Context and Inference

Context and Inference

1. Every language carries an implicit division of the space around the current speaker, a division of time relative to the act of speaking, and, via pronouns, a shorthand naming system for the participants involved.

2. Languages vary in the type of semantic information that is obligatorily included in deictic terms, when semantic distinctions are obligatory in this way we will say that they are GRAMMATICALIZED.

3. The pronoun systems of some languages also grammaticalize information about the social identities or relationships of the participants in the conversation. Levinson call this phenomenon SOCIAL DEIXIS.

4. Clark adopts this term (common ground) and distinguishes between COMMUNAL common ground for the knowledge shared by co-members of communities and PERSONAL common ground for the knowledge two people share from their past experience of each other.

5. Roger Schank and his colleagues devised SCRIPTS: are descriptions of what typically goes on in various social settings.

6. One important point about this background knowledge is that while the speaker makes guesses about the knowledge her listeners have, there is no certainty. MUTUAL KNOWLEDGE

7. Speakers “package” their utterances to take account of these estimates of knowledge. This packaging is often called INFORMATION STRUCTURE or, alternatively, THEMATIC STRUCTURE.

8. Listeners actively participate in the construction of meaning, in particular by using INFERENCES to fill out the text towards an interpretation of speaker meaning.

9. The term CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE was introduced by the philosopher H. Paul Grice. In lectures and a couple of very influential articles, he proposed an approach to the speaker´s and hearer´s cooperative use of inference.

10. The assumptions that hearers make about a speaker´s conduct seemed to Grice to be of several different types, giving rise to different types of inference, or from the speaker´s point of view, implicatures. In identifying these, Grice called them MAXIMS: • The Maxim of Quality: try to make your contribution one that is true. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. • The Maxim of Relevance: make your contribution relevant. • The Maxim of Manner: be perspicuous, and specifically.

11. LITERAL LANGUAGE THEORY, in this theory the principle is often viewed as the engine which drives the interpretation of non-literal utterances. If a listener interprets an utterance as literally untrue or nonsensical, the principle may lead him to search for a further level of meaning, FIGURATIVE language, which preserves the maxim of quality. (Metaphors and hyperbole)