Transcript Welcome Back, Folks! We’re travelling to a far

Welcome Back, Folks!
We’re travelling to a
littele bit far-end of
Language in Use Studies
EAA remains your faithful companion
Pragmatics and Cognition

Remember Grice’s Cooperative Principle
Make your conversational contribution such as
required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange in which you are engaged
 Maxim of Quantity
◦ Make your contribution as informative as required
◦ Do not make your contribution more informative than is
required
 Maxim of Quality
◦ Do not say what you believe to be false
◦ Do not say for which you lack adequate evidence
 Maxim of Relation
◦ Be relevant
 Maxim of Manner
◦ Avoid obscurity of expression
◦ Avoid ambiguity
◦ Be brief
◦ Be orderly

However, please note that Grice states
that anyone who cares about the goals which are
central to communication ... must be expected to
have an interest, given suitable circumstances, in
participation in talk exchanges which will be
profitable only on the assumption that they will be
conducted in general in accordance with the CP
and the maxims (1989: 29-30)

What does the above quote mean?
Communication takes place on the some
principles of relevance
Some notions

Cognitive environment

Contextual implication

Contextual effect
◦ The set of assumptions that a person could form in accordance with
the ‘preliminary’ evidence ‘observable’ to the person
◦ The form of assumptions combined with other existing assumptions
in the context accessible to a person
◦ The effect provided as a result of establishing an assumption in the
expectation that it will interact with other existing assumptions
 It may allow the derivation of a contextual implication
 It may provide further evidence for, and hence, strengthen, an existing
assumption
 It may contradict an existing assumption
Deriving contextual effects takes time and effort, and the
more time and effort expended the less relevant the
information will seem
 Costs and Rewards Principle
Some principles

For communication to take place, there should be a communicator
and a (comprehending) audience

Communicative behaviour must be deliberate and involve
intentions for further recognition by the audience

A communicator should produce an utterance whose
interpretation calls for less effort than any other utterance he/she
could have to achieve the same effect
The presumption of relevance carried out by every act of overt
communication has two aspects: on the one hand, it creates a
presumption of adequate effect, while on the other it creates a
presumption of minimally necessary effort. These presumptions
define a level of optimal relevance– a presumption that an
utterance will have adequate contextual effects for the minimum
necessary processing.

 The Principle of Relevance

The above principle yields two parts
◦ Cognitive principle of relevance
 The human cognitive system interprets an utterance in
such a way as to maximise its relevance. This means
achieving the greatest number of ‘contextual effects’
while maximising the cost in terms of processing effort.
◦ Communicative principle of relevance
 A bona fide communicator, simply by producing an
utterance, implicates his/her belief that it is optimally
relevant.

Principle of Relevance replaces all Grice’s
maxims – that a speaker tries to be as relevant
as possible in the circumstances he is involved in
a communicative event

A speaker is the more active participant in twoway communication; a hearer is more passive.
The speaker’s task is to produce an utterance
which will enable the hearer to construe the
intended message by following the standard
procedures.

The speaker must take the account of the
hearer’s knowledge and of how accessible its
different parts are.

The standard procedure for the hearer is to test
possible interpretations in order of processing
effort required, beginning with the most
accessible, until one is found whose contextual
effects justify the processing effort expended.
Two phases of interpreting utterances

Extracting of the explicature
◦ What is explicitly encoded in the linguistic form of the utterance, together
with certain elaborations that are needed to make it logically complete and
unambigious.
 An explicature is basically an enrichment of an original utterance in
order for the utterance to be easily understood.
E.g. Meeting tomorrow. [a note placed on Head of Eng. Dept. Office]
Explicates: who should attend, where and when to hold, what issues to
discuss, etc.
 A higher level explicature is attempted when a speaker wishes to
understand the propositional attitudes of a speaker of an utterance.
E.g. Please don’t miss the upcoming meeting!
Higher level explicature: Has reader missed the previous meetings? What
are the intentions of the note writer by for example using please (as a
strong request), and an exclamation mark in the note?, etc.

Combining of explicature with context to produce
implicatures
Ideas and issues related to
implicatures have been
discussed earlier. So, ...
Enough ah...for today mah!!!
Tararengkiyuw!!!