Linguistic Pragmatics

Tematica de examen la Pragmatica:

1.0. The Domain of Linguistic Pragmatics

2.0. Deixis
3.0. Conversational Implicature – Grice’s Analysis of Conversation
4.0. Presupposition
5.0. The Theory of Speech Acts

Prof. dr. Ilinca Crainiceanu

an III, sem II
PRAGMATICS
COURSE 1
The Domain of Linguistic Pragmatics
For characterizing the subject matter of (linguistic) pragmatics, the conceptions of Morris
(1971) regarding the three branches of semiotics still turn out to be basic. Semiotics is a
general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals with their function in both
artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntax, semantics and
pragmatics.
According to Morris, pragmatics deals with “the relation of signs to their users”. In more
precise terms, pragmatics “is that portion of semiotics which deals with the origin, uses and
effects of signs within the behaviour in which they occur”. As such, pragmatics deals with “all
the psychological, biological and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of
signs”.
Therefore, social aspects of signs (sociolinguistics) and psychological aspects of signs
(psycholinguistics) are part of the domain of pragmatics. Morris had in view the pragmatics of
any semiotic system. We will, of course, restrict ourselves to linguistic pragmatics, simply
pragmatics from now on.
From the above description of the subject matter of pragmatics it appears that linguistic
pragmatics finds itself at the borderline between linguistics and disciplines that characterise
the language users: psychology, sociology, biology.
Lieb (1976) attempts a more precise specification of the domain of pragmatics. He starts
from the apparent truism that the subject matter of linguistics consists of the semiotic
properties of natural language and of communication in natural language. A natural language
is a special kind of communicative complex, which, in its turn, is a set of means of
communication. Any means of communication is a means of communication for somebody
during a certain time. As examples of pragmatic properties Lieb mentions any relation
between communicative means (that is, linguistic structures), users (that is, human
organisms) and some space-time portion. The introduction of the specification “and some
space-time portion” is highly relevant. It points out to the importance of the concept of
context in pragmatics. Thus, the study of the determination of meaning in context is a matter
of pragmatics. For example, David Lodge in his novel “Paradise News” gives the following
piece of conversation:
Speaker A: ‘I just met the old Irishman and his son, coming out of the toilet’
Speaker B: ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was room for the two of them’
Speaker A: ‘No silly, I meant I was coming out of the toilet. They were waiting’.
It is the larger context (not just one sentence) that helps us sort out ambiguities in spoken or
written language.
Context is a dynamic not static concept: it stands for the surroundings that enable the
participants to interact in the communication process. Context is a matter of reference and
understanding what things are about.
Another example to prove the point is the following one due to Peter Grundy (1995):
Speaker A: ‘It’s a long time since you visited your mother’
This sentence, when uttered at a coffee table after dinner by a married couple in their living-
room has a meaning different from the one it has when uttered by a husband to his wife while
they are standing in front of the chimp enclosure at the local zoo.
The context is also of paramount importance in assigning the proper value to such
phenomena as deixis, presupposition, implicature, speech acts and the whole set of
context-oriented features.
We shall say a few words about these domains of pragmatics as schetchy introductory
remarks.
Deixis. Take the following example: I am the British Prime Minister.
To interpret this sentence we have to know what the referent of I is. What is referred to by I
depends on who says the word I at a particular time. The sentence is true now if it is uttered
by Tony Blair but false if it is uttered by John Major. Not only is who utters the sentence
important but also when the sentence is uttered.There is a class of words whose referents
depend crucially on the time, place and participants in the speech events. These words are
called deictic terms or simply deictics and the phenomen in general is called deixis.
Besides the personal pronouns, deictics include reference to location (this, that, here, there)
and time (now, then, yesterday, tomorrow).
Presupposition. The basic intuition behind the notion of presupposition is the relationship
between something that is actually said and something else which has to follow for the
sentence to make sense: p ∏ q. Karttunen (1979) offers the following definition to
presupposition: a proposition p presupposes another proposition q if and only if p entails q
(we infer q) and the negation of p also entails q. For example:
factive predicates: presupposition
e.g. John regrets insulting Ann John insulted Ann
change of state verbs:
e.g. Sally stopped smoking Sally had been smoking
iteratives:
e.g. John’s rash came back John had a rash earlier
cleft constructions:
e.g. It was John who kissed Ann Someone kissed Ann
Implicature. By conversational implicature, we understand, roughly speaking, the principle
according to which an utterance, in a conventional setting, is always understood in
accordance with what can be expected. Thus, in a particular situation involving a question, an
utterance that on the face of it ‘does not make sense’ can very well be an adequate answer.
If two people are in a bus stop and one of them asks the other: What time is it? and receives
the answer: The bus has just went by, makes perfect sense, although there are no strictly
‘gramaticalized’ items that could be identified as carriers of such information about the
context. It follows that the hearer makes ‘inferences’ about meaning based on context.
Speech acts. It has been proposed (Austin, “How To Do Things with Words”, 1962) that
communication involves the performance of utterance acts or speech acts. Any utterance act
or SA is a complex act including the following:
1). a locutionary act (=LA) - this is an act of saying something to an audience, an act of
uttering a sentence with meaning (sense and reference).
2). an illocutionary act (=IA) - this is an act of doing something, it is what the utterance counts
as.
3). a perlocutionary act (=PA) - the speaker’s utterance affects the audience in a certain way,
it has a certain intended or unintended effect on the hearer.
These acts are intimately related. In uttering some sentence the speaker S says something to
a hearer H; in saying something to H, S does something, and by doing something S affects H.
Austin mostly focuses on IAs and has but little to say about the LAs and PAs. The locutionary
act should be kept distinct from the illocutionary act. This is proved by the fact that a sentence
may have a perfectly clear meaning (sense and reference) without being clear at the
illocutionary force level.
For example:
Speaker A: What do you mean by saying that you are driving to London tomorrow?
Speaker B: Well, I was offering to take you allong.
Pragmatic competence. While syntax and semantics (as parts of the grammar) give an
account of language structure, pragmatics gives an account of language use.
The term language use may be misleading, since it might suggest that pragmatics is simply
an account of performance phenomena. Pragmatics is not only concerned with linguistic
performance but also with pragmatic competence, that is with the speaker’s knowledge of
how to use language. Pragmatic competence should roughly be understood as
communicative competence which may also include the speaker’s stylistic or rhetoric
competence, his textual competence a.s.o.
Thus, what we call linguistic competence in a broad sense appears to include linguistic
competence proper (grammatical competence), conceptual competence (intimately related to
the speaker’s knowledge of the world), and finally communicative competence.

COURSE 2
Deixis

Introduction. The most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context
is reflected in the structures of language is through the phenomenon of deixis. The term is
borrowed from the Greek word for pointing or indicating, and has as prototypical exemplars
the use of demonstratives, first and second personal pronouns, tense and specific time and
place adverbs.
Essentially, deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode or grammaticalize features
of the context of utterance or speech event. Thus, the pronoun this does not name or refer
to any particular entity on all occasions of use; rather it is a variable for some particular entity
given by the context (e.g. by a gesture, for example).
The importance of deictic interpretation of utterances is perhaps best illustrated by what
happens when such information is lacking (Fillmore, 1975). Consider, for example, finding the
following notice on someone’s office door:
(1) I’ll be back in an hour.
As we do not know when it was written, we cannot know when the writer will return.

The many facets of deixis are so pervasive in natural languages, and so deeply
grammaticalized, that it is easy to think of them as only pertaining to the domain of
semantics. If semantics is taken to include all conventional aspects of meaning, then
most deictic phenomena are properly considered semantic. However, on the view that
pragmatics deals with those aspects of meaning that can not be captured in truth-
conditional semantics but are ‘anchored’ to aspects of the context, deixis will probably
be found to straddle the semantics/pragmatics border.

Deixis is organized in an egocentric way. Deictic expressions are anchored to specific

points in the communicative event which constitute the deictic centre:

(i) the central person is the speaker.

(ii) the central time is the time at which the speaker produces the utterance.
(iii) the central place is the speaker’s location at speech time.
(iv) the discourse centre is the point which the speaker is currently at in the
production of the utterance.

Descriptive approaches. Although the importance of deixis can hardly be questioned, there
has been surprisingly little work of a descriptive nature in the area. The most important
linguistic works in the topic are due to Fillmore (1966) and Lyons (1968). The traditional
categories of deixis are person, place and time.
These categories are understood in the following way.
Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event: the
category first person is the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself, second
person the encoding of the speaker’s reference to one or more addressees, and third
person the encoding of reference to persons and entities which are neither speakers nor
addressees. It is important to note that third person is quite unlike first or second person in
that it does not correspond to any specific participant-role in the speech event: it is negatively
defined with respect to the other two participant-roles. Third person participant-roles are not
deictic words. Participant-roles are encoded in language by pronouns and their associated
predicate agreements. Pronominal systems generally exhibit this three-way distinction.
Pronominal systems may exhibit other superimposing distinctions based on plurality or
sometimes on sex of the referent and social status of the referent (as it is the case in
Japonese). For example, in English we distinguish (indirectly) between ‘we-inclusive-of-
addressee’ and ‘we-exclusive-of-addressee’ as in:
(2) Let’s go to the cinema (we-inclusive-of-addressee)
(3) ?Let’s go to see you tomorrow (we-exclusive-of-addressee)
Sometimes, morphological agreement can make further distinctions not overtly made
by the pronouns themselves in languages that exhibit no distinction between their
polite second person singular pronoun from their second person plural pronoun (as it
is the case in Romanian and French):

(4) Vorbiti frantuzeste? / Sunteti profesorul de franceza?

(5) Vous parlez français? / Vous êtes le professeur?
A further point to be noticed in connection with person deixis is that where face-to-
face contact is lost, languages often enforce a distinct mode of self-introduction.
Thus, whereas in a face-to-face meeting I can say “I’m John”, on the phone I must
say “This is John” or “John is speaking” with third person verb agreement; in contrast
in Romanian (and other languages) we use the first person agreement: “Sunt Ion”.

Time deixis. Time deixis concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans
relative to the time at which an utterance was spoken (or a message was written).
This time is called coding time or CT (Fillmore, 1971) which may be distinct from
receiving time or RT (as in our former example: I’ll be back in an hour). Time deixis
is commonly grammaticalized in deictic adverbs of time (like English now, then,
yesterday, this year) but above all in tense.

To understand the complexity of time deixis it is first necessary to have a good

understanding of the semantic organization of time in general (although this topic lies
beyond the scope of this elementary introduction). Briefly, the basis for systems of
measuring time in most languages seems to be the natural (objective) cycles of day
and night, lunar months, seasons and years. Such units can either be used as
measures (relative to some fixed point of interest, including the deictic centre: today,
this month, etc.) or they can be used calendrically to locate events in ‘absolute’ time
(relative to some absolute origio, as in this August which means the August of the
calendar year that includes the coding time (CT) and not necessarily the month we
are now in, different from this week which ordinarily means the week that we are now
in). Complexities arise in the usage of tense, time adverbs whenever there is a
departure between the moment of utterance or coding time (CT) from the moment of
reception or receiving time (RT). This happens in letter writing or the pre-recording of
media programmes. In this event, a decision has to be made about whether the
deictic centre will remain with the speaker and CT as in

(6) This programme is being recorded today, Wednesday April 1th, to be relayed
next Thursday.
I write this letter while chewing gum.

or will be projected on the addressee and receiving time (RT) as in (7) below:
(7) This programme was recorded last Wednesday, April 1th, to be relayed today.
I wrote this letter while chewing gum.

Moreover, we become aware that the whole process of sequence of tenses is a matter of
deixis as tenses in the subordinate clauses are a semantic reflex of the temporal value of the
two temporal standpoints (the present tense, on the present axis of orientation, and the past
tense, on the past axis of orientation). In the same way temporal adverbials change their
paradigm according to the time axis on which they appear: today vs. yesterday, tomorrow vs.
the next day a.s.o.
Finally, we should mention that time deixis is relevant to various other deictic elements in a
language. Thus, greetings are usually time-restricted, so that ‘good morning’ and ‘good
evening’ can only be used in the morning or in the evening, respectively. Curiously, while the
above can only be used as greetings, ‘good night’ can only be used as a parting, and not as a
greeting.
Place deixis. Place or space deixis concerns the encoding of spatial locations relative to the
location of the participants in the speech event. Most languages grammaticalize at least a
distinction between proximal (close to speaker) and distal (or non-proximal, sometimes
close to the addressee) deixis. Such distinctions are commonly encoded in demonstratives (
like this [+proximal] vs. that [-proximal]) and in deictic adverbs of place (like here [+proximal]
vs. there [-proximal]).
Lyons (1977) argues that there seem to be two basic ways of referring to objects: by
describing or naming them on the one hand, and by locating them on the other hand. As far
as the latter way of referring to objects, locations can be specified relative to other objects or
fixed reference points:
(8) The station is two hundred yards from the cathedral.
(9) Kabul lies at latitude 34 degrees, longitude 70 degrees.
Alternatively, objects can be deictically specified relative to the location of
participants at the time of speaking as in

(10) It’s two hundred yards away.

(11) Kabul is four hundred miles West of here.
Besides demonstratives and deictic advebs of place, there are some motion verbs
that have built-in deictic components. English come vs. go / bring and take make a
distinction between the direction of motion relative to participants in the speech
event. Thus,

(12) He’s coming

seems to gloss ‘he is moving towards the speaker’s location at CT’ while

(13) He’s going

glosses as ‘he is moving away from the speaker’s location at CT’. In contrast

(14) I’m coming

cannot mean ‘the speaker is moving towards the location of the speaker’, but
rather means ‘the speaker is moving towards the location of the addressee at CT’.
Such a usage may have dichronically arisen from a polite deictic shift to the
addressee’s point of view. However the above sentences do not exhaust the
contexts in which come may occur. Consider sentence (15) below:

(15) When I’m in the office, you can come to see me.
In the sentence above, come glosses as ‘movement towards the location of the
speaker at the time of some other specified event’ (called reference time). Such a
usage is ultimately deictic in that it makes reference to participant-role; but it is not
directly place-deictic in that there is no anchorage to the location of the present
speech event.
 There is even another deictic usage of come that is based not on participants’
actual location, but on their normative location or home-base. Hence the
possibility of saying (16) when neither speaker nor addressee is at home:

(16) I came over several times to visit you, but you were never there.
Further complexities in place deixis arise if the speaker is in motion - it then
becomes possible to use temporal terms in order to refer to deictic locations, as in:

(17) I first heard that ominous rattle ten miles ago.

(18) There is a good fast food joint just ten minutes from here.

Course 3
Conversational Implicature - Grice’s Analysis of Conversation
Preliminaries. Unlike many other topics in pragmatics, implicature does not have an
extended history. The key ideas were proposed by Paul Grice in his lectures delivered at
Harvard in 1967; they are still only partly published (1975, 1978).
Grice’s original intention in developing his now famous Logic of Conversation was to show
that apparent differences in the meaning of logical connectors: and, or, if-then, as used in
logic and in ordinary language, could be explained away because they naturally follow from
certain conversational principles, in their turn derived from general principles of human action
and rationality.
From a narrow linguistic perspective, Grice’s analysis of conversation shows how to mean
more than one says while also meaning what one says.
Grice starts with the following type of examples: suppose that A and B are talking about a
mutual friend C, who is now working in a bank. A asks B how C is getting along in his job and
B replies:”Oh, quite well. I think he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet”. At
this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, or even what he meant by saying that C
has not been in prison yet. The answer might be anyone of such things as that C is the sort of
person likely to yield to temptation provided by his occupation, that C’s colleagues are really
very unpleasant and treacherous people a.s.o. It might, of course, be quite unnecessary for A
to make such an inquiry of B, the answer to it being in the context clear in advance. I think it
is clear that whatever B implied, suggested or meant is distinct from what B said, which was
simply that C has not been to prison yet” (Grice, 1975). A proposition which is conveyed
indirectly, distinct from what is said directly, is called an implicatum. One of the possible
implicata in the example above is that C is the sort of person likely to yield to temptation.
Thus, Grice argues, what an utterance conveys in context falls into two parts: what is said
(i.e. the logical cognitive content) and the implicatures.
Grice distinguishes two types of implicatures:
a). conventional implicatures - these are inferences made possible by the meaning of
particular lexical items (e.g. too, however, moreover, well, still, although, so, therefore or
syntactic constructions). Grice’s example is:
1. He is an Englishman, therefore he is brave
where the conventional implicature carried by therefore is that he is brave because he is an
Englishman.
b). conversational implicatures are inferences determined not only by the conventional
content of the utterance, but also by the conversational context in which the utterance is
located. They are inferences derived from the content of the sentence and owe their
existence to the fact that participants in a conversation obey a Cooperative Principle, i.e.
are constrained by the common goal of communication to be cooperative. The following is
Grice’s formulation of the Cooperative Principle:
Cooperative Principle(=CP). Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the
stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which
you are engaged.
On the basis of the CP, Grice also formulates certain specific maxims of conversation, falling
under the general categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner.
1. The Maxim of Quantity relates to the quantity of information as is required for the
current purpose of the exchange; under it there fall the following submaxims:
a. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the
exchange.
b. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
2. The Maxim of Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. This has
two more specific submaxims:
a. Do not say what you believe to be false.
b. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
3. The Maxim of Relation: This maxim is simply “Be relevant”.
4. The Maxim of Manner: This has to do with how things are said. The supermaxim
is “Be perspicuous” and the submaxims are:
a. Avoid obscurity.
b. Avoid ambiguity.
c. Be brief.
d. Be orderly.
In short, these maxims specify what participants have to do in order to converse in a
maximally efficient, rational, cooperative way: they should speak sincerely, relevantly and
clearly, while providing sufficient information.
To this view of the nature of communication there is an immediate objection: the view may
describe a philosopher’s paradise, but no one actually speaks like that all the time! But
Grice’s point is subtly different. It is not the case, he readily admits, that people follow these
guidelines to the letter. Rather, in most ordinary kinds of talk, these principles are adhered to
by the hearers such that, contrary to appearences, these principles are observed at some
deeper level. An example should make this clear:
1. A: Where’s Bill?
B: There’s a yellow BMW outside Sue’s house.

Here B’s contribution, taken literally, fails to answer A’s question, and thus seems to violate at
least the maxims of Quantity and Relevance. We might therefore expect B’s utterance to be
interpreted as a non-cooperative response. Yet, it is clear that despite this apparent failure of
cooperation, we interpret B’s utterance as nevertheless cooperative at some deeper level.
We do this by assuming that it is in fact cooperative, and then asking ourselves what possible
connection there could be between the location of Bill and the location of a yellow BMW, we
arrive at the suggestion (which B effectively conveys) that, if Bill has a yellow BMW, he may
be in Sue’s house.
In cases of this sort, inferences arise to preserve the assumption of cooperation; it is only by
making the assumption contrary to superficial indications that the inferences arise in the first
place. It is this kind of inference that Grice dubs an implicature, or more properly a
conversational implicature. So, Grice’s point is not that we always adhere to these maxims on
a superficial level but rather that, whenever possible, people will interpret what we say as
conforming to the maxims on at least some level.
But what is the source of these maxims of conversational behaviour? Are they conventional
rules that we learn as, say, table manners? Grice suggests that the maxims are in fact not
arbitrary conventions, but rather describe rational means for conducting cooperative
exchanges. If this is so, we would expect them to govern aspects of non-linguistic behaviour
too, and indeed they seem to do so. Consider, for example, a situation in which A and B are
fixing a car. If the maxim of Quality is an invitation to produce a sincere act (a move we need
to make anyway to extend the maxim to questions, promoses, invitations, etc.) then B fails to
comply with it if, when asked for brake fluid, he knowingly passes A the the oil. Similarly, A
would fail to observe the maxim of Quantity, if, when B needs three bolts, A purposely passes
him only one, or alternatively passes him 200. Likewise with Relevance: if B wants three
bolts, he needs them now not half an hour later. Finally, B would fail to comply with the
maxim of Manner (i.e. clarity of purpose) if, when A needs a bolt of size 8, B purposely
passes him a bolt of size 10.
In each of these cases the behaviour falls short of some natural notion of full cooperation,
because it violates one or another of the non-verbal analogues of the maxims of
conversation.
However, the reason for linguistic interest in the maxims is that they generate inferences
beyond the semantic content of the sentences uttered. Such inferences are, by definition,
conversational implicatures, where the term implicature is intended to contrast with terms like
entailment and logical consequence which are generally used to refer to inferences that are
derived solely from logical or semantic content. Implicatures are not semantic inferences, but
rather inferences based on both the content of what has been said and some specific
assumptions about the cooperative nature of ordinary verbal interaction.
These inferences come about in at least two distinct ways. If the speaker is observing the
maxims in a fairly direct way, he may nevertheless rely on the addressee to amplify what he
says by some straightforward inferences based on the assumption that the speaker is
following the maxims. For example:
A (to passer by): I’ve run out of petrol
B: Oh, there’s a garage just around the corner
Here B’s utterance may be taken to implicate that A may obtain petrol there, and he would
certainly be less than fully cooperative if he knew the garage was closed or was sold out of
petrol. These inferences that arise from observing the maxims are called generalized
implicatures (Grice) or standard implicatures (Levinson, 1983) and do not require
particular contextual conditions in order to be inferred.
Another way in which inferences may be generated by the maxims is where the speaker
deliberately breaches or flouts the maxims. Consider the example:
A: Let’s get the kids something
B: Okay, but I veto I-C-E C-R-E-A-M-S
where B ostentatiously infringes the maxim of Manner (i.e. be perspicuous) by spelling out
the word ice-creams, and thereby conveys to A that B would rather not have ice-cream
mentioned directly in the presence of kids, in case they demand some.
Both kinds of implicature are of great interest. However we shall not offer further examples
containing generalized implicatures/standard implicatures but concentrate on the second
type of implicatures that come about by overtly and blatantly not following some maxim, in
order to exploit it for communicative purposes. As mentioned above, Grice calls such usages
floutings or exploitations of the maxims. They can be seen to give rise to many of the
traditional ‘figures of speech’. These inferences are based on the remarkable robustness of
the assumption of cooperation: if someone drastically deviates from maxim-type behaviour,
then his utterances are still read as underlyingly cooperative. Thus, by infringing some
maxim, the speaker can force the hearer to do extensive inferencing to some set of
propositions, such that if the speaker can be assumed to be conveying these, then at least
the encompassing cooperative principle would be sustained. Here are some examples:
The Maxim of Quality. This maxim may be flouted in the following exchange:
A: What if Russia blockades the Gulf and all the oil?
B: Oh come now, Britain rules the seas!
Any reasonably informed participant will know that B’s utterance is blatantly false. That being
so, B cannot be trying to deceive A. The only way in which the assumption that B is
cooperating can be maintained is if we take B to mean something rather different from what
he actually said. In fact he conveys the opposite of what he liteally said-namely that Britain
does not rule the seas, and thus by way of Relevance to the prior utterance, B suggests that
there is nothing that Britain could do. Hence, Grice claims, ironies arise and are successfully
decoded.
Similar remarks can be made for at least some examples of metaphor. For example, if we say
the following sentence:
Queen Victoria was made of iron

we express a categorial falsehood (i.e. a semantic selectional violation). Either we are being
non-cooperative or we intend to convey something rather different. The straightforward
interpretation is that since Queen Victoria in fact lacked the definitorial properties of iron, she
merely had some of the incidental properties like hardness, non-flexibility or durability. Which
particular set of such properties are attributed to her by the above sentence are in part
dependent on the context: said by an admirer it may be a commendation, conveying the
property of toughness; said by a detractor it may be taken as a denigration, conveying her
lack of flexibility, emotional impassivity or belligerence.
The Maxim of Quantity. The uttering of tautologies (i.e. redundant, true by virtue of its logical
form alone) should, in principle, have absolutely no communicative import. However,
utterances such as those below can in fact convey a great deal:
War is war.
Either John will come or he won’t.
If he does it, he does it.
Note that these, by virtue of their logical forms (respectively: ∀x (W(x) → W(x));
p v ¬ p; p → p) are necessarily true; moreover, they share the same truth conditions, and the
differences we feel to lie between them must be almost entirely due to their pragmatic
implications. An account of how they come to have communicative significance, and different
communicative significances, can be given in terms of the flouting of the maxim of Quantity.
Since this requires that speakers be informative, the asserting of tautologies blatantly violates
it. Therefore, if the assumption that the speaker is actually cooperating is to be preserved,
some informative inference must be made. Thus, in the case of “War is war” it might be:
‘terrible things always happen in war, that’s its nature and it’s no good lamenting that
particular disaster’; in the case of “Either John will come or he won’t” it might be: ‘calm down,
there is no point in worrying about whether he is going to come because there is nothing we
can do about it’; and in the case of “If he does it, he does it” it might be: ‘it’s no concern of
ours’.
The Maxim of Relevance. Exploitations of this maxim are, as Grice notes, a little harder to
find, if only because it is hard to construct responses that must be interpreted as irrelevant.
Grice provides the following example:
A: I do think Mrs Jenkins is an old windbag, don’t you?
B: Huh, lovely weather for March, isn’t it?
where B’s utterance might implicate in the appropriate circumstances ‘hey, watch out, her
nephew is standing right behind you’.
Another example will be something of the following kind:
Johnny: Hey Sally, let’s play marbles
Mother: How is your homework getting along Johnny?
where Johnny’s mother can remind him that he may not yet be free to play.
The Maxim of Manner. One example of the exploitation of this maxim will suffice here.
Suppose we find in a review of a musical performance something like a) below where we
might have expected b):
a). Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the
score of an aria from Rigoletto.
b). Miss Singer sang an aria from Rigoletto.
By the flagrant avoidance of the simple b) in favour of the prolix a) (and the consequent
violation of the sub-maxim ‘be brief’), the reviewer implicates that there was in fact some
considerable difference between Miss Singer’s performance and that to which the term
singing is usually applied.

Course 4
Presupposition

After conversational implicature which is a special kind of pragmatic inference, we turn now to
the study of another kind of pragmatic inference, namely presupposition. It seems to be
based more closely on the actual linguistic structure of sentences. Presupposition is, or rather
used to be, an extremely fashionable and all encompassing concept. Although there is fairly
general agreement about when a given sentence carries a presupposition (e.g. that sentence
(1) presupposes sentence (2) below), there are widely differing views about how exactly one
should define presuppositions and what are the consequences of presupposition failure (i.e.
what happens if one asserts (1) and (2) is false:
1. Chomsky wrote “Aspects”.
2. Chomsky exists.
Historical background. Once again, concern with this topic in pragmatics originates with
debates in philosophy, specifically debates about the nature of reference and referring
expressions. The first philosopher, in recent times, who dealt with such problems was Frege,
the architect of modern logic. When he discussed singular referring expressions (proper
names and definite descriptions) he said: “If anything is asserted there is always an obvious
presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have a reference. If one
asserts ‘Kepler died in misery’, there is a presupposition that the name Kepler designates
something”. Moreover, Frege put forth the idea that the presuppositions of a sentence are not
contained in the sense of the sentence and that the presuppositions of a sentence and its
negation are the same: “But it does not follow that the sense of the sentence ‘Kepler died in
misery’ contains the thought that the name ‘Kepler’ designates something. If this were the
case, the negation would have to run not ‘Kepler did not die in misery’ but ‘Kepler did not die
in misery or the name Kepler has no reference”. That the name Kepler designates something
is just as much a presupposition for the assertion ‘Kepler died in misery’ as for the contrary
assertion. Moreover, Frege shows, “whoever does not admit that the name has a reference
can neither apply nor withhold the predicate. It seems to follow from this that when a singular
term in an assertion fails to refer, nothing true or false can have been asserted”.
The pragmatic view on presupposition. From the rather numerous definitions of pragmatic
presupposition that have been proposed, we have selected two which seem to express the
prevailing opinions.
Stalnaker (1974), who devoted a series of stimulating papers to the concept of pragmatic
presupposition, proposes the following definition:
(13) A speaker pragmatically presupposes that p by uttering an expression e
in a certain context just in case:
(i) the speaker assumes or believes that p
(ii) the speaker assumes or believes that in a given context his addressee
assumes or believes that p.
Thus, the primitive notion of pragmatic presupposition is that of a speaker presupposing
something about the addressee or/and the context, not that of a sentence having a certain
presupposition. Presupposing that p as an act contrasts with saying or implicating that p.
Huntley (1976) analyses saying and implicating that p as instances of ‘giving it to be
understood that p’, while presupposing is a case of ‘taking it to be understood that p’.
For example, the president of a republic might respond to a question about the possibility of a
pardon for a convicted criminal by saying (14):
(14) I don’t think that people would stand for it.
The president’s intention is to give it to be understood by implication that he would not pardon
the criminal or at least that a pardon was not likely.
Compare (14) with the sentences below: (15a) presupposes (15b):
(15) a. John has stopped beating his wife
b. John has been beating his wife.

To presuppose something is not to attempt to communicate it or to give it to be understood. A

presupposition is something that the speaker is taking to be understood. Presuppositions are
believed or assumed to be true, they cannot be false in a context. Some evidence that the
belief/assumption that p, indicated in (13i), is associated with the concept of ‘taking it to be
understood that p’ is afforded by the fact that ‘take to be understood’ cannot be modified by
falsely:
(16) Nixon falsely gave/*took to be understood that he was not involved in
the cover up.
The second sort of definitions of pragmatic presuppositions (e.g. Lakoff (1972), Karttunen
(1973), among others) focuses on the fact that pragmatic presuppositions represent shared,
common ground information. They are propositions that must be true in a context if a certain
sentence is to be felicitously used. Such a definition is (17):
(17) Sentence A pragmatically presupposes proposition B, iff it is felicitous to utter
A in order to increment a common ground C, only in case B is
already entailed by C.
Again, it appears that one cannot require the presupposition to be (strictly speaking) entailed
by the existing contexts, nor can we always claim that the presupposition is shared by the
addressee. Rather, S pretends that conditions (13i-iii) are satisfied. However, this is satisfied
only if, by dropping the requirement that pragmatic presuppositions should be entailed by the
context, we maintain the weaker requirement that they should be consistent with the context.
Linguists began to be interested in presuppositions in the late sixties; McCawley (1968) is
one of the first important papers that used the concept. Linguists have contributed to the
study of presuppositions in three ways: a). they have uncovered a wide range of
presuppositional phenomena, extending the area of presuppositions; b). they have suggested
a variety of tests that are indicative of a presuppositional relations between propositions; c).
they have studied the behaviour of presuppositions in discourse, that is, what has come to be
known as the projection problem for presuppositions, and the phenomena of presupposition
suspension and cancellation.
A. We assume that pragmatic presuppositions are induced either by some lexical
item or by some syntactic constructions which are said to be presupposition
carriers. In the examples below we start from the core of presuppositional cases
(existential and factive presuppositions) and move to more controversial cases.
1. Proper names, definite descriptions - presuppose existence of their referents (and
uniqueness); this is the oldest case, discussed by Frege:
(19) The King of Buganda / John washed his hands
There is a King of Buganda
 John exists.
2. Factive verbs. They presuppose the truth of their complement proposition. From
the present perspective, what is more interesting is that there are degrees of factivity.
One may distinguish fully factive verbs (e.g. regret, resent, desire, be tragic, be odd)
and semi-factive verbs (e.g. realize, discover). Semi-factives lose factivity in certain
enviromnents, for instance, if-clauses. Thus, regret is factive (sentence c), realize is
semi-factive:
20. a. Bill resents / does not resent (it) that people are always comparing him with
his brother.
People are always comparing Bill with his brother.
b. John realized / *claimed that the earth is flat. (claim is not factive)
The earth is round.
c. If I later regret that I did not tell the truth, I’ll apologize
→ I did not tell the truth
d. If I later realize that I did not tell the truth, I’ll apologize
I did not tell the truth.
2. Syntactic constructions. We present one syntactic construction that has proved to
be presuppositional:
Temporal clauses (first discussed by Frege (1892)):
1. Before Strawson was even born, Frege noticed / did not notice
presuppositions.
Strawson was born.
2. As John was getting up, he slipped
John was getting up.
Therefore, temporal clauses introduced by when, after, as, before, during etc. presuppose the
truth of the time clause.

Course 5
Speech Acts

The first full fledged account of Speech Acts Theory is due to Austin who developed it
in his book entitled “How to Do Things with Words” (1962). Austin’s pioneering work must
be judged against the background of his epoch: a time when semanticists systematically
ignored the social and pragmatic dimension of language. Starting with Wittgenstein (who said
that ‘language is use’), we witness a reaction within analytical philosophy aimed at criticising
the descriptive fallacy and the undue privilege granted to the descriptive function of language.
Austin stresses the institutional dimension of language, the fact that discourse activity is
human action seen as institutional behaviour.
 1. The special theory - Constatative vs. Performative Utterances.
1.0. Austin’s first important contribution is his distinction between constatative
utterances (1) and performative utterances (2):
(1) a.The cat is on the mat
b. It’s raining

(2) a. I do (cf. take this woman to be my lawful wife, as uttered in the course of
a marriage ceremony).
b. I name this ship Queen Elizabeth (as uttered when smashing the
bottle against the stern)
c. I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow
Examples (1) are constatative utterances. To utter a constatative sentence is to describe a
certain pre-existent state of affairs; the utterer intends to give information on a given state of
the world. The description may or may not agree with the facts. Thus, constatative utterances
are naturally evaluated as true or false. Examples (2) are performative utterances. To utter a
performative (= PF) sentence is not to convey information, to state something or to describe a
pre-existing state of affairs. To utter a performative sentence is to do something, ‘to do things
with words’. Thus, when one says I do in (2a), one is doing something, namely marring,
rather than reporting something, namely that he is marring. The uttering of a PF sentence
constitutes, or is part of, the doing of a action (marring, christening etc.). Since PF sentences
are not used to say or state something, they are not true or false.
1.1. To successfully perform the act specified by the PF sentence the context should
satisfy certain conditions - the so-called felicity (happiness) conditions of the speech
act. Austin gives a detailed presentation of these conditions which he established by
checking what can go wrong with a PF utterance, i.e. in what way it can be
infelicitous.
Felicity conditions: a). there must exist an accepted conventional procedure, having a certain
conventional effect, a procedure which includes the uttering of certain words by certain
persons in certain circumstances. If one of these conditions is violated, the act is misinvoked.
For instance, in the course of time certain practices may be changed or abandoned, e.g. the
code of honour involving duelling. Thus, a challenge may be issued by saying: My seconds
will call on you and the interlocutor may simply shrug it off. This was a case of misinvocation.
This gereral position is exploited in the unhappy story of Don Quixote; b). The procedure
must be executed by all participants both completely and correctly. If one of these conditions
is violated, the act is misexecuted. For instance, a man’s attempt to marry is abortive if the
woman says I will not. In cases (2a) and (2b), if conditions b) are not met, the purported act is
void; c). if the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings,
then a person participating in the procedure must have those thoughts or feelings. If this
condition fails to obtain the act is not void, but it is infelicitous, mostly because it is insincere.
Here are a few examples of insincere acts:
(3) I congratulate you (said when I am not pleased)
I promose (said when I do not intend to do what I promise)
I bet (said when I do not intend to pay).
2.1. A PF sentence may show with greater or less precision what act is accomplished
in uttering it. From this point of view, Austin distinguishes between primary PFs and
explicit PFs:
(4) a. Go there! (5) a. I order you to go there
b. Did he come? b. I ask you whether he came
c. I shall be there c. I promose that I'll be there
In examples (5) there is a PF verb which makes explicit what act is being performed,
what is the force of the utterance. Sentences with PF verbs in the first person of the
indicative present, having the form 'I VPF that…', 'I VPF to…' or 'I VPF' are all called
explicit PF sentences. They are to be contrasted with primary PFs, illustrated in (4).
By virtue of their syntactic form, primary PFs show that some act is being performed
in uttering them, but they do not indicate which act it is.
2.2. In addition to PF verbs, there is a wide range of linguistic means that can be used
to make (more) precise the force of the utterance, i.e. how it is to be taken or what it
counts as. Austin lists the following:
(6) moods:
a. Shut it, now! I order you to shut it
b. Very well, then shut it! I consent to your shutting it
c. Shut it, if you like! I permit you to shut it.
(7) modal verbs:
a. You must go there at once! I order you to go there
b. You may leave now! I allow you to leave now
(8) intonation, cadence, emphasis:
 a. It's going to change! (a warning)
b. It's going to change? (a question)
(9) the circumstances of the utterance:
a. Coming from him, I took it as an order.
2.3. This enumeration of force indicators already shows that the precise force of a PF
utterance can be satisfied only in the context of utterance. The force of an utterance,
what it counts as, is an aspect of its meaning which is not fully determined by the
sense of the sentence.
2.4. On the explicit performative sentences [EPFS]. EPFSs have the property of
realizing the acts that they denote, that is they verify the schema:
(10) The speaker says: "I (hereby) V" → The S Vs.
Thus, sentences (11), which verify the schema, are PFs, while (12) are not. In (11) we
have also indicated the three characteristic syntactic patterns of EPFs (I V that, I V to,
I V).
(11) a. I promise that I will be there
b. I order you to be there
c. I appoint you president.
(12) a. I believe that I will be there
b. I know that I will be there
An interesting question raised by Austin was whether the EPFSs of a language
constitute a syntactically delimited class. i.e. whether there are syntactic features that
characterize all and only EPF utterances.
2.4.1. EPF utterances are typically voiced in the first person of the simple present
tense, in the active voice (examples (11)). Yet also characteristic is the use of a
passive sentence with second person subjects (sometimes this is the only acceptable
construction, e.g. (13b)):
(13)a. You are hereby requested to leave the city at once
b. You are fired (?? I fire you)
Hence, it is customary to add adverbials like hereby, here and now etc. as
unambiguous markers of performativity. Such adverbs are normally used only in
formal style.
 It is often (not always) requested that EPFSs do not employ the continuous
present which is descriptive, while the simple form is or may be performative:
(14) a. I promise to come He is promising to come
(performative) (constatative, description of what he is
doing)
b. I refuse to go He is shaking his head, he is refusing to go.
2.4.2. Austin notices an important asymmetry in the use of the PF verbs: used in the
first person of the simple present these verbs are (or may be ) performative; used in
other persons or tenses they are descriptive: 'I betted' and 'he bets' are not PF, but
describe actions on my and his part, respectively. However, this is not always true:
there are certain propositional attitude verbs such as believe, think, imagine, suppose
that are ambiguous between a descriptive reading (as in I believe God is love) and a
weak reading which chiefly occurs in the first person and in which the main assertion
is made in the complement clause (as in I believe he's over thirty).
3.0. Criticism of the Performative / Constatative Distinction. We have seen that in the
widest acceptation we call PF any utterance which is not a true or false description of
reality, but which in-forms the world, instantiating the reality of the accomplished act
(ordering, appointing, naming, asking etc. as in I order you to go away, Go away, Is
he back?). A PF utterance constitutes a new state of affairs, while a constatative
utterance merely attempts to correspond to the world. PF utterances are felicitous or
infelicitous, constatative utterances are true or false.
3.1. However, on closer scrutiny, Austin finds that the distinction is not really hard and
fast.
3.1.1. To begin with, constatative utterances may be liable to certain infelicities very
similar to those that affect PFs. For instance, constatative utterances may be
insincere. Suppose one says 'The cat is on the mat' when it is not the case that one
believes that the cat is on the mat. Clearly it is a case of insincerity. The unhappiness
here, though affecting a statement, is exactly the same as the unhappiness infecting 'I
promise….', when I do not intend to keep my word. Consider now the constatative
'John's children are bald' uttered when John has no children. The statement is not
true or false, but void.
3.1.2. Let us turn to PFs now: connected with the PF 'I warn you that the bull is about
to charge' is the fact that the bull is about to charge. If the bull is not about to charge,
then the PF utterance 'I warn you that the bull is about to charge' is open to criticism.
This is not because it is unhappy (void or insincere) but because it was a false
warning. Therefore, considerations of the type of truth or falsity may infect
performatives.
3.1.3. Austin's decisive argument against the constatative / performative opposition is
the following: to detect the performativity of pragmatically ambiguous sentences,
Austin used the EPF paraphrase. (15b) is certainly a paraphrase of (15a):
(15) a. The earth is round
b. I state that the earth is round
Thus, (15a) which describes a state of affairs is paraphrasable by (15b) which
performs the act of stating something. If (15a) is pragmatically equivalent to (15b),
Austin concludes that every utterance instantiates a new reality, namely the
pragmatic reality of the accomplished speech act. Hence, Austin concludes that all
utterances are performative, in the sense that in uttering a sentence the speaker
performs an illocutionary act - ordering, stating, promising, baptizing etc.
Constatatives are primary performatives having the illocutionary force (= IF) of
statements.
4. The General Theory. Consequently, Austin proposes that communication involves the
performance of utterance acts or speech acts. Any utterance act or SA is a complex act
including the following:
1). a locutionary act (=LA) - this is an act of saying something to an audience, an act of
uttering a sentence with meaning (sense and reference).
2). an illocutionary act (=IA) - this is an act of doing something, it is what the utterance counts
as.
3). a perlocutionary act (=PA) - the speaker’s utterance affects the audience in a certain way,
it has a certain intended or unintended effect on the hearer.
These acts are intimately related. In uttering some sentence the speaker S says something to
a hearer H; in saying something to H, S does something, and by doing something S affects H.
Austin mostly focuses on IAs and has but little to say about the LAs and PAs. The locutionary
act should be kept distinct from the illocutionary act. This is proved by the fact that a sentence
may have a perfectly clear meaning (sense and reference) without being clear at the
illocutionary force level.
For example:
Speaker A: What do you mean by saying that you are driving to London tomorrow?
Speaker B: Well, I was offering to take you allong.
5. Austin on Illocutionary Acts. In uttering a sentence, S performs a certain type of
institutional act defined by a certain relation established between S and H by means
of the utterance. To perform an illocutionary act (IA) is to produce an utterance with a
certain illocutionary force (IF), where IF is defined as a complex communicative
intention or communicative goal. The IA is happily performed only if a certain effect on
the hearer is obtained. Generally, the effect amounts to bringing about the
understanding of the meaning (sense and reference) and of the IF of the locution. So,
the performance of an IA involves "the securing of the uptake" (i.e. understanding,
comprehension). As first noticed by Strawson (1964) there is a strong similarity
between Austin's notion of uptake and Grice's notion of speaker meaning.
Understanding the IF is knowing what a speaker meant by his utterance. When one
intends to make a statement or make a promise, one wants to obtain a certain effect
on the audience by virtue of the audience's recognition of one's intention to get that
effect. Part of S's intention is that H should identify the very act S intends to perform
and successful communication requires fulfillment of that intention. In particular, since
the H's primary but not exclusive basis for identifying the IF is what S says, the theory
will have to spell out the connection between the LA and the IA; thus, H can
reasonably be expected to identify the IA. Bach-Harnisch (1979) suggest that in
deriving the IF of utterances, H tacitly relies on the following Communicative
Presumption (= CP):
Communicative Presumption: This is the mutual belief that whenever a member S
says something in language L to another member H, he is doing so with some
recognizable intention.
In interpreting the notion of uptake, it will be useful to make a distinction
between communicative IAs (stating, requesting, asking, promising etc.) which
involve intentions of S and conventional IAs (acts like voting, resigning, marring,
baptizing, arresting, acquitting etc.) which involve extralinguistic conventions. In the
case of conventional acts the utterance is embodied in some ceremonial act
constituting part of it:
(16) a. I baptize you in the name of the Holy Father, of the Son and the Holy
Spirit.
b. I sware to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
c. I pass (while playing bridge).
Acts like those in (16) are conventional. They exist only with respect to an
extralinguistic institution and their performance is governed by the conventions of that
institution. Communicative IAs are successful if uptake is secured through the
mechanisms of intentions. Communicative IAs are acts expressing attitudes. To
express an attitude is S's intention for his utterance to be taken as reason to think that
he has a certain attitude (belief, desire, etc.). Thus, communicative IAs are
transactions which introduce new interaction conditions among S and H (e.g. H's
obligation to fulfill a command, S's commitment to fulfill a promise) while conventional
acts bring about institutional changes. To give Austin's example if "I name the ship
Queen Elizabeth", this has the effect of naming or christening the ship; then certain
subsequent acts such as referring to it as Generalissimo Stalin will be out of order".

General Bibliography

1. Levinson Stephen (1983) - Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press.

2. Grundy Peter (1995) - Doing Pragmatics, Edward Arnold, A member of the
Hodder Headline Group.
3. Thomas Jenny (1995) - Meaning in Interaction (An Introduction to Pragmatics),
Longman Group Limited.
prof. dr. Ilinca Crăiniceanu

Programa cursului opţional ALTERNANŢE SINTACTICE ÎN ENGLEZĂ

sem I şi II, an III (engleză - o limbă străină, o limbă străină - engleză)

SEM I: ALTERNANŢE SINTACTICE ÎN ENGLEZĂ. PROPRIETĂŢILE SEMANTICE ALE

CONSTRUCŢIILOR CU VERBE DITRANZITIVE

Cursul opţional “Alternanţe sintactice în engleză” analizează atat proprietăţile semantice cat
şi pe cele sintactice ale verbelor cu dublu obiect (de exemplu, give, send, promise, cook, buy)
care pot forma două construcţii sintactice (alternanţe): construcţia cu dativ prepoziţional (John
gave a ring to Mary) şi construcţia cu dublu obiect (John gave Mary a ring).

1. Clasele de verbe ditranzitive care admit alternanţele sintactice; clasele de verbe

ditranzitive care nu admit alternanţele sintactice
2. Proprietăţile semantice ale complementelor indirecte în construcţia cu dative
prepoziţional şi construcţia cu dublu obiect.
3. Proprietatea de [+animat] a complementului indirect în construcţia cu dublu obiect.
4. Proprietatea de [+afectat] a complementului indirect în construcţia cu dublu obiect.
5. Presupoziţia de co-existenţă a referenţilor celor două complemente în construcţia cu
dublu obiect.
6. Subiectul cu rol semantic de Agent sau Cauză în construcţia cu dublu obiect.

Bibliografie
Crăiniceanu, I - 2007, Syntactic Alternations in English, Editura Romania de Maine,
Bucuresşti
Şerban, D – 1982, English Syntax, TUB, Bucureşti
Tenny, C – 1987, Grammaticalizing Aspect and Affectedness, doctoral dissertation, MIT

SEM II: ALTERNANŢE SINTACTICE ÎN ENGLEZĂ. PROPRIETĂŢILE SINTACTICE ALE

CONSTRUCŢIILOR CU VERBE DITRANZITIVE

Cursul opţional “Alternanţe sintactice în engleză” analizează atat proprietăţile semantice cat
şi pe cele sintactice ale verbelor cu dublu obiect (de exemplu, give, send, promise, cook, buy)
care pot forma două construcţii sintactice (alternanţe): construcţia cu dativ prepoziţional (John
gave a ring to Mary) şi construcţia cu dublu obiect (John gave Mary a ring).

1. Asimetriile c-command în construcţiile sintactice cu verbe ditranzitive.

2. Mecanismul de acordare a cazului în cele două construcţii sintactice cu verbe
ditranzitive (construcţia cu dative prepoziţional şi construcţia cu dublu obiect).
3. Procesul de pasivizare şi procesul de nominalizare în construcţiilor cu verbe
ditranzitive.
4. Analiza derivaţională a celor două construcţii cu verbe ditranzitive (Larson, 1988).
5. Analiza non-derivaţională a celor două construcţii cu verbe ditranzitive (Pesetsky,
1995).
6. Proprietăţile sintactice ale complementului indirect fără prepoziţie (Emonds şi Ostler,
2005).

Bibliografie
Crăiniceanu, I - 2007, Syntactic Alternations in English, Editura Romania de Maine, Bucureşti
Emonds, J. and Ostler, R – 2005, Thirty Years of Double Object Debates, Syncom (internet
source)
Larson, R – 1988, On the Double Object Construction, Linguistic Inquiry 19
Pesetsky, D – 1995, Zero Syntax, MIT Press
Şerban, D – 1982, English Syntax, TUB, Bucureşti