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Abstract: Grice made a distinction between what is said and what is implicated in which daily conversation happens. It aroused great attentions and disputes since it put into effect, and different scholars discussed this theory from many viewpoints. This article will be devoted in part to a careful examination of Grice’s theory and give an alternative picture of implicature from common understanding of it. This picture brings out many important features of communication which are ignored in traditional manner to a great extent and tries to expand Grice’s taxonomy to make room for a wider range of cases. The paper will classify the speakers’ meaning from speaker-implicature and audience-implicature to expose a concise picture concerning about conversational implicature.
Key Words: Conversational Implicature; Speaker-implicature; Audience-implicature
1.Background and Overview
Grice (1957) made a distinction between what is said by a speaker of a verbal utterance and what is implicated, which was a creative and influential theory both on linguistic field and philosophy field.. While Levinson (1983) provides a supplementary models which distinguish speaking meaning into standard conversational implicature and non-standard conversational implicature. At home, many a scholars also publish either monographs or papers on the Griean’s theory from different perspectives (Jiang, 2003; He, 2004; Xiong, 2004; Xu, 1996).
Apart from these different viewpoints, Neale (1992) gives out two diagrams which show “what U meant” dividing exhaustively into what is said and what is implicated. Besides Saul (2002) tries to give a definite taxonomy about what is said and what is implicated. But his classification does not give a clear borderline and indicate the underlying theory to support his arguments. Here my paper will not take a risk of denying the previous work and then gives the other way to draw a clear borderline on what is said and what is implicated. It has a lot work to be done in this way. This paper just gives out a concise and different perspective and may be provide some suggestions on dealing this tough problem. And some of term in formal semantics and pragmatics will be applied in dimension as the fundamental theory.
2.The Basic Theory in Dimension and the Demonstration of Taxonomy
2.1 The Theory in Taxonomy
As it is known to us, language is a mental faculty (Saeed 2000:329). It is obvious that there is a cognitive process in conveying the speakers’ meaning to audiences’ understanding. We can see it clear in the following mental chain:
Within the mental chain conversational implicature is not only on the perspective of speaker’s point, which was used to classify into what is said and what is implicated. Here we can see clearly two participants are in mental process of mutual understanding. Insofar it involves two processes in making successful conversations, one is that speaker convey his/her meaning to audience and the other is audience’ response to speaker. In both process there is a big problem, that is whether both participants aware or think what they said in consistent with the presumption and whether the information receiver could get the meaning correctly and make a right judgment. Because there is a mental gap between speaker meaning and audience meaning, which can be neatly divides into sentence meaning, speaker-implicature, replied meaning and audience-implicature. The implicature might be blocked because a speaker can not conversationally implicate something which the audience is not required to assume that he/she thinks.
2.2 Speaker-implicature
I propose a hypothesis there is a refinement difference in speaker implicature. So here I add another two small categories to bridge the possible gap. The first way arises whenever an utterance, even after disambiguation and reference fixing, does not by virtue of linguistic meaning express a complete proposition. When a sentence is in this way semantically underdeterminate, understanding an utterance of it requires a process of completion to produce a full proposition. The second way occurs when the utterance does express a complete proposition, yielded by what I call the process of expansion, is being communicated by the speaker. In both cases the speaker is not being fully explicit. Rather, he intends the hearer to read something into the utterance, to regard as if it contained certain conceptual material that is not in fact there. Let us see the following example of which a speaker wants to say something but fails to do.
A: Where is my book?
B: Do you speak to me?
Within the example, the speaker definitely wants to convey the information that whether B knows the position of the referential book. But in the process of constructing the speaker’s intension, the hearer draws two kinds of interpretation, in which one might be it is just a sentence that the speaker says to himself/herself and does not need an answer. Since it is just a soliloquy, it is clear that there is no connection with the hearer. In another situation, it is a definite question that the speaker wants to get some clues from the hearer about the location of the book. The hearer confuses about the real intention of speaker and he/she wants to get a clear understanding about which one is correct, so he/she adds a question “Do you speak to me?” to as an answer. In this example, the audience fails to recognize that the speaker has in mind to talk about just from the uttered description and the context but could apprehend the linguistic meaning of the sentence. We can see clearly that in the conversation the speaker makes a full proposition whereas he/she fails to explain it explicitly in the process of constructing the real meaning.
As we mentioned above, when a sentence disambiguation or reference unfixed, it can not express a full proposition, so does convey the real meaning. And the reason of it is in part to the ambiguous words, tense, aspect and verbs of propositional attitude.
2.3 Audience-implicature
Audience-implicatures are just like conversational implicatures except that audiences have authority over what is audience-implicated. For the original notion put forward by Grice, we refine conditions (2) and (3) of the three necessary conditions for conversational implicature, that is:
(2a) The audience believes that the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption.
(3a) The audience takes the speaker to think that it is within the audience’s competence to work out that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required.
Take another famous headline in newspaper for example; a director wants to know about the performance of an actress so he asks another director who has given her a role in a famous movie with the question of “How do you think of her performance?” And at the same time, the actress knows it is a big chance for her if the previous director could recommend her to the latter director. So she expresses her eager to take a role in new movie and requests the previous director could do her a favor. However, in fact, she is not a good actress in performing such a role in new movie whereas the director does not to refuse her please directly, so he says:“She is beautiful” as the response. In fact, the claim that she is beautiful means she is not good at performing the roles in movie. Here the audience intends the speaker form the belief (or the belief that he believes). So it is the speaker’s turn to guess what the real meaning of the hearer is, then he can make a choice about whether gives the actress a role in movie. As you can see, here I still expand my demonstration with the methods I mentioned in explaining speaker-implicature. Why I chose this way? That is because when we stands the point of the audience, it means the speaker and the audience switch the roles and form a new connection, which I have mentioned in diagram.
3.Conclusion
Not like what have discussed in Grice’s classification, which only pay attention to speaker’s intention rather than the interpretation of audience, here I give a new direction because in psychology it is certainty about the understanding ability in conversations. So it is important to take audience’s response into consideration. Apart this, from both sides, there must be something which they intended to convey or communicate but failed to, namely, making conversations unsuccessful. So it is helpful to analysis from this theory, on which may benefit us with a clear picture about what is said and what is implicated then to achieve the goal of making successful conversations.
References：
[1]Grice, H. P. 1957.‘Meaning’. Philosophical Review 66, 377–388.
[2]Leech, G. (1983). Pragmatics.CUP. Cambridge.
[3]Levinson, 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[4]Neale, 1992. ‘Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language’. Linguistics and Philosophy 15, 509–559.
[5]Saul, 2002, ‘Speaker Meaning, What is Said, and What is Implicated’. No?s.36(2), 228-248
[6]Saeed, 2000. Semantics. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
[7]何兆熊.2004. 《语用学讲稿》. 南京：南京师范大学出版社.
[8]姜望琪. 2003. 《当代语用学》. 北京：北京大学出版社.
[9]熊学亮. 2004. 《语言学新解》. 上海：复旦大学出版社.
[10]徐盛桓. 1996. 《会话含意理论的新发展》. 河南大学出版社.
Key Words: Conversational Implicature; Speaker-implicature; Audience-implicature
1.Background and Overview
Grice (1957) made a distinction between what is said by a speaker of a verbal utterance and what is implicated, which was a creative and influential theory both on linguistic field and philosophy field.. While Levinson (1983) provides a supplementary models which distinguish speaking meaning into standard conversational implicature and non-standard conversational implicature. At home, many a scholars also publish either monographs or papers on the Griean’s theory from different perspectives (Jiang, 2003; He, 2004; Xiong, 2004; Xu, 1996).
Apart from these different viewpoints, Neale (1992) gives out two diagrams which show “what U meant” dividing exhaustively into what is said and what is implicated. Besides Saul (2002) tries to give a definite taxonomy about what is said and what is implicated. But his classification does not give a clear borderline and indicate the underlying theory to support his arguments. Here my paper will not take a risk of denying the previous work and then gives the other way to draw a clear borderline on what is said and what is implicated. It has a lot work to be done in this way. This paper just gives out a concise and different perspective and may be provide some suggestions on dealing this tough problem. And some of term in formal semantics and pragmatics will be applied in dimension as the fundamental theory.
2.The Basic Theory in Dimension and the Demonstration of Taxonomy
2.1 The Theory in Taxonomy
As it is known to us, language is a mental faculty (Saeed 2000:329). It is obvious that there is a cognitive process in conveying the speakers’ meaning to audiences’ understanding. We can see it clear in the following mental chain:
Within the mental chain conversational implicature is not only on the perspective of speaker’s point, which was used to classify into what is said and what is implicated. Here we can see clearly two participants are in mental process of mutual understanding. Insofar it involves two processes in making successful conversations, one is that speaker convey his/her meaning to audience and the other is audience’ response to speaker. In both process there is a big problem, that is whether both participants aware or think what they said in consistent with the presumption and whether the information receiver could get the meaning correctly and make a right judgment. Because there is a mental gap between speaker meaning and audience meaning, which can be neatly divides into sentence meaning, speaker-implicature, replied meaning and audience-implicature. The implicature might be blocked because a speaker can not conversationally implicate something which the audience is not required to assume that he/she thinks.
2.2 Speaker-implicature
I propose a hypothesis there is a refinement difference in speaker implicature. So here I add another two small categories to bridge the possible gap. The first way arises whenever an utterance, even after disambiguation and reference fixing, does not by virtue of linguistic meaning express a complete proposition. When a sentence is in this way semantically underdeterminate, understanding an utterance of it requires a process of completion to produce a full proposition. The second way occurs when the utterance does express a complete proposition, yielded by what I call the process of expansion, is being communicated by the speaker. In both cases the speaker is not being fully explicit. Rather, he intends the hearer to read something into the utterance, to regard as if it contained certain conceptual material that is not in fact there. Let us see the following example of which a speaker wants to say something but fails to do.
A: Where is my book?
B: Do you speak to me?
Within the example, the speaker definitely wants to convey the information that whether B knows the position of the referential book. But in the process of constructing the speaker’s intension, the hearer draws two kinds of interpretation, in which one might be it is just a sentence that the speaker says to himself/herself and does not need an answer. Since it is just a soliloquy, it is clear that there is no connection with the hearer. In another situation, it is a definite question that the speaker wants to get some clues from the hearer about the location of the book. The hearer confuses about the real intention of speaker and he/she wants to get a clear understanding about which one is correct, so he/she adds a question “Do you speak to me?” to as an answer. In this example, the audience fails to recognize that the speaker has in mind to talk about just from the uttered description and the context but could apprehend the linguistic meaning of the sentence. We can see clearly that in the conversation the speaker makes a full proposition whereas he/she fails to explain it explicitly in the process of constructing the real meaning.
As we mentioned above, when a sentence disambiguation or reference unfixed, it can not express a full proposition, so does convey the real meaning. And the reason of it is in part to the ambiguous words, tense, aspect and verbs of propositional attitude.
2.3 Audience-implicature
Audience-implicatures are just like conversational implicatures except that audiences have authority over what is audience-implicated. For the original notion put forward by Grice, we refine conditions (2) and (3) of the three necessary conditions for conversational implicature, that is:
(2a) The audience believes that the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption.
(3a) The audience takes the speaker to think that it is within the audience’s competence to work out that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required.
Take another famous headline in newspaper for example; a director wants to know about the performance of an actress so he asks another director who has given her a role in a famous movie with the question of “How do you think of her performance?” And at the same time, the actress knows it is a big chance for her if the previous director could recommend her to the latter director. So she expresses her eager to take a role in new movie and requests the previous director could do her a favor. However, in fact, she is not a good actress in performing such a role in new movie whereas the director does not to refuse her please directly, so he says:“She is beautiful” as the response. In fact, the claim that she is beautiful means she is not good at performing the roles in movie. Here the audience intends the speaker form the belief (or the belief that he believes). So it is the speaker’s turn to guess what the real meaning of the hearer is, then he can make a choice about whether gives the actress a role in movie. As you can see, here I still expand my demonstration with the methods I mentioned in explaining speaker-implicature. Why I chose this way? That is because when we stands the point of the audience, it means the speaker and the audience switch the roles and form a new connection, which I have mentioned in diagram.
3.Conclusion
Not like what have discussed in Grice’s classification, which only pay attention to speaker’s intention rather than the interpretation of audience, here I give a new direction because in psychology it is certainty about the understanding ability in conversations. So it is important to take audience’s response into consideration. Apart this, from both sides, there must be something which they intended to convey or communicate but failed to, namely, making conversations unsuccessful. So it is helpful to analysis from this theory, on which may benefit us with a clear picture about what is said and what is implicated then to achieve the goal of making successful conversations.
References：
[1]Grice, H. P. 1957.‘Meaning’. Philosophical Review 66, 377–388.
[2]Leech, G. (1983). Pragmatics.CUP. Cambridge.
[3]Levinson, 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
[4]Neale, 1992. ‘Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language’. Linguistics and Philosophy 15, 509–559.
[5]Saul, 2002, ‘Speaker Meaning, What is Said, and What is Implicated’. No?s.36(2), 228-248
[6]Saeed, 2000. Semantics. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
[7]何兆熊.2004. 《语用学讲稿》. 南京：南京师范大学出版社.
[8]姜望琪. 2003. 《当代语用学》. 北京：北京大学出版社.
[9]熊学亮. 2004. 《语言学新解》. 上海：复旦大学出版社.
[10]徐盛桓. 1996. 《会话含意理论的新发展》. 河南大学出版社.