Questions

1. How might a linguist study the internal relationships between lexical items?

1. What is inclusion? Give examples.

2. Distinguish three types of opposites found in language.

3. Why is it impossible to assign firm meanings to some words?

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5 What is a prototype, and why is this notion important for the study of meaning?

6 How might one represent the meaning of sentences?

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PART THREE

The outer rings

When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather

scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean ––

neither more nor less.'

LEWIS CARROLL

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9

Using language

This is a self-clearing cafeteria' ran the notice in the student cafeteria. One might expect the plates and cups to put themselves away, judging from other similar phrases in the language, such as self-cleaning oven, self-raising flour, self-righting lifeboat. Yet the majority of students inter­preted the phrase as meaning that they, the customers, were expected to clear away their plates. Why? The obvious answer is that they used their common-sense and knowledge of the world to come to the most plausible interpretation in the circumstances, which was not necessar­ily the one which was most consistent with the linguistic structures.

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics which studies those aspects of meaning which cannot be captured by semantic theory. In brief, it deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be pre­dicted from linguistic knowledge alone. In a narrow sense, it deals with how listeners arrive at the intended meaning of speakers. In its broad­est sense, it deals with the general principles followed by human beings when they communicate with one another. It is therefore sometimes light-heartedly referred to as 'the waste-paper-basket of semantics.

Pragmatics overlaps with discourse analysis, which deals with the various devices used by speakers and writers when they knit sin­gle sentences together into a coherent and cohesive whole.

These fields are still fairly new, and there is no general agreement yet as to how to deal with them. This chapter outlines a number of recent approaches which have proved helpful.

The cooperative principle

An American philosopher, Paul Grice, is sometimes regarded as the 'father of pragmatics'. Grice emphasized that human beings

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communicate efficiently because they are by nature helpful to one another. He attempted to specify the principles which underlie this cooperative behaviour, and proposed four 'maxims' or rules of conver­sation which can jointly be summarized as a general principle: 'Be cooperative'. These are given below.

1 Maxim of Quantity

Give the right amount of information when you talk. If someone at a party asked "Who's that person with Bob?', a cooperative reply would be That's his new girlfriend, Alison'. An uncooperative reply would be an over-brief one, such as 'A girl', or an over-long one, such as That's Alison Margaret Jones, born in Kingston, Surrey on 4th July 1970, daughter of Peter and Mary Jones... etc'

2 Maxim of Quality

Be truthful. For example, if someone asked you the name of an un­familiar animal, such as a platypus, reply truthfully, and don't say 'It's a kookaburra', or 'It's a duck', if you know it's a platypus.

3 Maxim of Relevance

Be relevant. If someone says, 'What's for supper?', give a reply which fits the question, such as 'Fish and chips', and not Tables and chairs' or 'Buttercups are yellow'.

4 Maxim of Manner

Be clear and orderly. For example, describe things in the order in which they occurred: The plane taxied down the runway, and took off to the west' rather than ‘The plane took off to the west and taxied down the runway', which might confuse people as to what actually happened.

At this outline level, the cooperative principle seems like common-sense. It becomes more interesting when we consider how often peo­ple apparently break it. In answer to the question: ‘What's for supper?' one is likely to receive a reply such as: 'Billy fell downstairs', which

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doesn't answer the query, in answer to a question 'Why don't you like Pamela?' one might get the response: 'Pamela's an elephant', which is patently untrue.

Such replies are not evidence against the cooperative principle. On the contrary, they simply show how strongly it works: people are so convinced that the other person in a conversation is being cooperative, that a superficial breakdown in a conversational maxim is treated as important and informative. For example, if someone said: 'What's for supper?' and the reply was the superficially irrelevant one: 'Billy fell downstairs', the hearer is likely to assume that the information about Billy was somehow important, and will fill in the gaps with assumptions such as 'Since* Billy was supposed to cook the supper, and he's fallen downstairs, I assume that there isn't any supper ready'. Similarly, if someone told an overt lie, such as 'Pamela's an elephant', the listener would not just think, That's impossible', he or she would cast around as to why the speaker had made this comment. In brief, listeners interpret what people say as conforming to the cooperative principle, even when this principle is overtly broken. They draw implications from the utter­ance which are not strictly there in the linguistic meai.ing.

The main problem with these Gricean maxims is that they are fairly vague, and the conversational implicatures or conclusions which can be drawn are wide and numerous. Some recent work therefore has attempted to specify how humans manage to disentangle what is relevant from the mass of possible inferences they could make.