dear all, I4dlike to comment on grice and RT,
joerch wrote:
> >Why not seeing Grice's maxims as firmly entrenched in the encyclopaedia
> >>of certain culturally determined groups. (Well, enter sociolinguistics!
> >>Culturally determined groups is such a loose term. However, I don't see
> >>the need of going into further details here. Still, I presume that
> >>Grice's maxims vary in pretty much the same way as other "features" of
> >>language.) So, the maxims seem to be a result of certain conventions that
> >>individual's need stick to in order to facilitate certain human
> >>interaction processes (and thus to improve the degree of relevance!).
> >>Communication is one of these interaction processes which most of the
> >>time needs to be facilitated (I guess). Now, if I imagine a new member
> >>of (my western) society, he is likely to observe certain phenomena of
> >>communicational conventions over an over again. These observable
> >>phenomena can be seen as inputs to inferential processes. So once these
> >>experiences get processed, their status for interactional processes is
> >>likely to be reflected in the encyclopaedia of the individual as well.
> >>
> >>My "idea" now is, that the gricecean maxims may serve as premises in
> >>inferential processes. Once an individual is processing an utterance, he
> >>is at the same time in an interaction process. This offers the
> >>possibility that the initial context Sperber and Wilson describe in
> >>Relevance: Communication and Cognition could reasonably contain premises
> >>such as:
> >>
> >>if someone addresses me, it's a standard that he/she "is making his/her
> >>contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of
> >>the exchange)" and so forth...(Mind the first maxim of quantity embedded
> >>in this premise)
I quite like the idea to combine RT with a co-operative principle account (which
seems to be more sensible towards cultural differences). I think that RT can4t
explain communication on its own. Most of the examples Sperber&Wilson offer are
quite artificially construed in order to (I think) secretely presuppose what
can4t be explained otherwise. There is a whole variety of dialogue examples for
instance presupposing `an ordinary situation4 when explaining how RT can explain
communication. Now the thing is, that such a setting is already a context and
has to be chooses and agreed upon by the speakers. How do they do that? It is
far from beeing clear how they even access an initial context if there is not
already an agreed direction of communication (since the order of hypothesis is
not a fixed one either), something like a given context must already be there.
Besides I think the whole passage explaining the choice of context (octo
busso)is far from being convincing to me, because saying that "I want the
speciality of the capri restaurant etc...." when intending: 4I want an octo
busso4 does not really comply with the principle of relevance demanding the
stimulus to be the most relevant stimulus, that could have been used. I have the
impression by secretely violating their own premisses, Sperber&Wilson try (but
fail) to smuggle in an direction of conversation, something like a given
context. So it seems quite plausible to me that there is something like a set of
conventions, culturally determined which helps setting the frame RT can
afterwards work in. Admittely this sounds vague so far, but it is only intended
to be a step into a certain direction.
best, matthias
> >
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 21 2000 - 10:03:21 GMT