>
> In response to Hanno Beck’s question regarding when and how social
> information is taken into account during utterance interpretation:
>
> Both examples cited,
>
> (1) "The Melvin Hall dormitory is on fire."
> (2) "The dean wishes to speak with you."
>
> amount to requests for the addressee to do something (e.g. “Do
> something
> about putting the fire out” in case (1), “Go and see the dean” in case
> (2)). As I understand the problem raised by Hanno, the question is not
> so
> much whether the hearer will arrive at these intended implicatures (the
> request reading of these utterances), but whether s/he will decide to
> act
> on them, which to me is a question not about the implicatures
> conveyed, but
> about the perlocutionary effects of these utterances. I.e. in both
> cases,
> there is no question about the sincerity of the speaker’s intention to
> get
> the addressee to do something (notwithstanding the possibility that the
> speaker knows the addressee thinks the speaker is unreliable, joking
> etc.).
> The question is, once the addressee has understood that the speaker
> wants
> to get him/her to do something, on what grounds does s/he go on and do
> it?
>
> Nevertheless, we may begin one step earlier, and wonder if there is any
> chance the addressee may not arrive at the intended request readings.
> This
> seems to me to depend on the extent to which the linguistic expression
> used
> each time is conventionalised/ stereotypical for expressing the
> intended
> propositional content. E.g. saying, instead of (1),
>
> (1’) “The Melvin Hall dormitory is in the process of being eliminated
> by
> fire.”
>
> or, instead of (2)
>
> (2’) “The dean desires to converse with you”
>
> which express more or less the same propositional content, sound less
> stereotypical than (1) and (2) respectively. [This may be a matter of
> the
> frequencies of the individual lexical items used (which, in this case,
> correlates with matters of register-specificity, semantic generality/
> versatility etc.) or of the expressions as a whole. It is also a
> matter of
> individual speaker style—e.g. whether the addressee knows the speaker
> to
> have a preference for contrived expression, again, a matter of
> frequency of
> particular items/constructions, but this time in the individual
> speaker’s
> speech. In all cases, this intuition has something to do with previous
> experience, and should in principle be empirically verifiable, e.g.
> using
> corpus data etc.]
>
> The addressee may not arrive at the intended request readings if (1’)
> or
> (2’) are used, and in any case, if s/he arrives at these readings, it
> will
> be after greater processing effort, since s/he will have to figure out
> why
> a longer/unusual expression was used. It seems to me that the immediate
> association of (1) and (2) with the request readings can be nicely
> captured
> via Levinson’s (2000) I-principle (‘What is simply described is
> stereotypically and specifically exemplified’) and the not-so-immediate
> association of (1’) and (2’) with the same readings via its
> complementary
> M-principle (‘Marked descriptions warn “marked situation”’). I have
> proposed (Terkourafi 2001, 2003) that the intuition of
> stereotypicality can
> be propositionally represented as a belief (e.g. “when person
> such-and-such
> (this type of speaker, or this particular (token) speaker) says
> such-and-such s/he is trying to get this type of result) that can
> participate in the inferential process and determine its outcome.
>
> Now, to the problem of whether to act on the request readings. Previous
> experience is of course important also in this case, as is the notion
> of
> stereotypicality. If the addressee has no previous experience of this
> particular type of speaker or this individual (token) speaker lying,
> then
> s/he may well believe him/her, i.e. form the belief that “The Melvin
> Hall
> dormitory is on fire”, or “The speaker wishes to speak to me” without
> further ado. [NB: forming this belief is the perlocutionary effect
> sought
> by the speaker, but totally up to the addressee]. However, previous
> experience of the speaker (this particular token speaker, or the type
> of
> speaker s/he represents) lying acts as kind of pointer to a marked
> situation. The addressee may then well expend more effort deciding
> whether
> to believe the speaker or not (this also depends on the addressee’s
> personal interest, e.g. are all of his/her belongings at Melvin Hall?)
>
> In both cases, the issue seems to turn more on how to capture the
> effect of
> previous experience on the interpretation process—the points at which
> such
> experience will enter the process, if at all, and in what way. The
> proposal
> made here is that, for theory’s sake, we can represent such experience
> propositionally and consider that it is drawn upon based on
> similarities of
> previously experienced situations (which may be more or less abstractly
> propositionally represented) and the perceived situation (again
> propositionally represented). [Of course, storing need not be
> propositional; it may also be, e.g. visual, and the discovery of
> similarities may rely on a comparison of visual—perceived and
> recalled—stimuli].
>
> This proposal is compatible with RT, if the notion of perceived
> markedness
> is understood as a measure of relevance (cf. Dessalles’s work on
> newness
> vs. expectability of information as a measure of relevance; e.g.
> Dessalles
> 1998). This proposal amounts to an add-on to both the Neo-Gricean and
> RT
> views, inasmuch as a new theoretical construct, representations of
> experienced contexts to various degrees of abstraction (which can be
> represented as frames, cf. Escandell-Vidal 1996, Terkourafi 2001) is
> required, on which the proposed principles (heuristics or the
> principle of
> relevance) operate.
>
> I hope some of this helps!
>
> With best regards,
>
> Marina Terkourafi
>
> References
> Dessalles, J.-L. (1998) Altruism, status, and the origins of
> language.
> In: Hurford, J. et al. (eds.) Approaches to the evolution of language:
> social and cognitive bases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
> 130-147.
> Escandell-Vidal, V. (1996) Towards a cognitive approach to
> politeness.
> In: Jaszczolt, K. & Turner, K. (eds.) Contrastive semantics and
> pragmatics.
> Oxford: Pergamon. 629-50.
> Terkourafi, M. (2001) Politeness in Cypriot Greek: A frame-based
> approach. Ph.D. thesis. University of Cambridge.
> Terkourafi, M. (2003) Generalised and particularised implicatures of
> politeness. In: Kühnlein, Peter, Hannes Rieser & Henk Zeevat (eds.)
> Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium. Pragmatics & Beyond New
> Series 114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 151-166.
>
> --
> Marina Terkourafi
> A.G. Leventis Fellow
>
> The British School at Athens Department of Linguistics
> 52, Odhos Souidhias University of Cambridge
> GR-10676 Athens Sidgwick Avenue
> Greece Cambridge CB39DA
> U.K.
>
> http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~mt217
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 11 2004 - 16:04:23 GMT