Re: RT list: Degrees of inference?

Hello,
There is a paper by Helga Schröder: Do high-context cultures prefer implicatures?, which does offer some generalisations.
The paper is published in Relevance Studies in Poland - please contact me directly if you'd like a free copy of this book.

Regards,
Agnieszka Piskorska
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: ian mackenzie
  To: Ronnie Sim
  Cc: relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
  Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 7:08 PM
  Subject: Re: RT list: Degrees of inference?

  Thank you, Ronnie Sim.

  It’s not only the Horn of Africa. John Hinds (1987) quotes Yoshikawa(1978) (I can give the refs. to anyone who wants them) saying “the basic principle of communication in Japan, the fact that what is verbally expressed and what is actually intended are two different things, is something that Japanese people are supposed to be aware of.”

  S&W do of course argue that language use (in any natural language) is almost never literal, and that inference is almost always involved, but I’m still surprised that no-one seems to have tried to rank languages according to levels of inference, or the use of implicatures. Especially with all the SIL linguists with knowledge of Africa, and the various Japanese linguists working in RT. Then again, they tend to analyse specific particles, connectors, discourse markers, etc., i.e. do real work, rather than trade in airy generalisations like I do!

  Ian MacKenzie

  On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Ronnie Sim <ronnie_sim@sil.org> wrote:

    Ian, you asked

    "Can anyone tell me whether any work has been done on RT and degrees of inference considered to be necessary in different languages/cultures?"

    The short answer from me is a nagative ... but I hope others on the RT list will have something more positive.

    What I can do is agree on the basis of anecdotal evidence.
    I'd say in Africa generally -- so, at least in the societies I am most familiar with, in eastern Africa and the Horn, speaking directly is not the norm. People tend to talk indirectly about issues, and rely on the audience doing a lot of inferencing to keep track of what is intended. The more serious the issue is, the more care there is in not speaking to it directly. So the western "value" of being up front with what is on our mind is not appreciated, not valued, and may be read as insensitive. Put like that, I can also see indirectness, and consequent reliance on inferencing, at work in western societies in at least some aspects of life.

    Secondly, especially in the Horn of Africa, it seems to me that explanation [whenever called for] is achieved via the presentation of analogies -- 'parables' if you like. A asks a question about something that is not clear, and B responds by offering an analogy. A has to inference in what way the analogy fits. Again, the west does this, and some tropes depend on analogy, but in the Horn, in some societies at least, it is an art form--a genre, almost. Sometimes the analogy might be fairly 'narrow' and be interpretable in terms of one [or two] quite strong implicatures. At other times, it seems to depend on a range of weak implicatures, no one of which is consciously 'intended'. Again certain [traditional?] negotiations in the west may show similar signs. I think of negotiations that used to involve two families arranging a marriage between one of 'our sons' and one of 'their daughters'. And analogy and indirectness is the means of carrying it out. some time ago now, I heard this done in terms of a young man wishing to harbour his boat, so it can be quite raucous and baudy.

    Is indirectness something that surfaces in all societies, in some communication, and then, along the lines of your question, do some societies prefer indirectness, and a consequent greater dependence on inferencing?

    Anthropologist Mary Douglas set up two parameters for understanding societal behaviour -- Group and Grid. The Group parameter involves the bondedness among members of the group; the grid parameter involves stratification of tasks/roles among group members. Low Group/Low Grid would be individualist; High group/High grid is hierarchical societies; High group/Low grid is egalitarian; Low group/High grid is fatalist. The epitomising terms are extremes; most societies presumably show trends not extremes.

    Communication in different Group/Grid societies might reasonably be predicted to show differences brought about by such cultural factors.

    There is a correlation between the Group/Grid concept and the concept of high/low Context. Plausibly, communication in high shared context situations relies more heavily on inferencing.

    I would like to hear from others who have explored more systematically these cultural aspects in which communication takes place. Which is my main reason for saying anything at all, no matter how little! I assume that the work of Helen Spencer-Oatey, Stells Ting-Toomey and those who are associated with the same interests could give us much more.

    Ronnie [Sim]

    On 26/11/2013 17:07, ian mackenzie wrote:

      In the 1980s, John Hinds distinguished between speaker/writer and listener/reader responsible languages. In the former (e.g. English and French), the speaker/writer is primarily responsible for effective communication; in the latter (e.g. Japanese and perhaps Korean) it is the listener/reader. It is often said that in Japanese what is expressed and what is intended tend to be two different things; there is no obligation to give full explanations and clarifications, to be linear and direct, or to use explicit coherence markers and transitional statements. Consequently listeners/readers need to rely heavily on inference.

      In the 1970s, Edward Hall distinguished between high- and low-context cultures, giving Japan as an example of a high-context culture in which people tend to have similar experiences and expectations, allowing many things to be left unsaid, and inferences to be drawn from implicit shared cultural knowledge.

      The authors of RT come from speaker/writer responsible cultures (the French even have the deluded saying ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français!). Can anyone tell me whether any work has been done on RT and degrees of inference considered to be necessary in different languages/cultures?

      Many thanks,

      Ian MacKenzie

      Faculté de traduction et d’interprétation, Université de Genève

      ian.mackenzie@unige.ch

      Recently published: English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and Teaching English, Routledge, 2013.
Received on Wed Nov 27 18:44:24 2013