Dear All,
In her critical review of Levinson's "Presumptive Meanings" R. Carston writes that
Levinson argues for a level of utterance-type meaning, which is distinct from,
and intermediate between, sentence-type meaning and utterance-token
meaning: "it is more than encoded linguistic meaning but generally less than the full
interpretation of an utterance".
I was wondering whether the neo-gricean expectations regarding how
language is (should?) be normally used, correspond to the RT expectations
of relevance.
For example, would the following account of euphemistic communication
be acceptable from the RT perspective:
Since the default usage rule associated with military actions is the one of
using the prototypical lexeme "war" and not "campaign", "operation", "aggressive defense",
"humanitarian intervention", "installation of democracy" etc., these
undeniably strategically introduced expressions are interpreted as marked (Levinson's/Horn's M-HEURISTIC)
and the utterance-type meaning "the speaker is resorting to
euphemistic language" is inferred (metarepresented) along with the sentence-meaning
(provided the hearer is a Cautious Optimist).
Impoliteness appears to be not anticipated but inferred (or shaken - not stirred?) along the same lines,
unlike politeness-the-default-state-of-events.
For example failure to produce "Happy New Year" instead of "Hello" upon encountering an acquaintance
you haven't seen since December 31 is currently inferred and interpreted as impolite by speakers of
Russian and this way every year "Happy New Year" becomes a temporary
"usage rule"/substitute for standard greetings.
Would really appreciate your comments!
Happy New Year!
Andre
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