TPO20. Lecture 1. Linguistic

Narrator: Listen to part of lecture in a linguistic class

Lecturer
Ok the conventions or assumptions that covering conversation, these may various from one culture to another. But basically for people to communicate there’s a⋯they have to follow certain rules, like if I’m talking with you and I start saying things that are not true if you can tell what I’m lying and while I’m telling the truth, well, we are not gonna have a very satisfactory conversation, are we? Why? Because it violates one of the Gricean Maxims. That’s a set of rules or maxims of philosopher named H.P.Grice came up with in the 1970’s. One of these Gricean Maxims is, well, I’ve already given you a hint.

Student
Oh you just can’t go around and telling lies.

Lecturer
Right or as Grice put it ‘do not say what you believe to be false’. That’s one of Grice’s maxims of ‘quality’ as he called it. So that’s pretty obvious. But the others just as important, like suppose you are asking what time it was and I replied ‘my sister just got married’, what would you think.

Student
You are not really answering my question.

Lecturer
No I’m not, am I? There’s no connection at all, which feels wrong because you general expect to find one. So one important maxim is simply ‘be relevant’. And using this so called ‘maxim of relevant’ we can infer things as well or other the speaker can imply things and the listener can make inference. For instance, suppose you say you’d really love to have a cup of coffee right now, and I say ‘there’s a shop on the corner’. Now what can you infer from what I said?

Student
Well, that the shop sells coffee for one thing.

Lecturer
Right. And that I believe it’s open now. Because if I weren’t implying those things, my response will not be relevant. It have no connection with what you said before. But according to the maxim, my response should be relevant to your statement meaning we should assume some connection between the statement and response. And this maxim of relevant is quite efficient to use, even if I don’t spell out all the details you can still make some useful logical inferences namely ‘the shop is open and it sells coffee’. If we actually have to explain all these details conversations will move on pretty slowly, wouldn’t they?

Ok, then there’s a maxims of manner including things like be clear and avoid ambiguity. And another more interesting maxim is one of the so called ‘maxims of quantity’—quantity of information that is. It says to give as much information as is required in the situation. So suppose you ask me what I did yesterday and I say ‘I went to the art museum’, you would likely inferring that I saw a lots of art. Suppose though that I didn’t go inside the museum, I just walked up to it and then left then I violated the quantity maxim by not giving enough information. So you can see how important implications are to our ability to carry on conversation.

But there are times that people would violate these maxims on purpose. Let’s say a boss is asked to write a letter of recommendation for formal employee seeking an engineering job. The letter he writes is quite brief, something like Mr. X is polite and always dresses neatly, so what does this really mean?

Student
Oh I see, by not mentioning any important qualities related to the job. The boss is like implying that this is the best that I can be said about Mr. X that he is really not qualified.

Lecturer
Exactly. It’s a writing letter not a conversation but the principles that saying the boss is conveying a negative impress of Mr. X without actually saying anything negative about him. So by violating the maxims we⋯it can be way to be subtle of polite or to convey rumor though sarcasm or irony. Sometimes though people will violate maxims for another purpose to deceive now can you imagine who might do such a thing?

Student1
Some politicians?

Student2
Or advertisers?

Lecturer
Right anyone who may see an advantage and implying certain things that are untrue without exclusively saying something untrue. They think ‘Hey no blame as so far audience happens draw inferences that simply not true. So next time you see advertisement saying some product could be up to 20 percent more effective think of these maxims of quantity and relevant and ask yourself what inferences your being like to draw. Think more effective of what exactly and why do they use those little phases ‘could be’ and ‘up to’. These claims give us a lot less information than they seem to.