Welcome Back, Folks! We’re travelling to a littele bit far-end of Language in Use Studies EAA remains your faithful companion

Remember Grice’s Cooperative Principle Make your conversational contribution such as required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged Pragmatics and Cognition

 Maxim of Quantity ◦ Make your contribution as informative as required ◦ Do not make your contribution more informative than is required  Maxim of Quality ◦ Do not say what you believe to be false ◦ Do not say for which you lack adequate evidence  Maxim of Relation ◦ Be relevant  Maxim of Manner ◦ Avoid obscurity of expression ◦ Avoid ambiguity ◦ Be brief ◦ Be orderly

However, please note that Grice states that anyone who cares about the goals which are central to communication... must be expected to have an interest, given suitable circumstances, in participation in talk exchanges which will be profitable only on the assumption that they will be conducted in general in accordance with the CP and the maxims (1989: 29-30) What does the above quote mean? Communication takes place on the some principles of relevance

Some notions Cognitive environment ◦The set of assumptions that a person could form in accordance with the ‘preliminary’ evidence ‘observable’ to the person Contextual implication ◦The form of assumptions combined with other existing assumptions in the context accessible to a person Contextual effect ◦The effect provided as a result of establishing an assumption in the expectation that it will interact with other existing assumptions  It may allow the derivation of a contextual implication  It may provide further evidence for, and hence, strengthen, an existing assumption  It may contradict an existing assumption Deriving contextual effects takes time and effort, and the more time and effort expended the less relevant the information will seem  Costs and Rewards Principle

Some principles For communication to take place, there should be a communicator and a (comprehending) audience Communicative behaviour must be deliberate and involve intentions for further recognition by the audience A communicator should produce an utterance whose interpretation calls for less effort than any other utterance he/she could have to achieve the same effect The presumption of relevance carried out by every act of overt communication has two aspects: on the one hand, it creates a presumption of adequate effect, while on the other it creates a presumption of minimally necessary effort. These presumptions define a level of optimal relevance– a presumption that an utterance will have adequate contextual effects for the minimum necessary processing.  The Principle of Relevance

The above principle yields two parts ◦Cognitive principle of relevance  The human cognitive system interprets an utterance in such a way as to maximise its relevance. This means achieving the greatest number of ‘contextual effects’ while maximising the cost in terms of processing effort. ◦Communicative principle of relevance  A bona fide communicator, simply by producing an utterance, implicates his/her belief that it is optimally relevant. Principle of Relevance replaces all Grice’s maxims – that a speaker tries to be as relevant as possible in the circumstances he is involved in a communicative event

A speaker is the more active participant in two-way communication; a hearer is more passive. The speaker’s task is to produce an utterance which will enable the hearer to construe the intended message by following the standard procedures. The speaker must take the account of the hearer’s knowledge and of how accessible its different parts are. The standard procedure for the hearer is to test possible interpretations in order of processing effort required, beginning with the most accessible, until one is found whose contextual effects justify the processing effort expended.

Two phases of interpreting utterances Extracting of the explicature ◦ What is explicitly encoded in the linguistic form of the utterance, together with certain elaborations that are needed to make it logically complete and unambigious.  An explicature is basically an enrichment of an original utterance in order for the utterance to be easily understood. E.g. Meeting tomorrow. [a note placed on Head of Eng. Dept. Office] Explicates: who should attend, where and when to hold, what issues to discuss, etc.  A higher level explicature is attempted when a speaker wishes to understand the propositional attitudes of a speaker of an utterance. E.g. Please don’t miss the upcoming meeting! Higher level explicature: Has reader missed the previous meetings? What are the intentions of the note writer by for example using please (as a strong request), and an exclamation mark in the note?, etc. Combining of explicature with context to produce implicatures

Ideas and issues related to implicatures have been discussed earlier. So,... Enough ah...for today mah!!! Tararengkiyuw!!!