Курсовая работа: Pragmatics: rules of conversation

The aim of our work was to describe the rules of conversation according to Paul Grice’s philosophy and demonstrate their practical application.

At the first part we mentioned that Paul Grice was rather a philosopher than a linguist, that’s why we made the argument for the necessity of reading Grice’s work ‘Logic and conversation’ in the philosophical context, rather than in isolation. Then, a consideration of this context showed a number of themes which recurred: logic, conventional/non-conventional and, most importantly, rationality.

Grice’s interests were in the system of language; that it is an example of human rational action, and thus can be accounted for through some variety of logic (although, not traditional formal logic, perhaps). His aim was to find the logic of conversation which could account for the gap between saying and meaning, saying and implicating, conventional and non-conventional meaning. The logic that he sought was seen as a manifestation of rational action.

Grice’s articles (1957, 1967) have a profound influence on speech act theory. Grice proformulated the idea that ordinary communication takes place not directly by means of convention, but in virtue of a speaker’s evincing certain intentions and getting his or her audience to recognize those intentions (and to recognize that it was the speaker’s intention to secure the recognition). In his view, the utterance is not itself communicative, but only provides clues to the intentions of the speaker. A later part of Grice’s program spelled out how various maxims of cooperative behavior are exploited by speaker’s intentions in uttering certain words under particular circumstances.

Grice distinguished between what is said in making an utterance, that which determines the truth value of the contribution, and the total of what is communicated. Things that are communicated beyond what is said (in the technical sense) Grice called implicatures, and those implicatures are depend upon the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative he called conversational implicatures.

In our work we defined that Cooperative principles is a set of maxims of conversation and usually people follow them in order to make the communication clear. However, it is possible to flout a maxim intentionally or unconsciously and thereby convey a different meaning than what is literally spoken.Therefore, cooperation is still taking place, but no longer on the literal level. Conversationalists can assume that when speakers intentionally flout a maxim, they still do so with the aim of expressing some thought. Thus, the Gricean Maxims serve a purpose both when they are followed and when they are flouted.

References:

1. Bach, Kent, "Conversational Impliciture." - Mind and Language -1994 - pp.124-162.

2. Bach, Kent, "The myth of conventional implicature." Linguistics and Philosophy. - 1999 -pp.262-283.

3. Bach, Kent, 2004, "Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Language." In Horn and Ward (eds.) – 2004 - pp. 463-87.

4. Blakemore, Diane. Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. – 1992.

5. Carston, Robyn. "Implicature, explicature, and truth-conditional semantics." Reprinted in Kasher (ed.) 1998 - pp. 436-79.

6. Chapman, Siobhan. Paul Grice, philosopher and linguist. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.-2005

7. Grice, H. Paul, "Logic and conversation.", Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press - 1975 - pp. 41-58.

8. Grice, H. Paul "Further notes on logic and conversation." In P. Cole (ed.) – 1967.

9. Grice, H. Paul "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions," Philosophical Review - 1969 - pp.147-177.

10. Grice, H. Paul "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature." In P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, New York: Academic Press - 1981- pp. 183-97.

11. Horn, Laurence R. and Gregory Ward (eds.)The Hanbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell. – 2004.

12. Kempson, Ruth M. "Grammar and Conversational Principles." In F. Newmeyer (ed.) Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press – 1988 - pp. 139-163.

13. Levinson, Stephen. Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press/Bradford Books- 2000.

14. Neale, Stephen "Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language," Linguistics and Philosophy - 1992 –pp.509-559.

15. Searle John "Indirect speech acts." ibid. Reprinted in Pragmatics: A Reader, ed. S. Davis, Oxford: Oxford University Press. -1991- pp. 265–277.

16. Thomason, R. Accommodation, meaning, and implicature: Interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics. In Intentions in Communication, ed. P. R. Cohen, J. L. Morgan & M. Pollack, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press -1990 - pp. 325–63.

17. Van Kuppevelt, J. (1996) Inferring from topics: Scalar implicatures as topic dependent inferences. Linguistics and Philosophy – 1996 – pp. 393–443

18. Wilson, D., and Sperber, D. On Grice's theory of conversation. In Conversation and Discourse, ed. P. Werth, New York: St. Martins Press -1981- pp. 155–78.

Internet references:

1. www.appstate.edu/mcgowant/grice.htm

2. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

3. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature