Conversation Maxims and Implicature (Week 3)

The Texture of Talk

• Conversation analysis focuses on communication structure and patterning.
• Pragmatics focuses on broader expectations about meaning and behavior.
• Pragmatics is based on the idea that people assume logical behavior in conversations.

Cooperative Principle

• Grice's cooperative principle states people cooperate to make utterances understandable.
• People generally adhere to reasonable expectations about how people behave.
• Maxims aren't strict rules, but general principles about how things are done.
• People often violate or 'flout' these maxims in actual conversations.
• Flouting a maxim can create a special type of meaning known as implicature.

Maxims of Conversation

• Maxim of quality: Say what is true.
• Maxim of relevance: Be relevant to the topic.
• Maxim of manner: Be clear and unambiguous.
• Maxim of quantity: Be as informative as required, not more.

Implicature

• It involves implying or suggesting something indirectly.
• The very act of flouting a maxim creates a special type of meaning.
• People use default expectations to make sense of what others say.
• Listeners infer indirectly implied meanings when speakers don't behave as expected.
• Implicature allows us to manage the interpersonal aspect of communication.
• It can be used to be polite or avoid hurting feelings.
• It can also be used to avoid accountability for what you have said.

Speech Acts

• Pragmatics also concerns how people accomplish social actions when they talk.
• Utterances can perform actions in the physical world.
• Speech acts are utterances that perform actions.
• Key element isn't just 'meaning' but 'force'—the ability to perform actions.
• Austin identified types of forces: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary.
  • Locutionary: Actual meaning of the words.
  • Illocutionary: Intended action.
  • Perlocutionary: Actual effect on the listener.
• Speech acts can also be expressed indirectly.

Felicity Conditions

• Felicity: The ability of an utterance to perform a particular action.
• For speech acts to be 'happy' certain conditions must be met.
• Some relate to what is said, requiring conventional ways of uttering.
• Some concern who utters the speech act (authority) and their identity.
• Some concern the receiver.
• Receiver must generally decipher the speech act and comply.
• Some concern the issuance time or place.
• Figuring out what people are doing when they speak involves comparing conditions in which utterance is made to required conditions.

Sense and Sequencing: Conversation Analysis

• Conversation analysis starts with the assumption that conversations are orderly.
• Orderly means they follow a predictable pattern.
• Utterances are interpreted based on how they "fit" sequentially with other utterances.
• The main focus of conversation analysis is exploration of sequential structure.

Adjacency Pairs

• Social interaction often arranged in pairs of utterances.
• Pair sequences known as 'adjacency pairs'.
• Common examples: question/answer, invitation/acceptance, greeting/greeting.
• Adjacency pairs have conditional relevance.
• One utterance is dependent on the other utterance.
• The first dictates the second.
• Second determines how initial one was understood.

Analyzing Speech Acts and Implicature

• Presents how pragmatics and conversation analysis help understand potentially ambiguous contributions in social interaction, such as orders/refusals/consent.
• Orders are potentially ambiguous because they are difficult to distinguish from requests or observations.
• Refusals are often delivered indirectly to mitigate impact.
• Consent is tricky, often inferred or coerced.

Directives

• Order and request belongs to the family of speech acts called directives.
• Directives aim to get someone to do something.
• Order and request distinctions are unclear.
• Felicity conditions for a request include:
  • Hearer doing some future act they can do.
  • Act isn't normally done without asking.
  • Speaker really wants it done.
• Orders have similar felicity conditions.
• Orders lack the request voluntariness and holds compulsory nature.
• Voluntariness of a directive depends on requester, conditions and relationships.
• Directives often indirect, lack stating wished action.
• Most powerful make indirect orders.

Saying "No"

• Pragmatics figures out meaning via analysis of context.
• Conversation analysis figures out meaning via sequential connection.
• Need considering cultural models/expectations for making sense of utterances.

Cultural Scripts

• Cultural Scripts is a deep-seated expectation of who says what, when, where, and how.
• They come with set phrases.
• Scripts signal utterance kind.
• They are governed by preferred responses that create appropriateness.
• Preferred response relevant to refusal.
• Refusals are tough because they threaten the "face" of receiver.

Refusals

• Require explanations or softening.
• Sexual interaction refusals are really important.
• Need both parties consenting so forcing sex = crime.
• Experts advise simply saying no.
• "No" can be viewed as "maybe", since females are thought to be sexually reluctant.

Refusal Issues

• Feminist conversation analysts Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith (1999), argue that complex speech acts involved in refusals incorporates delays/hedges/apologies/accounts, refusing without saying "no".
• People need a clearer understanding of the signals of when consent is given/refused.

Orders of Indexicality

• Indexical order may have long/complex histories becoming.
• Connected to the rise of nation-states, with the cultural and sociolinguistic components tied in.
• Display variability/change under influences such macroshifts in market trends.
• Construct semiotic category/habitat.
• This is still affected by stratification, by the rating of levels like higher/lower, better/worse.
• Indexicality exists in general semiosis.

Perspectives on Conversation

• Austin's principles say focusing only propositional component of utterance is insufficient for explaining language use.
• Austin claims to provide an argument about the reasons why the propositional content of utterances is insufficient when understanding how people use languages.
• Schegloff's work on closings introduces conversation basic principles: adjacency pairs and conditional relevance.

How to do things with words

• Austin says a business statement can only 'describe'/state a fact either truly or falsely.
• Certain utterances do nothing "descriptive"
• Uttering makes part of doing (examples: marrying, betting.
• None are true or false.

Performative Utterance/Sentence or,

• Use varied ways.
• Issuing the utterance performs action.
• The person uttering the words must be doing the action.
• Circumstance/words must correspond/match.
• Uttering is normally event/leading.
• Action is essential.

Austin continues saying...

• Not speaking seriously may ruin action.
• When a condition is absent, no longer is an utterance false but what happens is ruined, and can become bad.
• When a person says what they wish or intend; should be taken this way.
• The uttering words perform so many things have to follow.
• The right or wrong happens with any uttering of performativeness.
• These need observing to be done/carried out in utterance.

Conclusion

• The action may fail when action is unhappy.

Schegloff introduces more complexity...

• States orderly conversation makes for great organization.
• Turn management allows (1) someone speaks for (1) time, and (2) speaker alternates.
• Need simultaneous arriving at a point a speaker stops is understandable, a break or pause.
• Halting is NOT THE ANSWER.

Proximate solution?

• Use 'terminal exchange'.
• Example: "good-byes"
• Paired up in adjacency pairs. –(1) 2 utterance length; adjacency is positioned correctly to form correct pair, and (3) there were unique speakers each producing utterance.
• Adjacency forms a relationship beyond normal.
• Two ways operate for the structure sequences: first pair parts and second pair parts
• Affiliates in sequence.
• Instances:
• Offer-accept/refusal, question-answer, greeting-greeting.
• Lastly these exhibits relative ordering, type selected discriminates between parts
• In order of first pair parts before second.