Pragmatics - The Contribution of Context to Meaning

We do not interpret language in a vacuum. We use our knowledge of the actors, objects and situation to determine more specific interpretations of any sentence. Pragmatics undertakes the study of the ways in which contextual features can determine sentence interpretations.

Oldea Song (South Australia)

      marks  shivering with cold     a big snake      tell you

      marks  put it down     a white-blossomed tree

      marks  to throw sand with one’s hands

To interpret this song you need to understand its cultural context.

A man is shivering with cold; he sees the tracks (marks) of a big snake. He tells another man; together they follow the edible snake and kill it near a white-blossomed tree. The last word of the song refers to the digging of a depression in the sand to make a fire for cooking a snake.

Interpreting traditional songs and stories requires various types of pragmatic information:

      lexical - what are marks?

put it down = ‘to kill something’

      genre - song lyrics are often less explicit

      culture - people are often cold while hunting

snakes are a potential food source

the preparations associated with building a fire

Disambiguation, Reference Assignment and Indexicality

Theories of pragmatics often take for granted that the literal meaning of sentences, or explicature, can be separated from the sentences’ pragmatic implicatures. However, reference to the context of a sentence is almost always needed to construct its literal meaning. Contextual information is used for: i) the disambiguation of ambiguous expressions, ii) the assignment of reference to variables, and iii) the interpretation of indexical expressions.

Contextual information can be used to disambiguate both lexical and structural ambiguities, as in the following sentences.

      They’ve got that creamy duck on special at Weaver’s.

      Everyone should bring a pencil.

The assignment of reference to variables is needed to interpret pronouns and time reference. This is illustrated in the following sentences.

      He’ll never make it.

      I left your mail on your desk.

      The plumber came and he’ll send a quote.

      Everyone came to dinner last night and Jones got tipsy.

Indexical or deictic expressions derive their interpretation from the context. Indexical expressions express the central anchoring points of an utterance such as the identity and position of the participants, the time and place of the utterance. Pronouns and determiners provide the clearest examples of words that depend upon context for their ultimate interpretation. Language contains many deictic expressions which overtly point to features of the context:

      pronouns         I, you, one, it

      proverbs          do, go, be

      proadverbs      now, then, here, there, so

      tense               past, present, future

      articles            the, a, that, this

We use deictic expressions frequently to avoid expressing non-essential information:

      He is there now.

      One did it for her there then.

Obviously, the evaluation of deictic expressions must be part of any sentence’s explicature. Assuming that explicature is responsible for determining the truth conditions for a sentence raises the question of whether we can maintain a clear boundary between explicature and implicature. Another possibility is that literal meaning constrains the ways in which listeners make use of implicature in determining truth conditions.

It is easy to find examples of pragmatic contributions to sentence meaning in English:

      The councilors refused the marchers a parade permit because they feared violence.

      The councilors refused the marchers a parade permit because they advocated violence.

Note the effect that the change in verb has on your interpretation of the pronoun they.

Davidson’s Analysis of Action Sentences

The Philosopher Donald Davidson observed that sentences can usually be augmented by the addition of various adverbial phrases such as slowly, with a knife, in the bathroom and at midnight, as in the sentence:

      Jones buttered the toast slowly with a knife in the bathroom at midnight.

Adverbial phrases are only loosely associated with predicates, and can be omitted in most cases. The event that the example sentence expresses would usually be expressed more simply as:

      Jones buttered the toast slowly.

      Jones buttered the toast.

Davidson’s analysis leads to an appreciation of the ways in which context fills in semantic blanks that accompany most utterances. We can augment every utterance by adding overt indexical expressions to indicate the missing information supplied by the context.

      He did it so with one there then.

Pragmatic Contributions to Explicature

Robyn Carston (1988) draws attention to a range of ways in which listeners draw upon the context for sentence interpretation. Consider the ambiguity in the sentence:

      We don’t have enough rice.

      The park is too far from the house.

The words enough and too must be evaluated in relation to some unexpressed purpose or proposed action. Such purposes can be overtly expressed as in the following sentences:

      We don’t have enough rice to make curry and rice for three people.

      The park is too far away from the house to walk the distance in half an hour.

A theory of pragmatics is needed to explain how listeners fill in the semantic blanks.

Implicature

Many times we infer a truth relationship between sentences which is not actually an entailment. Sentences can pragmatically relate to the truth of other sentences in which case we say that one sentence implicates another sentence. The philosopher Paul Grice first explored implicature. Grice begins with the idea that all linguistic exchange follows what he termed the cooperative principle.

      The Cooperative Principle

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

      or

      Be helpful.

He argued that all participants in a conversation seek to be cooperative by contributing helpful information. Grice identified a number of conversational rules or maxims that embody the cooperative principle. Grice’s four maxims are now reduced to two:

      Maxim of Relation (also called the Maxim of Relevance)

      Be relevant.

      Maxim of Quantity (also called the Maxim of Informativeness)

      1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).

      2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Grice observed that it is possible to violate or flout conversational rules, and that speakers

do this frequently to communicate ideas indirectly. Grice dubbed such indirect messages a

conversational implicature and studied the way speakers implicate messages by flouting

maxims of conversation.

Assume you find the following entry in a ship’s log:

      The first mate wasn’t drunk last night.

At first glance, this entry seems to violate the maxim of quantity. It tells us something that we

would ordinarily take for granted. Because it violate the maxim of quantity, though, we can

assume the captain is implicating the first mate was drunk the previous nights.

Implicature vs. Entailment

Conversational implicatures resemble semantic entailment in that you can construct a relation

between two propositions that is either an entailment or an implicature. The main difference

between implicature and entailment is that you can cancel an implicature, but not an entailment.

For example, suppose our ship’s log read:

      The first mate wasn’t drunk last night, or any of the previous nights.

The added clause cancels the implicature that he was drunk the previous nights.

Compare this result to what happens when you try to cancel an entailment:

      ? Ian drives a Corvette, but he doesn’t drive a car.

We can state the rule for implicature more formally as:

      X implicates Y if

            i. X does not entail Y

            ii. the hearer has reason to believe Y is true based on the use of X and the Maxims of Conversation.

It seems rather paradoxical to propose rules for conversation that everyone violates. Grice claims

that his principles actually extend beyond conversation to other forms of human interaction.

Sticking to conversational exchanges, can you think of any examples that clearly violate Grice’s

Cooperative Principle?

Advertisers rely on implicature to make extravagant claims. How are Grice’s maxims exploited in the following claims?

      Campbell’s Soup has one third less salt.

      The Ford LTD is 700% quieter.

      Maytags are built to last longer and need fewer repairs.

      Mercedes-Benz are engineered like no other car in the world.

      Chevy trucks are like a rock.

Presupposition

Presupposition is a special kind of entailment relation between sentences. The presuppositions of a sentence must be satisfied for the sentence to have a truth value. If a presupposition fails to hold, then the sentence does not have a truth value – there is a truth value gap. Strawson (1950) claimed that the sentence ‘The King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false because there is no person who is the King of France.

Since the presuppositions of a sentence must be true in order for a sentence to have a truth value, presupposition survives negation. More formally, if S presupposes P, then S entails P and not-S entails P. Some sentences, such as questions, do not have clear truth values, but do have clear presuppositions. Consider the sentence:

     When did Tom stop fiddling his taxes?

What is the negation of this question? Do wh-questions have truth values?

Presupposition is entailed by the literal meaning of a sentence and doesn’t depend on context. Implicatures, by contrast, depend upon context. What are the presuppositions of the implicature examples above?

Metaphor

One of the most frequent violations of Grices conversational principles occurs when we use metaphor. Metaphors like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ obviously violate the Maxim of Relevance since they state propositions that are not literally true.

Aristotle held that metaphors assert a resemblance between two entities. The sentence ‘The holiday was a nightmare’ asserts a resemblance between the holiday and a nightmare. The listener interprets the sentence by assuming the speaker is asserting a non-literal meaning that requires identifying what holidays and nightmares might have in common, such as being unpleasant.

Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors We Live By) question the traditional assumption that metaphors are a special or literary form of speech. They noted that metaphorical language is much more frequent in ordinary language use than Aristotle would predict. Lakoff and Johnson observe that many metaphors observe common themes, e.g.,

      Good is up

            Examples:

                  I’m feeling up. That boosted my spirits. My spirits rose.

                  You’re in high spirits. I’m feeling down. I’m depressed.

Much of our language about language is structured by metaphor:

      IDEAS (or meanings) are objects.

      linguistic expressions are containers.

      communication involves sending ideas in containers.

      Examples:

      It’s hard to get that idea across to him.

      I gave you that idea.

      It’s difficult to put my ideas into words.

      His words carry little meaning.

      The sentence is without meaning.

What difficulties does metaphor create for a theory of meaning that uses truth conditions?

Discourse Structure

Deictic expressions are used to keep track of participants and events in discourse. Examine the following story from Robert Louis Stevenson (1911) ‘Treasure Island’, p. 40.

      The supervisor stood up straight and stiff, and told his story like a lesson; and you should have seen how the two gentlemen leaned forward and looked at each other, and forgot to smoke in their surprise and interest. When they heard how my mother went back to the inn, Dr. Livesey fairly slapped his thigh, and the squire cried “Bravo”! and broke his long pipe against the grate. Long before it was done, Mr. Trelawney (that, you will remember, was the squire’s name) had got up from his seat, and was striding about the room, and the doctor, as if to hear the better, had taken off his powdered wig, and sat there, looking very strange indeed with his own close-cropped, black poll.

Argument Tracking: Who, what and where?

What are the arguments?

      The supervisor stood up straight and stiff, and told his story like a lesson; and you should have seen how the two gentlemen leaned forward and looked at each other, and forgot to smoke in their surprise and interest. When they heard how my mother went back to the inn, Dr. Livesey fairly slapped his thigh, and the squire cried “Bravo”! and broke his long pipe against the grate. Long before it was done, Mr. Trelawney (that, you will remember, was the squire’s name) had got up from his seat, and was striding about the room, and the doctor, as if to hear the better, had taken off his powdered wig, and sat there, looking very strange indeed with his own close-cropped, black poll.

What would happen if pronouns were used throughout this paragraph? 

      He stood up straight and stiff, and told it like a lesson; and you should have seen how they leaned forward and looked at each other, and forgot to smoke in their surprise and interest. When they heard how she went back to the inn, he fairly slapped his thigh, and he cried “Bravo”! and broke his long pipe against the grate. Long before it was done, he (that, you will remember, was his name) had got up from his seat, and was striding about the room, and he, as if to hear the better, had taken off his powdered wig, and sat there, looking very strange indeed with his own close-cropped, black poll.

Event Structure: What Happened?

What are the events?

      The supervisor stood up straight and stiff, and told his story like a lesson; and you should have seen how the two gentlemen leaned forward and looked at each other, and forgot to smoke in their surprise and interest. When they heard how my mother went back to the inn, Dr. Livesey fairly slapped his thigh, and the squire cried “Bravo”! and broke his long pipe against the grate. Long before it was done, Mr. Trelawney (that, you will remember, was the squire’s name) had got up from his seat, and was striding about the room, and the doctor, as if to hear the better, had taken off his powdered wig, and sat there, looking very strange indeed with his own close-cropped, black poll.

How are the events ordered?