Pragmatics: saying what you mean
The hypothetical Martian visitor to whom we alluded briefly in Chapter 1 would no doubt be bemused by many aspects of language: not least its complexity and diversity, and the amazing skill demonstrated by young humans in acquiring it. But perhaps most perplexing of all would be the very nature of interactions in which language is used. In spite of the fact that conversation is riddled with non-sequiturs, apparently uninformative contributions and blatant irrelevance, human beings appear to communicate very well.
The way in which meaning is produced and understood in context is the subject matter of pragmatics. As we will see in this chapter, we all use conversational ‘short cuts’ to make interaction more efficient. Since these short cuts can only work if we share an assumption that conversation is a co-operative exercise, we will consider models of co-operation and politeness which help us understand how successful interaction takes place.
As we will see, there is much more to conversation than the simple communication of factual information. We use language to perform actions, too: I promise, or I bet you, for example, by their very utterance imply a commitment on the part of the speaker; many people find it difficult to say I’m sorry, because much more than mere words is involved. The model of speech acts we present later in the chapter outlines the conditions required for such utterances to be successfully made.
Meaning in context
Consider the following exchanges:
(1) Paul: Can you put the washing out?Sarah: It’s raining!Paul: OK.(2) Sally: Has Sarah revealed her takeover plans?Lynn: She’s keeping her cards close to her chest.Sally: Ah, I suspected as much.(3) Sarah: You can’t sack your own brother-in-law!Alan: Business is business!(4) Steve: Could you tell me the time?Claire: Yes, it’s twenty past four.(5) Dad: Were you born in a barn?Daughter: (Closes the door)
If you’re a native speaker of English, none of these exchanges will seem particularly odd: it is only when we stop and think about them that their strangeness becomes apparent. In the first two examples, the response appears to bear no relation to the question actually posed, yet Paul accepts Sarah’s response in (1) as an answer to his request, while in (2), Lynn’s apparently irrelevant reply, about a card game which has not even been mentioned, is interpreted by Sally as a helpful contribution. Alan’s reply to Sarah in (3) is a tautology, and therefore appears to convey no information whatsoever. We probably don’t even notice that Claire’s response to Steve’s question in (4) does not actually address the question posed (‘Could you tell me…’), which formally seems to require a yes or no answer. Finally, communication appears to have broken down completely between Dad and Daughter in (5), where Dad’s question receives no answer at all, Daughter choosing to close a door instead.
How can meaningful communication emerge from what seems to be chaotically disorganized interaction? And why is communication so often oblique, when more direct alternatives are available? (For example, if you want someone to close a door for you, as in (5), why not simply use the imperative verb form, designed specifically for this purpose, and say ‘Close the door!’?).
Conversational ‘short cuts’ of the kind illustrated above all ultimately serve to make interaction more efficient, by exploiting speakers’ shared knowledge and experience. They can only work because of a simple assumption that humans share in conversation, namely that they are engaged in a co-operative exercise. We will examine the consequences of this co-operative principle and look more closely at speech acts, in which language is used (as in (4) or (5)) not merely to communicate information but to achieve a particular purpose.
Co-operation generally prospers when participants in an interaction endeavour not to offend each other, i.e. they try to be polite. Later in the chapter, we will consider a model of politeness developed by two linguists, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, and its consequences for our understanding of language in context. But we begin with the work of the philosopher Paul Grice, whose co-operative principle provides a framework for understanding many of the mysteries of conversation.
Grice’s theory of implicature
Much of Grice’s work explores different kinds of meaning, and in particular the difference between what a speaker says and what he/she implicates. What Grice termed implicatures go beyond what is actually said: for example in (5) above, what appears to be a question about a person’s birthplace is interpreted (correctly) by the hearer as meaning ‘close the door’. Implicatures can be inferred from a general principle of conversation, which he set out as follows:
THE CO-OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE
‘Make your 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’.
The principle can be broken down into four maxims of conversation (though Grice suggested that this might not be an exhaustive list):
• 1 The maxim of quality
Try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically:
do not say what you believe to be falsedo not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.• 2 The maxim of quantity
Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
• 3 The maxim of relevance (or relation)
Make your contributions relevant.
• 4 The maxim of manner
Be perspicuous, and specifically:
avoid obscurityavoid ambiguitybe briefbe orderly.
…\[We] need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor are they moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.(Bach 2006: 5)
It is important to understand what the principle and its maxims are and, equally importantly, what they are not. They are not rules, like grammatical rules: it is possible to violate them – sometimes deliberately and ostentatiously so – and our utterance (the term employed to signify a spoken contribution in context) will still be understood. Nor are they social imperatives of the ‘don’t forget to say please and thank you’ kind, though they are a kind of social convention which we unconsciously acquire as we learn to use language.
What the principle and maxims amount to is a very robust set of assumptions that participants make about the conversation in which they are engaged, which are often maintained even in the face of evidence that co-operation has broken down. So even where, for example, a speaker’s contribution to an interaction appears irrelevant, a hearer will generally assume that it was intended as relevant, and strive to find an interpretation which fits the purposes of the current exchange. Similarly, it hardly needs saying that speakers do not always speak the truth as the maxim of quality requires, but conversation nonetheless proceeds on the assumption that contributions are truthful, unless and until that assumption becomes untenable (see Case study below).
Key idea: The co-operative principle
According to Grice’s co-operative principle, conversation can only proceed while participants assume each other to be co-operating. This assumption is so strong that they will endeavour to interpret each other’s contributions as co-operative, even when superficially they appear not to be.
Case study: Good cop, bad cop
A staple of TV detective dramas is the ‘good cop, bad cop’ interrogation, in which two police officers interview a young, and usually naive, petty crook implicated in a major criminal enterprise. The good cop typically offers to help him avoid jail in return for evidence against the criminal masterminds, while the bad cop reminds him of the predicament in which he finds himself, as in the following dialogue (which unfortunately did not quite make it to The Sweeney in the late 1970s):
Good cop: Well now, Tommy: you’re in a bit of bother…
Tommy: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Good cop: Why don’t you tell me about ‘Mr Big’?
Tommy: Never heard of him.
Good cop: Come, come, Tommy: let’s not play games. You know we’ve got you on CCTV, and we’ve got three witnesses who saw you with him the night of the robbery.
Tommy: Sorry, I wish I could help you, but I don’t know a thing. Honest.
Good cop: This is getting us nowhere, Tommy…
Bad cop: With your previous, you’re looking at six years inside….
Good cop: But play nicely, and we can make all this go away.
Tommy (sweating): Look… I’d like to help…it’s just that… Mr Big…he knows where my mum lives…
In Gricean terms, such dialogues are about maintenance of the co-operation principle. The hapless interviewee attempts to convince his interrogators that he is adhering to the maxims of quantity and quality (‘I don’t know a thing. Honest.’), but the evidence against him makes this pretence unsustainable. The good cop reminds him that dialogue is in his interests, but can only continue if the assumption of co-operation can be maintained (‘This is getting us nowhere’). The bad cop, meanwhile, stresses the negative consequences of it breaking down (‘six years inside…’). Faced with an unpalatable choice, the interviewee may change tack, as here, by suggesting that he would like to co-operate, but has good reasons for not being able to. What is remarkable is that, even in adversarial interactions, all parties strive to maintain at least the illusion that they are co-operating.
Grice’s formulation of the maxims is rather terse, so it is worth looking at how each works in practice. The quality maxim, as we saw above, does not make the ridiculous claim that human beings do not lie: it simply means that conversation can only proceed if participants can work on the assumption that both parties are telling the truth, or at least, can sustain a convincing pretence that they are doing so. The second sub-maxim means that both parties need to be able to assume that their interlocutor is not saying anything which he/she has does not have good reason to believe is true, but conversation may break down because interlocutors disagree on what constitutes ‘adequate evidence’. For this reason, speakers may choose to use hedges, to warn their interlocutors that they do not believe themselves fully able to satisfy the requirements of the quality (or of another) maxim.
In the exchange below, for example, David’s use of the common maxim hedge ‘Well’ sends an advance signal to John that he is not sure he can properly answer John’s question, but that he has some evidence that offers a partial answer:
John: Has Fiona recovered from her illness?
David: Well, I saw her at a party on Saturday.
The maxim of quantity amounts to a requirement that we provide just enough information (and no more) for the purposes of the talk exchange in which we are involved. So, a reply to question ‘What did you do yesterday?’ which begins:
‘I got up at 7.52 and 30 seconds and got out of bed to go into the bathroom where I had a shower, wearing a shower cap to keep my hair dry and then dried myself off with a large towel with a map of Lanzarote on it and came downstairs at 7.57 and 44 seconds and put some toast in the toaster while putting the kettle on for a cup of tea. I went into the hall to pick up my newspaper and read the sports pages at the breakfast table, and then I put a 1-mm layer of orange marmalade on my toast and drank my coffee with no milk and two sugar cubes in it…’
would generally be excessive, though there are contexts (for example, when making a statement to the police) where some of this detail might be appropriate. The common cry of ‘Too much information!’ uttered when a person has offered excessive, inappropriate or embarrassing detail, is a good illustration of how conversational misjudgements are informally policed, reminding participants to observe the norms of the quantity maxim in a way that others find acceptable.
The meaning of the maxim of relevance (or relation) appears simple and self-explanatory, though of course we do not have a watertight definition of what ‘relevance’ actually means, which perhaps explains why interlocutors will strain to interpret contributions as relevant even when superficially they appear not to be. Speakers may also disagree, or pretend to disagree, on what constitutes ‘relevance’ for the purposes of the current exchange (see Case study overleaf). Conversation will quickly break down when a participant signals his/her inability, or unwillingness, to offer a relevant contribution, as any parent who has tried to prise information from children about what they have done at school today will know.
Finally, the maxim of manner simply requires participants to be as clear as they are able to be. Part of that clarity is being brief (an interlocutor will assume that if ‘John’ and ‘the man from the council who inspects hygiene standards in fast food outlets and is also my grandfather’ are one and the same person, you will choose ‘John’ unless you have good reason for not doing so) and being orderly, i.e. reporting events or actions in the appropriate order. For example, the two sentences below convey exactly the same information, and are grammatically well formed, but the second seems pragmatically odd (indicated conventionally by a preceding question mark), because the assumption is that the actions should take place in the order they are given, even though this is not explicitly stated:
To make chips, peel your potatoes, cut them into long strips and fry them in cooking oil heated to 180°C.
?To make chips, fry your potatoes in oil heated to 180°C, cut them into strips and peel them.
The sub-maxim ‘Be orderly’ offers a good illustration of the difference between entailments, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, are aspects of meaning which are true in all possible worlds, and implicatures, which are a context-dependent overlay on semantic meaning. The semantics of both the above sentences are the same, but the order of the actions is an implicature that flows from the assumption that the speaker is observing the sub-maxim ‘Be orderly’.
Case study: The pragmatics of political interviews
The next time you hear a politician challenged to ‘answer the question’ in a television interview, you can be fairly sure that he/she is attempting to stretch the notion of ‘relevant’ beyond what the interviewer and audience are likely to find acceptable, by answering a different question to the one posed, and is being dragged back to observance of the maxim of relevance by the interviewer. In fact, the jousting match between a skilled interviewer and an experienced politician often amounts to an attempt by the former to force compliance with Grice’s maxims on the latter.
While the politician may have a strong interest in violating the maxims (for example by being obscure or ambiguous about unpopular policies), he/she is also aware of the strong countervailing pressure to observe them, and therefore often attempts to convince the audience of his/her intention to do so. When a politician prefaces remarks with ‘Let me be clear’, for example, it’s usually a sign that the maxim of manner is about to be violated. Many of the interviewer’s stock responses, on the other hand, can be interpreted as demanding of the interviewee that the maxims be observed:
‘But, Prime Minister, all the available evidence suggests this policy isn’t working…’ (quality)
‘Your government does not seem to want to talk about unemployment’ (quantity)
‘I must press you to address the point the listener has made’ (relevance)
‘You haven’t been clear, have you, Prime Minister, about who will actually benefit from this proposal?’ (manner)
Politicians’ words are a matter of public record and are regularly tested for their honesty and consistency. As this famous exchange between Jeremy Paxman and ex-Home Secretary Michael Howard demonstrates, a politician would therefore rather violate manner by being obscure than run the risk of openly violating quality by being untruthful. Paxman actually asked the same question no fewer than 14 times before coining the word ‘obfuscommunication’, which we might define as ‘persistent and deliberate failure to observe the quantity maxim’.
Paxman: Did you threaten Derek Lewis?
Howard: I was not entitled to instruct Derek Lewis and I did not instruct him. And –
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Howard: The truth of the matter is that Mr Marriott was not suspended. I did not –
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Howard: I did not overrule Derek Lewis.
Paxman: Did you threaten to overrule him?
Howard: I took advice.
Paxman: You’re a master of obfuscommunication, Mr Howard.
A similar gap between entailment and implicature is evident in the logical and real-world use of numbers. Few people, for example, would argue with the statement ‘If both teams score two goals, the result is a draw’. Yet, when presented with the (unlikely) scoreline ‘West Ham United 6 Barcelona 2’, all English speakers agree that this is not a drawn game on the above definition, even though both teams have, quite clearly, scored two goals (one of them with four more to spare). The entailment of ‘two’ (‘at least two’) differs from the implicature (‘two and only two’) which flows from observance of the quantity maxim: we assume that, if the speaker had meant ‘at least two’, he/she would have said so and that in normal circumstances ‘two’ means ‘two and only two’.
An important property of implicatures is that, unlike entailments, they are defeasible, i.e. they can be cancelled:
Q: Did you give £50 to Children in Need?
A: Yes, in fact I gave £100.
?A: Yes, in fact I gave £49.
In the first reply, the implicature (‘£50 exactly’) is overridden by the ‘in fact…’ clause, but the entailment (‘at least £50’) cannot be, so the second reply is pragmatically ill formed. The implicature that events follow the sequence in which they are uttered can be cancelled in a similar way:
I washed the floor, fed the cat, did the washing-up and watched TV, but not necessarily in that order.
Finally, Barry Blake (2008: 116) gives the example of Mr Brown meeting Mrs Jones for an illicit tryst at a hotel and being asked by the receptionist: ‘Are you married?’. Both reply, truthfully, that they are: the implicature ‘married to each other’ is one which neither party has an interest in cancelling!
Key idea: Defeasible implicatures
Implicatures are context-specific meanings generated by observance (or deliberate flouting) of the four maxims of co-operation. They differ from entailments in that they are defeasible, i.e. they can be cancelled.
Spotlight: Comedy pragmatics
Much of our humour derives from violation or flouting of Grice’s maxims. A celebrated example is the Mrs Merton Show interview with Debbie McGee, in which Mrs Merton (Caroline Aherne) asked: ‘What was it that first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’. By flouting the maxim of quantity (‘Do not make your contribution more informative than required’), she invited the audience to look for an interpretation in which the additional superfluous information (‘the millionaire’) was in fact required for the purposes of the exchange (in this case something along the lines of ‘Did you marry Paul Daniels for his money?’). Since this meaning was an implicature, it could of course have been plausibly denied.
In the scene in Alvin and the Chipmunks where the eponymous heroes first meet their carer Dave, humour arises not from a surfeit of information but from a lack of it, violating the quantity maxim in a different way. The three introduce themselves thus:
Simon: We’re getting off on the wrong foot. Allow us to introduce ourselves. Hello. I’m Simon. The smart one. He’s Alvin…
Alvin: …the awesomest one!
Theodore: And I’m Theodore.
The first two introductions set up the expectation that, for the purposes of this exchange, a name and exceptional personal quality is required. The suggestion here is that Theodore is unable to observe ‘quantity’ here, because he cannot think of an exceptional quality to boast about!
Flouting the maxims
Thus far we have assumed that the co-operative principle and individual maxims are generally observed, with the risk that conversation will break down if they are violated. But the evidence with which we began the chapter suggests this is a gross oversimplification. Interactants frequently and blatantly infringe the maxims without negative consequences for communication, for example in (1) and (2) above, where the responses appear to violate the relevance maxim by bearing no relation to the question posed, or in (3), where the tautologous sentence appears to violate the maxim of quantity by being completely uninformative.
In cases like these, the maxims are not so much infringed as flouted: the speaker does not merely violate the maxim concerned, he/she does so ostentatiously and thereby actively sends a signal to an interlocutor that co-operation is in fact being maintained at a deeper level. Thus in (1) Paul interprets Sarah’s seemingly irrelevant reply as meaning: ‘I’m flouting the maxim of relation by referring to rain rather than washing. What connection about rain and washing do you draw, from our shared real-world experience, which might be construed as an answer to your request?’ and infers the implicature ‘I can’t put the washing out, because it would get even more wet if I did so.’
As listeners, we presume that the speaker is being co-operative (at least insofar as he is trying to make his communicative intention evident) and is speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly, and otherwise appropriately. If an utterance appears not to conform to any of these presumptions, the listener looks for a way of taking it so that it does conform. As speakers, in trying to choose words to make our intention evident, we exploit the fact that our listeners presume these things.(Bach 2006: 6)
Metaphor works in a similar way, as in (2) above:
Sally: Has Sarah revealed her takeover plans?
Lynn: She’s keeping her cards close to her chest.
Lynn’s response is obviously irrelevant, on a literal level, to the question posed, but the co-operation principle is robust enough to induce the hearer to interpret it as relevant by looking for common ground between the two contributions. Sarah’s secret plans are likened to the cards held by a poker player, to be revealed, if at all, only at the moment of maximum advantage.
Finally, tautologous statements like Alan’s reply in (3) ‘Business is business’ (compare ‘Boys will be boys’) advertise their own lack of informativeness so blatantly as to suggest that it must be a deliberate choice on the part of the speaker, which invites the addressee to look for ways in which they might at some level be co-operative. This particular tautology is conventionally interpreted as meaning something like ‘The rules of successful business are unchanging and leave no room for sentiment’, satisfying the quantity maxim obliquely.
Skilled speakers exploit the potential of flouts to achieve a variety of ends. In (6), below, manner (here the sub-maxim ‘Be brief’) is deliberately violated to cast doubt on John’s culinary prowess:
(6) Paul: Did John cook you dinner last night?Mary: He handed over a plate containing items which could be described as food, some of which had been heated in an oven. Some of it was edible.
The answer Mary appears to be groping for is ‘Yes’, but her wordy failure to offer it invites Paul to draw the appropriate conclusion.
The quality maxim is flouted in (7) to question the wisdom of the preceding contribution, while a relevance flout in (8) signals to Paul that Steve is in fact within earshot:
(7) Tony: I fancy England’s chances at the next World Cup.Phil: And I think the Monster Raving Loony Party will win the next election by a landslide (
‘And your suggestion is equally daft’)(8) Paul: Since Steve got elected to the council he’s been a small-minded, irritating little jerk.Amanda (spotting Steve): Did you see that Agatha Christie film on TV last night? (
‘Watch out! He might hear you!’)
Grice has also suggested that some implicatures are conventionalized, applying irrespective of context. The difference between and and but, for example, is that the latter generates an implicature that two items are contrasted:
Jenny was poor but honest. (cf. Jenny was poor and honest.)
Paul’s a nice guy but he votes Republican. (cf. Paul’s a nice guy and he votes Republican.)
The implicature of contrast or incompatibility associated with but may be readable in all contexts, but it remains an implicature rather than an entailment, because it is defeasible, for example by means of a ‘not that…’ clause:
Jenny was poor but honest – not that you can’t be both, obviously!
Paul’s a nice guy but he votes Republican – not that I have anything against Republicans, of course. (In fact, some of my best friends are Republicans…)
Key idea: Maxim flouts
Maxim flouts are deliberate and ostentatious violations of the maxims of co-operation, which signal to an addressee that co-operation is being maintained in an indirect way, and generate particular implicatures.
Speech acts
In most of the sentences we have looked at so far, language has been used to make statements or to comment upon the world in some way. But we use language for a range of other purposes too, for example to get people to do things (‘Get out of my sight!’; ‘Open fire!’). Some utterances, in fact, seem to constitute actions in themselves:
I bet you £10 that Australia beat England.
I expect you to be home by 10 pm.
I dare you to walk out without paying.
I declare you husband and wife.
I order you to pay a fine of £5,000.
The properties and behaviour of such sentences were first explored in J. L. Austin’s beguilingly titled book How to do Things with Words, first published in 1962, which starts by pointing out that there is a difference between verbs of stating, or constatives, and performative verbs, like those underlined above, by which a speech act is performed. Performatives share a number of properties: they are receptive, for example, to use of the simple present tense with present meaning, which is uncommon in English in declarative sentences (compare ‘I order you to leave this minute’ with ‘?I read a book this minute’); many of them take ‘to + infinitive’ or ‘for + Vb + ing’ complements (‘I order/warn/urge/dare you to X’, ‘I apologize/excuse you/pardon you for Xing’) and, perhaps most significantly of all, they all pass the ‘hereby’ test: the adverb ‘hereby’ can be placed before a performative verb but not a constative one (‘I hereby declare you husband and wife’ cf. ‘?I hereby turn the television on’).
As Austin’s book continues, however, the distinction between performative and non-performative utterances is gradually undermined, so that all utterances become viewed as speech acts in some sense. In Austin’s terms, all utterances have a particular ‘force’. ‘Force’, however, is not something that can be analysed in terms of truth-conditions. As Levinson (1983: 245) points out, the same propositional content (that the interlocutor is to go home, in the examples below) can be associated with a range of very different speech acts:
I predict that you will go home.
Go home!
Are you going to go home?
I advise you to go home.
<Image src="OPS/images/common7.jpg" alt="image" />
Once we realize that what we have to study is not the sentence, but the issuing of an utterance in a speech-situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act. Moreover, comparing stating to what we have said about the illocutionary act, it is an act to which, just as much as to other illocutionary acts, it is essential to ‘secure uptake’: the doubt about whether I stated something if it was not heard or understood is just the same as the doubt about whether I warned sotto voce or protested if someone did not take it as a protest, \&c. And statements do ‘take effect’ just as much as ‘namings’, say: if I have stated something, then that commits me to other statements: other statements made by me will be in order or out of order.(Austin 1962: 139)
Austin suggests that there are three kinds of force, associated with the nature of the speech act performed (see Levinson 1983: 236):
locutionary act – uttering a sentence with a determinate sense and reference
illocutionary act – uttering a sentence which performs an action (advising, promising, declaring, etc.) by virtue of the conventional force associated with it
perlocutionary act – the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of the utterance. (Note that the perlocution performed may well not be the one speaker intended or wished.)
The distinction between the second and third type may be difficult to draw in practice. Austin offers the following concrete example:
Shoot her!
Here, he suggests, the utterance may have the illocutionary force of ordering, urging or advising the addressee to shoot someone, but the perlocutionary force of persuading, forcing or frightening the addressee into shooting her (and also of frightening the intended victim). The perlocutionary force is the most obviously context-dependent aspect of the speech act, the illocutionary force being often conventionalized within the sentence type. In the above example, the illocutionary force of ordering is conventionally associated with a particular sentence type (imperative), but direct imperatives are often avoided in practice, for reasons we explore below, in favour of indirect speech acts. For example, instead of saying ‘Shut the door!’ one might use an interrogative form (‘Can/will you shut the door?’), or even a superficially declarative statement (‘Brr! It’s cold in here!’) in the hope that the interlocutor will take the hint.
Key idea: Using performatives
Verbs such as promise, declare, bet, swear, order, which constitute an action by virtue of being uttered, are called performatives. To be used appropriately, their relevant felicity conditions must be met, otherwise a misfire or an abuse will result.
Austin argues that, in the case of performative sentences, we need to look for the set of appropriate conditions that must be met for them to be uttered ‘felicitously’, i.e. for the sentence to work in context. These have become known as felicity conditions, and they fall into three main categories (see Levinson 1993: 229; after Austin 1962: 14–15):
A.
(i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect.(ii) The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in the procedure.
B. The procedure must be executed
(i) correctly and(ii) completely.
C. Often
(i) the persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, as specified in the procedure, and(ii) if consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant parties must so do.
Austin distinguishes two types of violation of these conditions: violations of A or B result in what he calls misfires – the intended action simply fails to be realized: for example, a policeman cannot say ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder’ if no suspect is present; nor (generally speaking) can a person who is not legally empowered to make an arrest utter these words felicitously.
It is important, too, that the addressee play his/her part: in Austin’s terminology there must be uptake where appropriate. For a marriage to take place, for example, to meet the two conditions under B the celebrant must offer the conventionally prescribed words for a church, civil or other ceremony and the partners must, each in turn, show that they accept what is being asked of them (usually by saying ‘I will’ or ‘I do’).
Violations of the C conditions are what Austin terms abuses, and are less obvious because the speech act itself appears to have been performed felicitously. However, if (for example) an apology or forgiveness offered is insincere, or if one party at a wedding ceremony says ‘I will’ without meaning it, the speech act has not been properly performed and the consequences are likely to come to light later on.
Politeness theory
We have seen how a very robust assumption of co-operation in conversation accounts for some important aspects of meaning in context. The underlying principle is that human beings, as co-operative creatures, have more to gain from working together than being in conflict with one another, and that talk is generally a manifestation of co-operation which is mutually beneficial (hence Churchill’s famous dictum that: ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war’). One might consider co-operation in conversation as one manifestation of politeness, a topic explored by Brown and Levinson (1987) in an important work of the same name. The need to be polite, they argue, is an important driver of the way we express ourselves in most circumstances, from the use of indirect speech acts we alluded to above, to the insertion of conversational fillers such as ‘I’m sorry…’ or ‘Not being funny, but…’
Central to Brown and Levinson’s notion of politeness is the concept of face, of which they distinguish a negative and a positive kind. Negative face refers simply to an individual’s desire to be free from imposition, while positive face refers to one’s need to be viewed positively by one’s peers and to be accepted as part of a group. In certain circumstances, speech acts can be seen as Face-threatening acts (FTAs), the force of which speakers attempt in normal circumstances to minimize. One of the felicity conditions for using an imperative or an overt performative verb such as command or order, for example, is that the speaker be in a position of power or authority over the addressee, and thereby have the authority to require compliance from his/her. But the act of saying ‘Get me a cup of coffee!’ or ‘I order you to get me a cup of coffee’, threatens the addressee’s face by underlining the difference in status and imposition upon him/her. The speaker may therefore wish to attenuate this status difference and thereby protect the latter’s face, often at the expense of his/her own, by using an indirect speech act, e.g. ‘Would you mind getting me a cup of coffee?’ or ‘May I ask you to get me a cup of coffee?’ Although lacking the force of an order, a request similarly threatens the addressee’s negative face: the addressee in turn will strive to avoid the dispreferred option of refusal, which would constitute a threat to the speaker’s positive face (now you know why so many people complain ‘I just couldn’t say “no”!’).
In some languages, the FTA implicit in a request is attenuated by the use of a conditional verb form:
Could you lend me a fiver?
Would you do me a favour?
Would you do me the honour of being my wife?
Formally what is happening here is that the speaker is saying ‘I’m not actually asking you to lend me a fiver/do me a favour/marry me, because that would impose on you (i.e. threaten your negative face), but if I were to ask you, would you regard this imposition as excessive?’, but such constructions have become so conventionalized as to be immediately recognized for what they are: polite request formulae. Where a request or invitation has to be refused, addressees generally use set openings to mitigate the FTA, suggesting (whether truthfully or not) that they would have liked to accept, but that circumstances prevent them from doing so, e.g. ‘I’m sorry, but…’; ‘I’m afraid….’; ‘Regrettably…’. Conditional requests like these are, in effect, fossilized versions of the pre-requests speakers use when the request is of a sensitive nature and the potential threat to both parties’ face is significant (see Case study below).
Case study: Safety first: pre- (and pre-pre-)requests
In some cases, particularly where the nature of a request is sensitive, the threat to the face of the addressee, and potentially also that of the speaker in the event of a refusal, is perceived to be significant enough for the speaker to wish to avoid making the request directly. In such circumstances pre-sequences are common, allowing all parties to save face.
The question ‘Are you doing anything on Saturday night?’, for example, looks like a simple request for information, but may in practice mean ‘I’m working my way up to asking you out on a date’. It therefore functions as a pre-request, protecting both parties’ face by enabling them if needs be to maintain that no actual invitation was ever made: the response ‘Yes, I’m busy with my drama rehearsal’, for example, directly answers the question posed and allows the (positive) face-threatening ‘I don’t actually want to go out with you’ to be avoided.
But in the same way as ‘polite’ requests using conditional structures have become conventionalized, so pre-requests like the one above are in some cases equally transparent, and addressees will respond to them as if they were in fact direct requests (‘I’m sorry, but I’m very busy’). It is not uncommon, therefore, for the conversationally wary to resort to pre-pre-requests for additional face protection:
Steve: I guess you must get bored of an evening, now that your boyfriend’s been sent to prison? (pre-pre-request)
Paula: Well, yes, now you mention it the evenings do drag on a bit.
Steve: Are you doing anything this evening? (pre-request)
Paula: I don’t think so…
Steve: Would you like to come to the cinema with me? (request)
Pre-sequences like these illustrate the complexity of conversation structure, a focus of scholarly attention in the branch of linguistic study known as conversational analysis, founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and associated notably with the sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.
Key idea: Positive and negative face
Participants in an interaction will generally try to protect their own and their interlocutor’s face where possible. Positive face refers to an individual’s desire to be viewed positively, while negative face is the desire to be free from imposition. Strategies to avoid or minimize face-threatening acts (FTAs) include recourse to indirect speech acts and pre-sequences.
Fact-check
[1](answers.mdx#rfn10-1) What is the co-operative principle?
A prescription for successful conversation
A robust assumption of co-operation on the part of participants in an interaction
A hypothesis that human beings generally tell the truth in one-to-one conversation
A belief among conversationalists that their interlocutors are telling the truth, even though they themselves might not be
[2](answers.mdx#rfn10-2) What would politicians generally prefer to do in an interview?
Violate the quantity rather than the quality maxim
Violate the quality rather than the relevance maxim
Not violate the maxim of manner
Lie through their teeth
[3](answers.mdx#rfn10-3) ‘The Lone Ranger rode off into the sunset, got on his horse and put on his boots’ is probably a violation of which maxim?
Quality
Quantity
Relevance
Manner
[4](answers.mdx#rfn10-4) What are maxim flouts?
Accidental violations of Grice’s maxims
Non-co-operative violations of Grice’s maxims
Ostentatious violations of Grice’s maxims, signalling co-operation of an indirect kind
Tactics used by politicians in particular to avoid answering questions
[5](answers.mdx#rfn10-5) What characterizes performative verbs?
They realize speech acts
They are receptive to use of the present simple in English
They can be used with ‘hereby’
All of the above
[6](answers.mdx#rfn10-6) When do abuses of performatives occur?
When they are not uttered sincerely
When they are performed by the wrong person
When the procedure is executed incorrectly
When there is no uptake from the addressee
[7](answers.mdx#rfn10-7) A: Mary has two children – in fact, three. B: Mary has two children – in fact, one. Why does B sound less natural than A?
A cancels an entailment, while B cancels an implicature
B violates the maxim of relevance
B violates the maxim of quality
A cancels an implicature, while B cancels an entailment
[8](answers.mdx#rfn10-8) What can metaphors be viewed as?
A kind of indirect speech act
Maxim violations
Relevance maxim flouts
Performatives
[9](answers.mdx#rfn10-9) Why are maxim hedges used?
To signal non-cooperation
To signal the speaker’s perceived inability to satisfy one or more of the maxims
To confuse the addressee
To minimize an FTA
[10](answers.mdx#rfn10-10) Why are indirect speech acts used in making requests?
To minimize the threat to an addressee’s positive face
To minimize the threat to an addressee’s negative face
Because the conditional form is seen to be more ‘polite’
To minimize the threat to the speaker’s positive face
Dig deeper
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford University Press, 1962)
S. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapters 1, 3 & 5
J. Saeed, Semantics (3rd edition, Blackwell, 2009), Chapters 7 & 8
G. Yule, Pragmatics (Oxford University Press, 1996), Chapters 1, 4, 5 & 6
Online sources
Wikipedia ‘The co-operative principle’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative\_principle
K. Bach (2006) ‘The top 10 misconceptions about implicature’, available at: