Lecture 2: Communicativeness, relevance discourse types

Lecture 2: Communicativeness,
relevance & discourse types

1. What is
“communicativeness”?
2. Relevance.
3. Discourse types: the
notion of register.

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1. “Communicativeness”
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Consider the following:
“When I made a mistake, I admit it. Some people
may disagree, but I think it’s the American way” (G.
Bush sr, 1992).
After 224 years, the revolution continues. We remain
a new nation. And as long as our dreams outweigh
our memories, America will be forever young. That is
our destiny. And this is our moment.
CNN’s headline in 2002 “The unfinished war”.

1. “Communicativeness”
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It communicates propositional and pragmatic
meanings. The big C will involve both the
representation/propositional content and pragmatic
meanings.
What is representation/prop content? Consider:
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I made a mistake.
A mistake was made.

What you see is the process, the participants, and
their relations and the roles assigned to each of the
arguments.


1. “Communicativeness” Pragmatic
meaning
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Pragmatics is the study of language use. Charles
Morris (1938) has this to say about syntax,
semantics and pragmatics:
Syntactical rules determine the sign relations
between sign vehicles; semantical rules correlate
sign vehicles with other objects; pragmatical rules
state the conditions in the interpreters under which
the sign vehicles is a sign. Any rule when actually in
use operates as a type of behavior, and in this sense
there is a pragmatical component in all rules.


 Grice’s

pragmatics is concerned with
implicature and the cooperative principle
 Austin’s pragmatics is concerned with speech
acts
 I don’t say read my lips, but I say read my
plan. (Clinton to Bush, 1992)

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1. “Communicativeness” Pragmatic

meaning
 Basically,

pragmatics is about implicatures
(as opposed to explicatures),
presuppositions, speech acts. Consider:
 1. The grass needs cutting.
 2 I regretted kissing her.

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How to interpret implicatures
What happens when these rules are
flouted?
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Grice's explanation: 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.
The Maxims
Quantity

Make your contribution as informative as is required for the
current purposes of the exchange - the ‘maxim of strength’ in
the text - (and not more informative than is required).


How to interpret implicatures
 Quality

Try to make your contribution one that is
true, specifically:
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(i) do not say what you believe to be false
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(ii) do not say that for which you lack
adequate evidence (the ‘maxim of evidence’
in the text)
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How to interpret implicatures
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Relation
Be relevant.

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Manner
Be perspicuous, and specifically:
(i) avoid obscurity
(ii) avoid ambiguity
(iii) be brief
(iv) be orderly


The four maxims?
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a. Question: have you ever talked to Ms. Larry that she might be
asked to testify in this lawsuit?
Answer: I’m not sure and let me tell you why I’m not sure. It
seems to me ... I want to be as accurate as I can be. Seems to
me the last time she was there to see Barry before Christmas we
were joking about how you-all, with the help of the Rome
Institute, were going to call every woman I’d ever talked to and ...
ask them that, and so I said you would qualify, or something like
that. I don’t, I don’t think we ever had more of a conversation
than that about it, because when I saw how long the witness list

was, or I heard about it, before I saw, but actually by the time I
saw her name was on it, but I think that after all this happened. I
might have said something like that, so I don’t want to say for
sure I didn’t because I might have said something like that.


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(the cooperative principle)
A: excuse me are you busy
B: no not at all
A: I wonder if I could have a word with you? (Guy Cook, 1989)
Speech acts (what fecility conditions exist for the following acts
to function)
I pronounce you man and wife.
I name this ship JFK
I absolve you from all your sins
I declare the meeting open.
Out

What is relevance
all about?
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Consider the following examples:
People sometimes wonder that they do not eat to live or
do they live to eat. When we are poor or when our lives
are difficult, it seem to be that we must have something
to eat in the meal. That's the way to maintain our lives.
We only care of what we have for the meal and even
don't care if the food is good enough for us or is enriched
in protein, lipids, .... or not.
Is it coherent? What is the problem with this piece?
Lack of relevance. So what is relevance?


Another example
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Economists believe that space research is also

essential to economic growth and keeping our
competitive edge. It is estimated that a quarter of all
long-term economic growth in some key industries in
industrialized countries since the late 1970s is due to
some progress, which in turn, is rooted in space
research. Economist Edwin Mansfield of the
University of Pennsylvania has found that space
research has a “social rate of return” in the form of
lower prices, better products, and higher productivity.


What is relevance?
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Relevance should be defined in terms of “Topic
framework”.
Brown and Yule (1983): Those activated features of
context (directly reflected in the context, and needed
to be called upon to interpret the text) constitute the
contextual framework within which the topic is
constituted – the topic framework. If a contribution
fits in the topic framework, we shall say it is relevant.


Consider
 Just

imagine that Bush. Sr is one who
dislikes broccoli and he was invited to a
party. Some one said to him:
 “That is broccoli again.”
 Oh, this dish is aweful.

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Jane: Do I look strange in my cover
cloth?
Janice: Everybody wears them
around here.

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Jane: Do I look strange in my cover
cloth?
Janice: We are in Africa

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Jane: Do I look strange in my cover cloth?

Janice: We are in a hot continent.

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What is relevance all about?
 D.

Wilson and D. Sperber: intuitively, an input
is relevant to an individual when it connects
with background information he has available
to yield conclusions that matter to him: say
by answering a question he has in mind,
improving his knowledge on a certain topic,
settling a doubt, confirming a suspicion …
 Relevance is not just an all-or-none matter
but a matter of degree
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What is relevance all about?
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In relevance-theoretic terms, an input is relevant to
an individual when its processing in a context of
available assumptions yields a POSITIVE

COGNITIVE EFFECT.
Thus,
other things being equal, the greater the PCE, the
greater the relevance of the input to the individual at
that time;
and the greater the processing effort expended, the
lower the relevance of that input to the individual at
that time.


Register and language use
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User-related variations are called dialects
(geographical, temporal, social, standard, or idiolect)
Use related variations are called register. For
example,
We can speak about the use of language in
education, in science, in the law, medicine, etc.
Register vs. genre. Consider: a business letter, a
report, a short story.

What is register about?
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Formal semantics is concerned with propositional
content which involves predicates, arguments and
roles.
To be effective, discourse has to operates as a
register. “A register may be defined as a variety of
language used in a particular context” (Halliday,
1985); or variation of language according to use.
Halliday, McIntosh & Stevens (1964). Language
variation is related to the user and to use.


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Consider:

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Dear Emily,

Honesty. Not honesty in the abstract, but honesty at home and between
you and me, what is that like? Well, first, it’s shouting, hurting feeling,
one of us stamping out or slamming doors. If this is honesty, who wants
it? I wish I could say I always do, but I’d be lying. What I really want is
for us to love one another, to live in peace and never slam another door,
even in these teenage years of yours. Good luck to me, and probably
bad luck for us…
Love, Dad.

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Three aspects can be distinguished: What the letter is about (field), the
medium used (mode), and the relationship between Emily and her
father (tenor)


Fuzziness of registers
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Mr. President, Mr. Speaker,
Members of the House and the Senate,
Distinguished Americans here as visitors in this Chamber as I might,
It’s nice to have a fresh excuse for giving a long speech. When

presidents speak to the Congress and the nation from this podium,
typically they comment on the changes and the opportunities that face
the United States, but this is not an ordinary time for all the many tasks
that require our attention. I believe tonight one calls on us to unite and
to act, that’s our economy. .. (Bill Clinton, 1993)
Field: Economy
Mode: written to read as if heard, speech-format.
Tenor: basically serious and formal, but mixed with informality to break
ice.


Genres revisited
 Genres

are conventionalized forms of texts
which reflects the functions and goals of the
participants in them (Kress, 1985).
 First note the word “Conventionalized”.

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