The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics

Foundations and Interfaces

Dale A. Koike, J. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer, Dale A. Koike, J. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138316461
• eBook ISBN: 9780429849343
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics is the first volume to offer a comprehensive overview of advances in Spanish Pragmatics, addressing different types of interaction and the variables, both social and linguistic, that can affect them.

Written by a diverse set of experts in the field, the handbook unifies two major approaches to the study of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. Thirty-three chapters cover in detail both pragmatic foundations (e.g. speech act theory, implicature and relevance, deixis) and interfaces with other concepts, including:

• Discourse

• Variation; Culture and interculture

• (Im)politeness; humor

• Learning contexts and teaching

• Technology

This is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers of Spanish language and linguistics.

Part I
Foundations of pragmatics

1
Implicature and Spanish speakers’ meaning

Sarah E. Blackwell

1 Introduction

An ‘implicature’ is any meaning a speaker can convey beyond the meaning of what is explicitly said. This meaning can be more than, or different from, the conventional, semantic meaning of the words uttered, as illustrated by Levinson’s classic example (1989, p. 89):

• (1)
  A: ¿Puede decirme la hora?

  ‘Can you tell me the time?’
  B: Bueno, el lechero ya ha pasado.

  ‘Well, the milkman has come.’

Assuming B’s response is relevant, he conveys (i.e., ‘implicates’) not knowing the precise time, but that it is approximately the time the milkman comes. Bach (2012) notes that the distinction between the meaning of the words used and what a speaker means in uttering them “is perhaps the distinction most basic to pragmatics” (p. 47). The philosopher H. Paul Grice, who coined the term implicature, proposed his theory of conversational implicature (1975, 1989) to explain how speakers can mean more than what they explicitly state.

In the following section, key distinctions underlying Grice’s theory are outlined. Subsequently, I describe the theory, the defining features and types of conversational implicature, and how conversational implicatures can arise. Next, I discuss the class of implicated meaning Grice called ‘conventional implicature’ and debates it spurred, before identifying some criticisms and misconceptions about Grice’s model. I then outline Horn’s (1984) and Levinson’s (2000) neo-Gricean theories, which constitute revisions of Grice’s original proposal. Afterward, I review various studies on Spanish, which apply classical or revised Gricean frameworks and heuristics, and then discuss some methodological issues associated with Gricean pragmatics. Finally, I offer suggestions for future research utilizing constructs from Gricean and neo-Gricean models.

2 Review of existing research

2.1 Saying, meaning, and implicating

Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is rooted in his distinction between saying, meaning, and implicating. Grice (1975) associated what someone has ‘said’ with the conventional meaning of the words uttered, and any enriched or inferred content that was not part of the propositional (semantic) content of an utterance could not be, according to Grice, part of what was said.

Grice (1957) also distinguished between ‘natural meaning,’ or meaning-_N, and ‘non-natural meaning,’ or meaning-_NN. Meaning-_N emphasizes the relationship between observable elements and what they signify, as illustrated by Grice’s classic example in (2) (1957, p. 377, my Spanish translation):

• (2) Esos granos significan (significaban) sarampión.
  ‘Those spots mean (meant) measles.’

By contrast, meaning-_NN refers to one’s intentional communication expressed via an utterance. Thus, if a speaker utters

• (3) Huele a humo.
  ‘It smells like smoke.’

she might intend to communicate (i.e., ‘mean-_NN’) any number of things, from conveying the olfactory sensing of smoke, to suggesting checking the oven. In distinguishing this type of meaning, Grice elucidated the fact that speakers’ intentional meanings depend not only on the words used, but also on contextual information and the assumption that we generally aim to make our intentions recognized by our addressees. To capture these ideas, Grice (1975, 1989) proposed a system of conversational logic for the effective, efficient, and rational use of language in conversational interactions known as the theory of conversational implicature.

2.2 Grice’s theory of conversational implicature

Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is based on the recognition that general principles of language use guide speakers in everyday conversation. The originality of his theory rests on his account of how conversational implicatures arise, their features, and the role of his overarching Cooperative Principle (1975, p. 45):

• (4) 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 Cooperative Principle (henceforward, the CP) captures the idea that speakers generally try to make their utterances appropriate to the conversational context, since otherwise, successful conversations would be impossible. In other words, felicitous conversations rely on the assumption that interlocutors intend to be cooperative and, according to Grice, speakers implicate messages by exploiting this assumption. He instantiates the CP via four categories of conversational maxims, three of which have sub-maxims (1975, pp. 45–46):

• (5) Quantity:
  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.
  Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
  1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
  2. Do not say that for which you lack evidence.
  Relation: Be relevant.
  Manner: Be perspicuous.
  1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
  2. Avoid ambiguity.
  3. Be brief.
  4. Be orderly.

Grice’s maxims are principles speakers generally follow and expect others to follow, which together, spell out the CP. The Quantity sub-maxims account for our assumption that speakers should be no more or less informative than necessary. The Quality sub-maxims capture our expectation that speakers will not make specious or unfounded statements, while Relation (also called the ‘Relevance maxim’) captures the assumption that speakers will contribute relevantly to conversations, just as we would offer ibuprofen for a headache and not a band-aid. Finally, the Manner maxim does not concern how much information is conveyed, but rather how speakers express intended meanings via more usual, simpler, clearer, and oftentimes shorter expressions (e.g., casa ‘house’), versus less usual, prolix or obscure, and thus marked expressions (e.g., residencia ‘residence’). Finally, the Manner sub-maxim of ‘be orderly’ captures our tendency to relate events in chronological order, and explains differences in meaning between (6a) and (6b), which express the same truth-conditional meaning (i.e., if (a) is true, (b) is true, and vice versa) (from Reyes, 1994, p. 66):

• (6)
  • Pepa se casó y tuvo dos hijos.
    ‘Pepa got married and had two children.’
  • Pepa tuvo dos hijos y se casó.
    ‘Pepa had two children and got married.’

In uttering (6a) or (6b), one conversationally implicates that the events described happened in the order reported. Therefore, saying (6b) implicates that Pepa’s children are, in Reyes’s words, “extramatrimoniales” ‘illegitimate’ (1994, p. 66). This distinction in meaning is one that truth-conditional semantics could not account for, but which speakers can cancel by adding a phrase like pero no en ese orden ‘but not in that order,’ cancelability being one defining characteristic of conversational implicatures. In other contexts, however, no such implicature arises from using y ‘and’ (e.g., Ayer comí un montón y no hice ejercicio ‘Yesterday I ate a lot and didn’t exercise’), or a cause-consequence interpretation could be generated (Cogí la gripe y no pude ir ‘I caught the flu and couldn’t go’). Grice maintained that such inferable meanings were not part of ‘what was said’ but rather what was ‘conversationally implicated.’ The following describes the features and types of conversational implicature comprising Grice’s model.

2.3 Features and types of conversational implicature

Unlike other types of implicational meaning (e.g., presuppositions, semantic entailments), conversational implicatures are derived from Grice’s CP and maxims. Additionally, they do not contribute to the truth conditions of the utterances that produced them. Thus, (6a) and (6b) share the same truth conditions but generate different implicatures. Conversational implicatures are also nonconventional meanings. For instance, my use of un millón (‘a million’) in (7) conversationally implicates muchísimo ‘a lot,’ instead of, literally, 1,000,000:

• (7) Tengo un millón de cosas que hacer hoy.
  ‘I have a million things to do today.’

Conversational implicatures are calculable based on the utterance, the maxims, and contextual knowledge. Furthermore, they are cancelable or defeasible by adding a phrase that nullifies the implicature in certain linguistic or non-linguistic contexts. Cancelability characterizes the two types of conversational implicature identified by Grice (1975): ‘particularized conversational implicatures’ (PCIs) and ‘generalized conversational implicatures’ (GCIs). PCIs depend on the context for their generation, while GCIs arise regardless of the context, as (8) illustrates (+> indicates ‘implicates’):

• (8)
  • Este café está templado.
    ‘This coffee is lukewarm.’
  • PCI: +> ¿Puedes calentarme el café?
    ‘Can you heat up my coffee?’
  • PCI: +> ¿Me trae un café más caliente?
    ‘Will you bring me some hotter coffee?’
  • PCI: +>¿Tiro este café y hago más?
    ‘Should I throw this coffee out and make more?’
  • GCI: +> Este café no está caliente.
    ‘This coffee is not hot.’

The PCIs (8b–d) generated by (8a) depend on the conversational context (e.g., at home, in a restaurant, in the office, and participants’ shared background knowledge); however, following Gricean theory, the same GCI (8e) arises regardless of context due to the speaker’s use of templado ‘warm/lukewarm.’¹ Yet, each implicature can be canceled. For instance, after saying (8a), one could add pero me lo tomo igual ‘but I’ll drink it anyway,’ canceling the potential particularized implicatures in (8b–d); and, one could say, having sipped the coffee, de hecho está bastante caliente ‘actually it’s quite hot’ to nullify the GCI in (8e). The implicature no está caliente ‘it’s not hot’ arising from saying the coffee is templado ‘warm/lukewarm’ is a type of GCI known as a ‘scalar generalized Quantity implicature.’

Scalar GCIs are based on Grice’s Quantity 1 maxim and arise from sets of linguistic alternates of the same grammatical category, which can be ordered by degree of informativeness or semantic strength (e.g., <excelente, bueno>, <‘excellent, good’>). By asserting a stronger item to the left on the scale, the weaker item is entailed. However, using a weaker expression in the set implicates the negation of any stronger members to its left. Thus, Es un buen alumno ‘He’s a good student’ generates the GCI No es un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics: Foundations and interfaces
• PART I Foundations of pragmatics
• PART II Interfaces of Spanish pragmatics
• PART III Pragmatics and discourse
• PART IV Pragmatic variation; culture and interculture
• PART V (Im)politeness in interaction; humor
• PART VI Pragmatics learning contexts and teaching
• PART VII Pragmatics, technology, and research methods
• Index