Pragmatics: Cooperation, Implicature, and Discourse

Pragmatics: Cooperation and Implicature

Hedges: These are expressions speakers use to mark that they may be in danger of not fully adhering to the principles of cooperation.

Conversational Implicature

Conversational implicature refers to the fact of conveying more than what is said. It is speakers who communicate meaning via implicatures, and it is listeners who recognize those communicated meanings via inference.

Types of Conversational Implicatures

• Generalized conversational implicatures: These occur when there is no special knowledge required in the context to calculate the additional conveyed meaning.
• Scalar implicature: This is a quantity implicature based on the use of an informationally weak term in an implicational scale. For example, the words none, some, and all form an implicational scale, in which the use of one form implicates that the use of a stronger form is not possible.
• Particularized conversational implicatures: Since these are by far the most common, they are often just called "implicatures." There is a need for relevant contextual knowledge to work out the conveyed meaning.

Properties and Conventional Implicatures

Properties of conversational implicatures: They can be calculated, suspended, cancelled, and reinforced.

Conventional implicatures: These are not based on the cooperative principle or maxims. They are associated with specific words and result in additional conveyed meaning when those words are used (e.g., but, even, and, etc.).

Discourse Analysis and Coherence

Discourse analysis: When restricted to linguistic issues, it focuses on the record (spoken or written) of the process by which language is used in some context to express intention. The pragmatic perspective tends to focus specifically on aspects of what is unsaid or unwritten (yet communicated) within the discourse being analyzed.

Coherence: What is said or written will make sense in terms of language users' normal experience of things, which will be locally interpreted by each individual tied to the familiar and the expected.

Background Knowledge and Schemata

Background knowledge: Our ability to arrive automatically at interpretations of the unwritten and the unsaid must be based on pre-existing knowledge structures. Related concepts include: schema, frame, and script.

Cultural schemata: It is almost inevitable that our background knowledge structures—our schemata for making sense of the world—will be culturally determined. We develop our cultural schemata in the contexts of our basic experiences.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics

Cross-cultural pragmatics: This field studies the differences in expectations based on cultural schemata. It looks at the ways in which meaning is constructed by speakers from different cultures. Related concepts include: Contrastive pragmatics, Interlanguage pragmatics, and Pragmatic accent.