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Lecture 2 Lecture 2 Communicativeness, relevance discourse types 1 What is “communicativeness”? 2 Relevance 3 Discourse types the notion of register 1 “Communicativeness” 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.
Lecture 2: Communicativeness, relevance & discourse types What is “communicativeness”? Relevance Discourse types: the notion of register 1 “Communicativeness” 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” “Communicativeness” 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: – – 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 “Communicativeness” Pragmatic meaning 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) “Communicativeness” Pragmatic meaning Basically, pragmatics is about implicatures (as opposed to explicatures), presuppositions, speech acts Consider: The grass needs cutting I regretted kissing her How to interpret implicatures What happens when these rules are flouted? 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: (i) not say what you believe to be false (ii) not say that for which you lack adequate evidence (the ‘maxim of evidence’ in the text) How to interpret implicatures Relation Be relevant Manner Be perspicuous, and specifically: (i) avoid obscurity (ii) avoid ambiguity (iii) be brief (iv) be orderly The four maxims? 10 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 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 15 Jane: Do I look strange in my cover cloth? Janice: Everybody wears them around here 16 Jane: Do I look strange in my cover cloth? Janice: We are in Africa 17 Jane: Do I look strange in my cover cloth? Janice: We are in a hot continent 18 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 19 What is relevance all about? 20 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 21 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? 22 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 23 Consider: 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 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 24 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” 25 Interplay of S, D, G & R situation genre register discourse 26 27 A number of things stand out from this definition A particular text A situation Purposes of the participants Overall, this is discourse A particular situation calls for a particular type of discourse Discourse is represented by both genres and texts A particular text that we see is an instance of a genre, and discourse at the same time One example revisited 28 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 Is it a particular text? Is this particular text a conventionalized form of genre? Is it discourse? Possible to distinguish the following registers and genres 29 Registers Genres Newspaper News, reports, commentaries… Bell-lettres Novels, stories… Official documents Laws, contracts, notes… Scientific Thesis, reports, articles Conversational Talks, interviews, … ... settling a doubt, confirming a suspicion … Relevance is not just an all-or-none matter but a matter of degree 19 What is relevance all about? 20 In relevance- theoretic terms, an input is... situation calls for a particular type of discourse Discourse is represented by both genres and texts A particular text that we see is an instance of a genre, and discourse at the same time One example... protein, lipids, or not Is it coherent? What is the problem with this piece? Lack of relevance So what is relevance? Another example 13 Economists believe that space research is also essential