Cooperative Principle Scopes of Pragmatics

Upon hearing Jill’s response, Jake has to assume that Jill is cooperating and not totally unaware of the maxim of quantity. Jill expects Jake to understand that by not mentioning ‘the milk’, he will acknowledge that she only bought ‘the ice cream’. In this case, Jill has communicated her meaning via generalized conversational implicature. b Particularized Conversational Implicature This implicature requires the hearer to have special knowledge of a context in order to interpret the messages Yule, 1996: 42. This happens because most of the time conversation takes place in very specific contexts in which locally recognized inferences are assumed. For example: Jake: Hey, will you come to the party tonight? Matt: Sorry, I have to study. In this case, it seems that Matt’s response does not appear to be relevant with the topic. Thus, Jake has to use some special knowledge to make Matt’s response relevant so that he can get the additional meaning conveyed by Matt. If Jake recognizes what Matt said, he will understand that Matt will not be able to join the party because Matt has to study. With this regard, particularized conversational implicatures are usually just called implicatures since they are the most common implicatures used by the interlocutors.

d. Presupposition

According to Griffiths 2006: 143, people use the shared background assumptions about what the interlocutor assumes in interpreting utterances. These shared background belief are described as presuppositions. It is obvious that presuppositions are a part of a common ground between the interlocutors and they are essential to the construction of connected discourse. Shared background beliefs make it easier for the hearer to arrive at the message communicated by the speaker. In line with Griffith, Givon 1979 in Brown and Yule 1983: 29 defines presupposition in terms of assumptions the speaker makes about what the hearer is likely to accept without challenge. Presuppositions are not the same as entailment; something that logically follows from what is asserted in the utterances Yule, 1996: 25. It is the speakers who own presuppositions, not the sentences. Furthermore, Yule 1996: 27 demonstrates the six categories of presuppositions. They are existential presuppositions, factive presuppositions, non-factive presuppositions, lexical presuppositions, structural presuppositions, and counter-factual presuppositions. 1 Existensial Presuppositions These presuppositions deal with the existence of an entity. They can be in the forms of possessive constructions and any definite noun phrase. For example, the word ‘the Queen of England’ indicates that the queen does exist in real life. 2 Factive Presuppositions Factive presuppositions are related to the fact of an entity. These presuppositions can be identified by the verbs ‘know’, ‘realize’, ‘regret’, as well as phrases involving ‘be’ with ‘aware’, ‘odd’ and ‘glad’. 3 Non-Factive Presuppositions Non-factive presuppositions are assumed that the information provided is not true. These are often associated with certain words like ‘dream’, ‘imagine’, and ‘pretend’. 4 Lexical Presuppositions These types of presuppositions use particular expressions to presuppose another non-asserted message. When one says that someone managed to do something, the asserted meaning is that the person succeeds in doing something. The word manage here is asserting ‘succeeded’ and presupposing ‘tried’. The words ‘stop’,‘start’ and ‘again’ also have lexical presuppositions. 5 Structural Presuppositions Structural presuppositions deal with certain sentence structures. For example, the wh-question construction in English presupposes that the information after the wh-form is already known to be the case as in “When did he leave?” That utterance can be interpreted that the information presented is true that he already left. 6 Counter–Factual Presuppositions These presuppositions mean that what is presupposed is in contrast with the facts stated. A conditional structure indicates the counter-factual presupposition. For example, the sentence ‘If it didn’t rain, I would have gone to your house’ is conventionally interpreted that the information stated is not true at the time of the utterance.

3. Speech Acts

a. The Definition of Speech Acts

People do not merely create a set of grammatically correct utterances when they speak but they also perform some functions via those utterances. This is the basic idea of speech acts in which people use language to perform actions. As defined by Yule 1966: 47, speech act is an action performed via language. Through speech acts, people can perform a single utterance with more than one act. People can perform requests, commands, apologies, promises and so on. Similar to Yule’s definition, Aitchison 2003: 106 defines speech acts as a sequence of words that behave somewhat like actions. By performing speech acts, the speaker is often trying to achieve some effect with those words; an effect which might in some cases have been accomplished by an alternative action. For example: It is so hot in here. The utterance above can be regarded as a request to turn on the fan or air conditioner. If the hearer recognizes the speaker’s intention, he or she will definitely turn on the fan or the air conditioner. The utterance is obviously influenced by the context or the situation where the interaction takes place. This circumstance is called speech event Yule, 1996: 47. This is the nature of speech event in which it will determine the interpretation of an utterance as performing a particular speech act.