National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
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- Discourse Deixis
| 3.2.3 Implicature An implicature is something meant, implied, or suggested as distinct from what is said. Implicatures can be part of sentence meaning or dependent on conversational context. The term “implicature,” was coined by Paul Grice, one of the earliest scholars of Pragmatics. An implicature is anything that is inferred from an utterance, but is not necessarily a condition for the truth of the utterance. This is where implicature differs from entailment. For an entailment, what is inferred must be a condition for the truth of what is uttered. But in implicature, the truth of a statement only suggests that of the other and does not necessarily require it. Let us look at an utterance, such as this 4.3: Have you got some cash on you The conversational implicature is not found in the plain message before us. Rather, the speaker possibly implies that he would want the addressee to lend him/her some money because he/she does not have enough at the time of uttering the statement. Implicatures are arrived at by looking at the following • the usual linguistic meaning of what is said • the shared or general knowledge • the assumption that the speaker is obeying what Grice calls the cooperative principle. We shall look at what we mean by the cooperative principles in units that follow. 3.2.4 Deixis Deixis simply means the use of reference items in utterances. Such reference items depend greatly on the context of the utterance (the extralinguistic context. Words that are considered deictic include I, you, nowhere, that, there, etc. There are different kinds of deixis: Discourse Deixis: A discourse deictic refers to a portion of the discourse relative to the speaker’s current location in the discourse. Example 3.3 I hope you enjoyed that story. 14.5. The vocal cord vibrates when some vowels are pronounced. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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