Metapragmatics of Speech and Its Interactions with Pragmatic Inferences

Abstract

Since it was first introduced to the linguistic pragmatics in the early 1970s, the notion of metapragmatics has been employed in one way or another in the description of some pragmatic phenomena such as indexicality and reported speech. However, virtually no attempts have been made to make use of this independently motivated notion in the discussion of pragmatic implicatures. This study is an attempt to build a new metapragmatic perspective in the study of pragmatic inferences. To this end, we begin with characterizing metapragmatic implicature in comparison with pragmatic implicature, and then investigate the role of metapragmatics in pragmatic reasoning in the neo-Gricean framework. In particular, it is shown that the order of the incrementation of the context, or the projection principle proposed by Levinson (2000) is defective since it does not take into account the presence of metapragmatic implicature. Moreover, it is pointed out that some unexpected failures of implicature on a pragmatic level is due to the presence of metapragmatic implicature involved in the utterance. Thus, this study shows that the interaction of metapragmatics and pragmatics provides a new insight into how implicatures are processed or blocked without positing any extra devices to deal with apparent counterexamples or exceptions to the neo-Gricean pragmatics.