Pragmatic Implicature Research Articles

Overcoming embarrassment in humorous narratives among Pakistani young men: A case study

This case study illustrates the use of humor support strategies by Pakistani young men in their conversation to overcome embarrassment and construct and maintain a humorous discursive frame. The present research draws on video recordings of Pakistani university young men’s conversation, analyzed using Hay’s framework of humor support strategies in relation to the pragmatic implicatures of full support. The findings reveal that laughter, overlaps, contributing more humor, repetition and contradicting self-deprecation are among the most prominent humor support strategies. These strategies not only indicate heightened involvement in the conversation but also serve to release the tension of being embarrassed. The study concludes that humor support is a coping strategy used by Pakistani young men for the release of the pressure of being in an awkward position and to open up space for the construction of humorous discourse.

Pragmatic Implicature and the Articulation of Protest in Femi Osofisan’s Plays

This study was motivated by the need to explore the pragmatic strategies employed by Femi Osofisan in his plays Women of Owu, Morountodun, and Red Is the Freedom Road to depict protest and resistance. The purpose was to analyze the use of pragmatic implicature in these plays, illustrating how implied meanings and contextual cues enhance the expression of socio-political struggles. Utilizing a qualitative research design, the study conducted a content analysis of key speeches within the selected texts, examining the pragmatic implicature of the language used. Three major findings emerged: first, Osofisan’s use of implicature effectively exposed the moral hypocrisy and brutality of oppressors; second, the speeches affirmed the importance of unity and collective action in resistance movements; third, the implicit messages within the dialogues fostered a deeper emotional and ethical engagement with the audience, enhancing the plays' impact. The study concluded that pragmatic implicature is a crucial linguistic tool in Osofisan’s work, which enriches the narrative and powerfully conveys the dynamics of protest and resilience. This study contributed to a better understanding of how language can be used to articulate and inspire resistance within socio-political contexts.

Pragmatic ellipsis and its pragmatic consequences

This article focuses on the chunk ye shi (literally “also be”) in Chinese. Ye is a contrastive focus marker, yet in some ye shi sentences, there is no overt alternative for contrast. Besides, these sentences carry specific pragmatic implicatures. We propose that these sentences do not form a challenge to ye’s status as a contrastive focus marker. Ye has two core properties: (1) it presupposes the existence of alternatives to contrast with the focus it marks; (2) it implicates a sense of counter-expectation when marking the focus. These two properties can account for all uses of ye shi, including their specific implicatures. Moreover, these two properties are assumed to be shared by ye-type contrastive focus markers cross-linguistically. The alternative evoked by ye shi can be elided through a mechanism named by us as pragmatic ellipsis. It differs from the traditional syntactic ellipsis. The way how ye shi obtains the pragmatic ellipsis use reflects a syntax-to-pragmatics way of grammaticalisation, challenging the unidirectionality hypothesis proposed by Hopper and Traugott (1993).

How important is the study of pragmatics to train students' communication skills in facing the challenges of the 21st century?

This research aims to analyze pragmatic aspects in Indonesian language textbooks at junior high school (SMP) level. The research method used is qualitative analysis of the texts in the selected textbooks. Data was collected through observation of speech acts in the text, including language use, communicative context, and pragmatic implicatures contained therein. The results of the analysis show that middle school Indonesian language textbooks generally pay attention to pragmatic aspects in selecting and compiling texts, but there are still several shortcomings in their application. Some of these shortcomings include the use of language that is not appropriate to the communicative context, as well as a lack of emphasis on pragmatic aspects which are important in learning Indonesian. The implication of this research is the importance of greater attention to pragmatic aspects in preparing Indonesian language textbooks, to ensure that the texts presented can provide students with a better understanding of language use in various communicative situations.

An Investigation into the Pragmatic Competence of the Front-Office Trainees of Valombola Vocational Training Centre

This study aimed to analyze the front-office trainees' pragmatic competence at Valombola VTC. The trainees were tested on their ability to formulate and implement strategies for requests, their politeness principles in the speech acts of refusal and apologetic responses, and the factors that impact their pragmatic competence. Fifteen out of thirty (2022) front-office trainees enrolled in the Hospitality Department's program were chosen for the study using a systematic random sampling method. A Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) and a questionnaire were utilized as data collection devices. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted on the data about the students' pragmatic abilities. According to the study's results, the trainees' pragmatic competence was a dismal 30% when it came to the verbal act of refusing. It can be concluded that the trainees at the front desk lacked the pragmatic competence necessary to effectively respond to requests, offer apologies, and employ a refusal approach. Taking into account the outcomes of the three speech acts of asking, apologizing, and refusing, their pragmatic competence was found to be fairly low. This is in line with their preference for using their vernacular language when interacting with others, as shown even in the questionnaire. Furthermore, the results show that trainees employ various aggressive apologetic methods and reaction styles when asked to apologize. Finally, the results show that pragmatic competence is affected by several underlying issues, such as a lack of education, a low level of everyday activities involving English, and the misunderstanding of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the TVET sector as a whole and front-desk trainees in particular were advised to take English for Specific Purposes with an emphasis on pragmatic skills.

Anthropological Symbolic Significance of the Number ‘Three’: A Case of Selected Languages and Cultures in Zambia

This paper problematizes the symbolic significance of the number ‘three’ in Zambian culture and society. The paper aims to highlight the pragmatic implicature of the number ‘three’ conveyed by different cultures and languages in Zambia. The study used a qualitative approach. Data were collected through elicitation by conducting unstructured interviews as well as document analysis. Primary data were collected from 33 respondents who were selected purposively to represent six cultures from five provinces of Zambia. Primary data were justified by secondary sources of information. Phenomenology theoretical locale was chosen to underpin the study. The study reveals that there is a significant value in numerology such as the arithmetic number ‘three’. The number ‘three’ is highly interpreted in both Biblical and cultural contexts and can be used to preserve indigenous knowledge for future generations. Anthropologically, the number ‘three’ is used to teach, admonish, counsel, reconcile, and unify people such as families, churches, and marriages. It can be concluded that the anthropological symbolic significance of the number ‘three’ bears some commonalities in the Zambian culture and the sample languages, and has minor pragmatic variations.

CYBERPRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL HUMOR IN WHATSAPP STICKERS

With the growth of digital environment, social interaction between people, particularly university students, is also affected. Communication has become multimodal, meaning people not only send textual messages but also visuals such as videos, memes, stickers, or emojis. These multimodal communication forms are facilitated by digital communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Line. The use of stickers, specifically in WhatsApp, could suggest certain implicatures which are covered in humorous way. The present research aims to describe how the text and the image of WhatsApp stickers create humorous intention and to find out the implicit functions of digital humour of WhatsApp stickers in daily interaction. The data for this study were collected from university students’ communications in their WA, in which 20 students were requested to submit 5 samples of stickers used in actual interactions. As a result, 100 stickers were gathered as the data. The collected data were analysed qualitatively using the theories of digital humour and cyberpragmatic approach. Cyberpragmatic is basically the use of pragmatic concepts in analysing digital data. The results show that WhatsApp stickers were used by the students to convey the feeling of sadness, anger, tiredness, concern, and eagerness, which were represented by the text and image of the stickers. For example, when a student complains about the number of assignments, he sent a sticker showing an ads for headache, where the brand name was changed into “Oh tugas” (oh assignment). The interrelatedness between the text and the image in this sticker can convey the pragmatic implicature in humorous way. Thus, the findings of this study implied that stickers could become an effective way to communicate the intended message of the speakers. Stickers can also be an alternative way of communicating in digital environments beside using other forms of multimodal communication forms such as texts, GIF, meme, and emoji.

Causal Semantics for Implicative Verbs

Abstract Implicative verbs (e.g., manage, dare) are characterized by complement inferences (Karttunen, 1971). English manage entails its complement; the entailment reverses polarity with matrix negation, and is accompanied by a projective inference to the complement’s non-triviality (Coleman, 1975; Karttunen & Peters, 1979). I use data from Finnish and English to argue that the implicative inferential profile is derived from backgrounded relations of causal necessity and causal sufficiency (defined over the structure of a formal causal model; Pearl 2000; Schulz 2011) which link the lexical content of an implicative verb to the realization of its complement. The proposal builds on Baglini & Francez’s (2016) causal analysis of manage, but significantly revises the earlier proposal to offer a treatment which accounts not only for English manage, but extends to the lexical semantics of the full implicative class, including ‘polarity-reversing’ verbs like fail, lexically specific verbs like dare, and their Finnish counterparts. Unlike earlier analyses, the proposed causal semantics also provides a natural explanation of the commonalities between two-way entailing verbs like manage and a related class of weaker ‘one-way’ implicatives such as Finnish jaksaa (‘have the strength’), which entail complement truth values under only one matrix polarity, but generate strong pragmatic implicatures in the two-way implicative pattern under the non-entailing polarity.

On the expression of mistaken beliefs in Australian languages

Abstract This paper explores the expression of mistaken beliefs – as in for example the boy mistakenly believes that the turtle is dead (whereas in fact it is alive) – in the Indigenous languages of Australia. It is shown that some mode of expressing this meaning is attested in around 40% of the languages in a selection of 149 language varieties. In over 90% of the languages showing some mode of expressing the target meaning, it is – or can be – achieved through grammatical morphemes or constructions more or less dedicated to the expression of mistaken beliefs. These include particles, enclitics and various types of complement construction involving verbs of thinking, that frequently also convey meanings of saying, doing and hearing, rarely that specify the thought as mistaken. In just four or five languages, however, the meaning is attested only as a pragmatic implicature of a general statement of belief. To the extent possible given the limitations of the sources, the paper examines the range of meanings and uses of the morphemes/constructions expressing mistaken beliefs.

“Migrants and the EU”. The diachronic construction of ad hoc categories in French far-right discourse

The French right and far-right have promoted a dehumanized vision of the migrants through their discourse in the last ten years. In this paper, we argue that this is the outcome of a diachronic linguistic process involving migration-related lexicon. A remarkable frequency increase enabled the progressive semantic bleaching of its [+human] trait and finally its functional recategorization as a simple trigger of a non-referential category where migrants and terrorism, but also the European Union and globalization, conflate to generically designate the “other”. Combining corpus methods and critical discourse analysis through the quantitative, semantic, and distributional analysis of migration-related lexicon in a corpus of 5689 tweets by Marine Le Pen and other right-wing French politicians, we show the association between migration and several unrelated topics through pragmatic implicature at various stages. We find a robust tendency of migration-related lexicon to occur in lists and parallelisms, whose sematic-pragmatic function is specifically to implicate a relation between the members of a category construed in context. We claim that these structures are the main culprit for the emergence, the spread, and the entrenchment of manipulative categories in public discourse and for their expansion in ad hoc fashion, following the right's political agenda.

МИКРОМИР ЛОГИКО-МОДАЛЬНЫХ ЧАСТИЦ: ШТРИХИ К ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКОМУ "ПОРТРЕТУ" ДАЖЕ

In recent times, in the context of the contemporary anthropocentric linguistics, when the study of the pragmatic aspect of the language system functioning becomes particularly relevant, many linguists turned to an issue of particles that are the universal explicators of the semantic and pragmatic meanings (refer to works of A. Wierzbicka, T.M. Nikolaeva, I.M. Boguslavskiy, V. Gast and many others). Despite very active and rather fruitful studying of particles, that for a long time had remained on the periphery of research interests, a whole set of their categorical features has been under investigated. Our article is devoted to the functioning of the particle dazhe [даже “even”] in the affirmative and negative contexts. As an example of research language material, we constructed several sentences representing the basic syntactic structures of the analyzed utterances, and many examples from the main corpus of the electronic resource “Russian National Corpus”. The main purpose of the article is to study semantic and pragmatic implicatures that are included in the semantics of the particle dazhe, and their modifications, including those arising under the influence of negation. Moreover, we dispute the opinion of I.M. Boguslavsky on the need to remove the scalar implicature from the interpretation of that particle, to which he came because of the insufficiently strict separation of the two scales in the double scalar implicature. The methods of conducting the research were 1) the analysis of the semantic and pragmatic presuppositions and implicatures generated by dazhe in the affirmative utterances and negative utterances utterances with negation as a result of interaction of the semantics of the particle and negation; 2) the analysis of dazhe’s functioning in the gradational constructions; 3) the comparative analysis of its functioning in the contexts of neutral and contrastive negation that enables to reveal the specifics of the double scalar implicature and that of unexpectedness, which are the components of the semantic and pragmatic structure of the particle in question.

On glasses half full or half empty: understanding framing effects in terms of default implicatures

The variations in how subjects respond to positively or negatively framed descriptions of the same issue have received attention from social science research, where, nevertheless, a naïve understanding of speech interpretation has undermined the different explanations offered. The present paper explores the semantic-pragmatic side of framing effects and provides a unifying explanation of this phenomenon in terms of a combined effect of pragmatic presuppositions and default implicatures. The paper contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of representations and cognitive processes involved in the framing bias by showing how well-entrenched linguistic practices associated to frame choice, and conducive to an implicit focus, result in default implicatures on the addressee’s side.

Semantic, Aspectual Category and Evidential Category of-guo

The semantics of -guo indicates a non-empty set of a type of eventuality in a certain time frame, while the properties of term inability, discontinuity and repeatability are only pragmatic implicatures. From the viewpoint of event structure, -guo is better considered as an imperfective marker than an experiential marker which asserting the activity description and leaving the state description as a standard implicative. Forwardly, from event structure to information structure, “-guo” is developed into an indirect evidential marker. Based on social needs of reliability and extended intersubjectivity, “-guo” emphasizes the truth of events and gains the specific meaning as an interpersonal evidential.

Postproverbials in Igbo Language

Abstract This treatise assesses the pragmatic implicature derived during the use of postproverbials in Igbo language and culture. Igbo proverbs have been so much studied that it would certainly be monotonous for a paroemiographer to resume making belated significance of Igbo speculations on the meaning and essence of a proverb. It is a glaring fact that that there is virtually no substantial controversy about the importance of proverbs in culture and the significance of proverbs in Igbo traditional society as a repository and verbal effulgence of wisdom is indeed proverbial. This study relies on Austin’s pragmatic theory of speech acts, conversational implicature and presupposition. The data is drawn from oral interview conducted by the researchers on ten Igbo elders with the aim of unraveling the linguistic idiosyncrasies associated with the connotation of postproverbials as it relates to different contextual usages. The paper will look at the development of this threat to the fixability of Igbo proverbs, the normative rapture and by extension establish the presence of “new” proverbs with new syntactic forms, new meanings and perhaps, new values. The analytic emphasis is based on the type of transformation, the shift in the construction of users. This paper concludes that postproverbiality is situated in the dynamic space of informal speech of a younger and adventurous generation.

Stative progressives in Inner and Outer Circle varieties of English

Stative progressives in Inner and Outer Circle varieties of English

The Role of Reasoning and Pragmatics in the Modifier Effect

The modifier effect refers to the fact that the perceived likelihood of a property in a noun category is diminished if the noun is modified. For example, "Pigs live on farms" is rated as more likely than "Dirty pigs live on farms." The modifier effect has been demonstrated in many studies, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms are still unclear. This paper reports two series of experiments that jointly point to the conclusion that the modifier effect is the result of a superposition of three cognitive mechanisms: (a) probabilistically softened default inheritance, (b) pragmatic implicatures due to Gricean relevance assumptions, and (c) inference based on world knowledge. We present evidence that the pragmatic effects operate largely on an unconscious level and that their influence can be reduced by changing the presentation format of the cognitive task.

Anti-resultativity in Latin

The paper examines the semantic domain of anti-resultativity (absence of result) as well as lingual means of its rendering in Latin. It has been made explicit that anti-resultativity denoting unreached or cancelled result is verbalized through grammatical and lexical means. An unsuccessful result can be realized in three directions: temporary cessation of the situation, which does not exclude the possibility of its further continuation (interrupted action); the subject’s attempt to achieve the result (a deliberate action); ending the situation at the point that is as close as possible to the finale. The termination of a situation with its possible continuation and logical ending is expressed solely at the lexical level with the help of phase verbs with termination semantics (desino, desisto, cesso) or circumstantial indices that indicate the absence of a result until a certain moment (nondum). The main role is given to the context. The means of expressing a deliberate but not realized action is the imperfect (so-called imperfectum de conatu), the conative meaning of which arises due to the interaction of the actional semantics of predicates (mainly telic verbs) and context and can be interpreted as pragmatic implicature. Explicitly intended action is also expressed by syntagmas with verbs of the corresponding semantics (conor, tempto + infinitive). Termination of a situation at a critical point close to completion is treated in the article as proximity (partial resultativity). It is implemented exclusively at the lexical level with the help of the adverbs paene and, more rarely, prope. Plusquamperfect is used to express cancelled result. The anti-resultative meanings of the Latin imperfectum, as well as that of plusquamperfectum, are consequences of the pragmatic implicature that arises under the influence of the context and/or under the influence of the communicative situation. In the first case, the lack of result can be considered as an implication of durativity, if there is no information about reaching the final point, but only the situation is advised towards it. The anti-resultative meaning of the plusquamperfectum is due to the inherent time interval of the time frame and the connection to the secondary reference point.

Rehabilitating Austin, Reassessing Grice: The Case of Cancellability

Abstract This paper assesses Grice’s work on conversational implicature in the light of one of its early targets: Austin’s claim that we cannot isolate the meaning of an expression from the context in which it is used. Grice argues that we can separate the literal meaning of many utterances from their pragmatic implicatures through the mechanism of explicit cancellation. However, Grice’s conception of cancellation does not account for the fact that an explicit cancellation must be uttered, and that its utterance involves further implicatures that undermine the attempted cancellation. What Grice calls explicit cancellations are better understood as utterances that resolve ambiguities, and hence apply only in cases where there exists an ambiguity that needs resolving. If Grice’s work does not undermine Austin, we are in a position to reassess an Austinian form of philosophical criticism that emphasizes the ordinary usage of expressions deployed in philosophical arguments.

Rigvedic nú: Configurational Syntax, Semantics, and Poetics

AbstractThe Rigvedic particle nú (310x) appears most frequently in second position within the clause, which is normally equivalent to the pāda. Often, nú is displaced to third or fourth position by other clitic(‐like) elements with which it competes (most frequently íd, cid, and u), In a smaller group of passages, nú (nearly always lengthened to n) appears in initial position in the clause and pāda, where it represents a topicalization of time. The collocation n cid (usually also clause‐initial) with a few exceptions has the meaning ‘never’. Most likely, this usage has been extracted by ellipsis from the phrase *ná n cid ‘not even now’, where the scope of the scalar particle (cid ‘even’) entails all time past and present and, by pragmatic implicature, the future. In a few instances n cid has the value ‘even now’. Instances where nú appears in penultimate or final position within the clause and pāda most likely presuppose a clause‐final focus position. The chief remaining passages where nú cannot possess the meaning ‘now’ are those where it follows the interrogative pronoun ká‐. In such instances, nú possesses a cooperative interpersonal conversational value like English ‘now’ under the same circumstances.

Putting pain in its proper place

In a series of articles in this journal, Michael Tye (2002) and Paul Noordhof (2001, 2002) have sparred over the correct explanation of the putative invalidity of the following argument: the pain is in my fingertip; the fingertip is in my mouth; therefore, the pain is in my mouth. Whereas Tye explains the failure of the argument by stating that “pain “creates an intensional context, Noordhof maintains that the “in” in ‘the pain is in my fingertip’ is not spatial, but has state-attributing character. In this paper, we offer a third account, explaining the failure of the argument through state-attributing pragmatic implicatures. Empirical evidence is provided in support of this account.