#conversational implicature

[nofatclips]

The Hidden Rules of Conversation

[snowgall]

Opinion | It’s not just Trump’s message that matters. There’s also his metamessage.

A linguistics professor examines James Comey’s testimony about his conversations with the president.

When people talk to each other, they glean meaning from metamessages. But messages come in handy when someone wants to deny a meaning that was obvious when the words were spoken.

The president’s “exact words,” according to Comey’s notes, were: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” Risch cried literal meaning. Zeroing in on the word “hope,” he asked Comey if he knew of anyone being charged with a criminal offense because “they hoped for an outcome.” Though he confessed that he didn’t, Comey said, “I took it as, this is what he wants me to do.” Risch rested his case: “You may have taken it as a direction but that’s not what he said.” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, later made the same point in a tweet: “Hoping and telling are two very different things.”

Actually, they aren’t, when the speaker is in a position of power, as Harris noted. Referring to her experience as a prosecutor, she said, “When a robber held a gun to somebody’s head and said, ‘I hope you will give me your wallet,’ the word ‘hope’ was not the most operative word at that moment.” The gun gives the robber power to encourage another to make his hope a reality.

Opinion piece written by Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University

[snowgall]

I’ve been demoted from ‘spouse’ to ‘friend’ by programmers unaware of how language works

Facebook just sent a message to my husband prodding him to “reflect upon his eight years of friendship” with me. That is, we’ve both been on Facebook for 8 years, and have been ‘Facebook friends’ for that long.

Um...how nice?

The thing is, the implication in this message is that we’ve only been friends (not spouses), and only for eight years (when in fact we’ve been married far longer).

For linguistics nerds, this implication follows from Grice’s maxims of conversation, specifically, the Maxim of Quantity. When you state that you’ve been friends for eight years, you imply that you haven’t been friends any longer than that, or else you would have said so.

This effect is compounded because they are conflating the platform-specific meaning of “Friend” with colloquial usage. Being online friends with someone doesn’t mean that your RL relationship (a) is only that of friends and (b) started at the same time your online friendship began.

Facebook has unwittingly provided an excellent demonstration that computers (or their programmers) have no idea how human communication works. The message it sent my husband was completely grammatical (and probably followed a template created by an actual human) and yet nevertheless felt completely off-base.

It’s also a failure of programming, because Facebook has us listed as “married” to each other as well. We aren’t hiding that information!

Do people appreciate getting these messages? It just feels really odd.