My llinguistics Professor is an actual icon. She is german and today talked about how language can influence how you are viewed by other people. Now she made the example of RP english, which makes you sound more prestigious and educated.
HOWEVER, same goes te other way around. She then explained how if she was to ask about the way to a mountain in Standard german, nobody would take her seriously; moreover, they would even think she couldn't manage t climb it.
Tell me why my german friend, whos been living in austria for YEARS, turns to me and says in the most heartbroken voice, 'wait, do they really? :('
Yes, babes, they do. Im sorry you had to find out this way.
Also the professor afterwards apologized for ruining her worldview, the funniest thing ever.
Someone like this has already revealed themselves to be a dishonest actor.
For starters, it's a loaded question with an unwarranted assumption built into it.
And secondly it also assumes that there's no legitimate opposition to religion or religious belief, that disbelief in magical nonsense could only come as an unhealthy response to trauma or distress. That belief in supernatural flapdoodle is the default, normal and reasonable, and you must justify why you don't believe, rather than them needing to justify why you should. A denial of their burden of proof.
This sort of nutcase is not worth engaging. They've already displayed their intellectual dishonesty, and despite often claiming to be "genuinely interested" - can't tell you how many times I've seen that - they're not.
Point out their fallacies and send them on their way. They'll act all innocent, but it's as insincere as their opening.
The philosophy of pragmatics is a branch of philosophy that focuses on the study of language use in context, particularly the ways in which speakers use language to communicate effectively and achieve their communicative goals. Pragmatics is concerned with how meaning is inferred from context, how speakers convey and interpret meaning beyond the literal content of their words, and how language is used to perform actions and achieve social purposes.
Key aspects of the philosophy of pragmatics include:
Speech Acts: Pragmatics examines the performative aspect of language, studying how utterances are used to perform actions and bring about changes in the world. Speech act theory, developed by philosophers such as J.L. Austin and John Searle, investigates the illocutionary force of utterances (what speakers do in uttering sentences) and the perlocutionary effects of utterances (the effects they have on hearers).
Implicature and Inference: Pragmatics explores implicature, which refers to the meaning that is conveyed indirectly or implied by an utterance beyond its literal meaning. Philosophers analyze how hearers infer implicatures based on conversational context, background knowledge, and pragmatic principles. Gricean maxims, formulated by philosopher H.P. Grice, outline principles of conversation that guide speakers and hearers in cooperative communication.
Presupposition: Pragmatics investigates presupposition, which refers to the assumptions that speakers make about what their interlocutors already know or accept as true. Philosophers examine how presuppositions are conveyed linguistically and how they affect the interpretation of utterances.
Context and Contextual Meaning: Pragmatics considers the role of context in shaping meaning and interpretation. Philosophers analyze how linguistic meaning is enriched or modified by contextual factors such as situational context, linguistic context, and social context.
Reference and Anaphora: Pragmatics explores issues related to reference and anaphora, studying how speakers refer to entities in the world and how they establish coherence and cohesion in discourse through pronouns, demonstratives, and other referring expressions.
Politeness and Face: Pragmatics examines politeness and face-saving strategies in communication, investigating how speakers manage interpersonal relationships and social status through language use.
Overall, the philosophy of pragmatics offers insights into the dynamic and interactive nature of language use, shedding light on how speakers navigate the complexities of communication to convey meaning effectively and achieve their communicative goals.
Many people who raise objections to the Bible will have subconscious presuppositions that affect the way they see it. For instance, a Muslim who holds the Qur'an to be perfect cannot agree with the Bible in total, as the two disagree on so many fundamentals. An atheist who continues to deny God's existence cannot accept any book as supernatural revelation. Realizing the presuppositions that lie behind a person's objections to the Bible can help, as it is often worth dealing with the presupposition itself. Otherwise we may find ourselves answering question after question that are in fact smoke screens for the real issue.
Gregory Bateson on being aware of our presuppositions:
“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.
In this latter activity, it is clearly desirable (but not absolutely necessary) for the scientist to know consciously and be able to state his own presuppositions. It is also convenient and necessary for scientific judgment to know the presuppositions of colleagues working in the same field. Above all, it is necessary for the reader of scientific matter to know the presuppositions of the writer.”
“… I believe in the importance of scientific presuppositions, in the notion that there are better and worse ways of constructing scientific theories, and in insisting on the articulate statement of presuppositions so that they may be improved.”
-Gregory Bateson, “Every Schoolboy Knows”
in Bateson, G. Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, http://www.oikos.org/m&nschoolboy.htm July 27, 2012.
So much of what I read in the psychiatric literature seems to be written by people who aren’t aware of the importance of understanding the presuppositions behind the questions they are addressing in their research. They seem to take for granted that “Bipolar Disorder” is a fact rather than a construction, that THE way to treat “schizophrenia” is with a medication, etc. etc, etc.
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 11 shownotes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne,
Gretchen: And I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and today we're going to talk about being cooperative and the linguistic humour that comes when you're not. But first, our Patreon episode this month is about language games, language play, things like Pig Latin, Verlan, rhyming slang, and other ways of moving around bits and pieces of language and what that tells us about how language works.
Lauren: And also on the Patreon, we have a new supporter level, which is the Lingthusiasm multipack. For a $20 a month subscription, you can have the opportunity to privately share bonus episodes with your students, or if you have a couple of broke friends and you want to share the Lingthusiasm bonus episode joy with them, this tier is a way that lets you do that in good conscience, and you also get to nominate topics and vote on future bonus episode topics. So you can find that and all the other levels of support that we have at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
Gretchen: So, also this month, I did an interview on the linguistics podcast World in Words where I talked about weird Twitter and especially the Twitter account of Jonny Sun (jomny sun), who is a very popular kind of weird Twitter account, and some of the internet linguistic things that happen there. So we will link to that interview and you can listen to us on that podcast, which is also a linguistics podcast you might like.
Lauren: They do beautiful stories about language and have been doing so for a long time. They have a massive collection of back episodes, they're part of PRI... We'll put a link to those in the show notes
Gretchen: Cool, so if you need something to do between your Lingthusiasm episodes, you can listen to them too.
[Music]
Gretchen: Let's talk about linguistic cooperation.
Lauren: Okay, we'll do it cooperatively as well.
Gretchen: Cooperatively, yes! So, when linguists talk about cooperation, there's a kind of very specific type of cooperative meaning that exists in linguistics. So, let's do a model dialogue. Lauren, if I were to say to you, "Would you like some coffee?"
Lauren: I would say, "Coffee would keep me awake."
Gretchen: And this could mean, depending on my knowledge of Lauren's time zone and her current desires and so on, that she might want coffee or she might not want coffee.
Lauren: So if it's in the morning and I desperately need to be alert for the start of the day, it would be really great that coffee keeps me awake. But if it's 11 p.m. at night, and I am known to not stay awake very late, probably would mean that I don't want coffee. And even though there's nothing in the linguistic content there to indicate clearly whether they desperately want coffee or do not want any caffeine right now, but we can tell from interaction, we can tell from the context and the person that we're speaking to, whether that means a definitive yes or a definitive no, because we're doing something more complicated with understanding what's happening in that conversation than just looking at the words.
Gretchen: And it's often used to be politer, so rather than saying, "You want coffee?" "Yep!", you might say, "Do you want coffee?" "Oh, coffee would keep me awake! That would be a great favour that you could do for me!" Or, "Ehn, coffee would keep me awake..." rather than saying "No," which might be kind of blunt or rude.
Lauren: We do this all the time to stop hurting each other's feelings or to kind of soften the edges of an interaction. And it's not necessarily that communication is failing, it's that communication is more sophisticated than just looking at exactly the words people say and then exactly how they reply. And it can also be used to comedic effect, and a lot of the examples we have of how this kind of cooperation works, we look at how it works by looking at when it's broken, and in comedy it's often broken for amusement.
Gretchen: Exactly. And sometimes it's also broken to be annoying, or it feels annoying when it's broken. So one of these is the classic, "Can I go to the washroom?" "I don't know, can you?"
Lauren: Augh, I hate this one so much!
Gretchen: It's the worst.
Lauren: But I always find an opportunity to use it. It's very funny to use it, it's very frustrating to be on the receiving end of it.
Gretchen: Yeah, and the thing that's frustrating about it is because the respondent is ignoring Gricean Maxims in most circumstances, unless maybe you're a patient at a hospital who's just had some sort of operation where you're, like, not sure if you're allowed to take yourself to the bathroom. Then, you know, under most circumstances the capability of someone's going to the bathroom is not in question, it's the permission to. And so we know that the relevant thing to assume there, the cooperative thing to assume there, is that this is what kind of question it is.
Lauren: And people deliberately choose the wrong definition of "can" to reply to.
Gretchen: Yeah, 'cause it can be kind of fun to get someone's goat, but it's also hard to articulate why this feels so annoying, why does this feel so wrong. So we are going to, in this episode, talk about what you can say that this person is violating, what this person is flouting, what the problem is when someone says that, and how you can articulate to them how annoying they're being.
Lauren: And by not saying exactly what we mean, it can actually help move interactions onward.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: And a lot of this has been really thought out and kind of codified as a set of ways of understanding how we navigate conversation, and the person who's often given credit for articulating this most clearly, and whose work a lot of this is based on, is Paul Grice, who is a linguist who was working on this in the 1960s, 1970s. He was a philosopher, but was very interested in the philosophy of language and semantics and meaning, and a lot of work on semantics happens in this imaginary, context-free world, or used to. Semantics was this kind of "not thinking at all about the context of how people use language," and Grice noticed that a lot of the time people don't say exactly what they mean, and that follows a set of conventions, and that we kind of seek out being cooperative in how we talk.
Gretchen: Yeah, and we have certain assumptions; we generally assume that people are trying to cooperate with us, we generally assume people are trying to tell us something that's relevant and useful and cooperative to what our goals are in the conversation – people are saying something for a reason, they're not just saying something totally irrelevant just to be annoying or just to be completely random.
Lauren: And they're saying a sufficient amount of stuff, so if you say a lot of things, there might be a reason why you're doing that, and if you don't give much information, then there's usually a reason for that as well. And so, it's a way of understanding what's happening in those situations.
Gretchen: And it's something that we acquire! I was looking at some research for this episode and came across a study that tested children on how well they were able to understand some of these Gricean Maxims. They tested four-year-olds, five-year-olds, and six-year-olds, and what they did is they have, like, a puppet – they had three puppets.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And they have one puppet saying something like, "What games do you know?" and then one of the puppets might say in response, "I know how to play football," and another puppet might say, "I know your name," which is the irrelevant response.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And so, they've asked the children which of these puppets is being cooperative, or which of these topics is being rude, or which these puppets being saucy, and trying to get them to pick. And so children who understood that you're supposed to give a relevant response to "What games do you know?" would pick the one that said they play football rather than the one that says they know your name, because that's not a relevant response. And they found that four-year-olds generally had basically a chance understanding of these things, which might mean they understood a few of them, but not enough for it to show up significantly in the data. Five-year-olds seem to understand some kinds of cooperation but not others, and six-year-olds performed like adults. So it's a thing that happens later in your development of language; four-year-olds can talk in complete sentences, but they don't necessarily have the social understanding that adults do.
Lauren: I feel really heartened that there's research that shows that children struggle with these Maxims, because I definitely remember as a child struggling with and having to learn how these work. I remember when I was about six, I was at something with a bunch of people, and an adult offered me some chips, like potato crisps, out of a packet, and they were like, "Would you like some?" and I was like – I feel so embarrassed now that I understand how these things work, but at the time I was like, "Don't you like them?" Like, don't you like the flavor of them?
Gretchen: That's so considerate!
Lauren: Yeah, I was just like, if they're getting rid of these – like, it's such a child thing – it's like, oh, if they don't want to eat them themselves, they must not like them.
Gretchen: 'Cause if I had the chance to eat chips that I liked and I would just –
Lauren: There's no way that I would share these if they were tasty, so they must not think they're tasty. And I remember the adult had to, like, actually explain to me what they meant. They were like, "Oh no, I just thought that maybe you would like some because I like them, but I like sharing." So I feel really heartened that it's a thing children don't automatically understand. And it can be hard, like when you're learning a new language, you may find it difficult to understand what the politeness expectations or cooperative expectations are in your language.
Gretchen: Yeah, this happened to me, actually, when I was an adult, but I was just somewhere – I was travelling and I kept being like, "Why is no one inviting me to anything? Like, I feel kind of excluded," and it turned out that what people were doing was mentioning that events were happening.
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: And that I was supposed to get the inference that if I heard about an event, I should express interest in going, whereas I was trying to, like, not intrude and not express interest in something unless I was being explicitly invited.
Lauren: Interesting!
Gretchen: And so they thought I was very standoffish and didn't want to go, and I thought no one wanted to invite me to anything.
Lauren: I know that some people who have autism express a difficulty with navigating the implicit meaning behind a lot of things that other people take for granted, in terms of what is behind a lot of this cooperation principle, and so – although we kind of talked about some people being annoying when they deliberately flout these things, there are some people for whom navigating these kind of implicit, cooperative conversational strategies is really, really difficult.
Gretchen: There's an example of that on Tumblr, there's a post that's been going around that says something along lines of, "I just realised that when you're doing something and someone asks you what are you doing, what they're really asking you is can I join you."
Lauren: Right.
Gretchen: So if it's like, "What game are you playing?", they're trying to say, "And do mind if I join you?"
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And so there's been various people going back and forth about what do people actually mean when they're saying this, and is this a kind of soft invitation or something like that.
Lauren: Yep. So, thinking about it and thinking about it overtly as a set of guiding principles for how you interact with people can also help some people to navigate them.
Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. And also sometimes, when they're really obvious, they can also be really funny.
Lauren: Yeah. And we're going to basically illustrate. So, Grice breaks down the cooperative principle into four potential ways that you can use these, or flout and kind of not use them, and we're going to kind of work through them with some examples. But I think the important thing is sometimes they're talked about as rules, and I think that kind of makes it sound like it's a hard and fast, and if you don't use them then you're breaking them and it's really bad, and I don't want us to talk about it in that way.
Gretchen: Yeah, and I think they're talked about as if they're rules, but they're really kind of baseline assumptions and we flout them all the time. And what that is doing is just adding meaning beyond the baseline.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And because there's lots of non-baseline meanings that you can have. And so it's just a leveling up, think of it as leveling up.
Lauren: And the other thing is, even though we're working through these four categories, I personally often find it difficult to categorize examples of people using or flouting these cooperative principles, and often examples don't neatly fit into one of these categories.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm. So it's helpful to think about that, that there are different categories and there are different ways of breaking them down, because not all of them seem exactly the same thing, but really any time there's an extra layer of meaning, there's probably some way that that layer is being interpreted. And a lot of them overlap a bit. The first one that comes up is what Grice calls the Maxim of Quality, and this one is like – I always forget that it's even there, because it just seems pretty obvious and it doesn't have as many, like, fun, exciting jokes that play around with it. But the Maxim of Quality is, like, generally we assume people are telling the truth.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And where this shows up sometimes is that sometimes obvious lying is not interpreted as, "Oh, this person is such a liar!", it's interpreted, "Oh, haha, I know what you mean."
Lauren: Yup, and it's often used a lot in sarcasm. So, like, you say the opposite of what you mean. You're using this understanding of, like, I will obviously say the thing I mean, but if I use this particular tone of voice and I'm saying something that is obviously the opposite, I really do mean the thing, but I'm using sarcasm to highlight that.
Gretchen: Like if someone falls down and you say "Nice job," they're not going to be like, "Why is this person congratulating me?", they're going to be like, "Haha, very funny, you're being sarcastic."
Lauren: "You're being very un-nice." I really like it when someone is clearly caught doing the wrong thing, and you're like, "Did you eat all the ice cream?" and someone's there with the tub of ice cream in their hand and ice cream on their face and they're like, "Nooo... No, I didn't eat it all. I just found this empty tub."
Gretchen: Or if you're at someone's house and you're like, "Do you mind if I get a glass of water?" and there's no reasonable person that would refuse this request, probably, and the person just like, "No." And especially – it's sometimes used in this case, like, "No," because if there was some reason why you actually couldn't have a glass of water, like if they didn't have any cups, or if their water had been turned off or something, you have to have an explanation. You'd have to be like, "Well, oh my god, I'm so sorry, but actually this is what is going on."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: "You can't have a glass of water, but I have this other thing," or something like that. Like, you'd have to apologize if you couldn't do a very minor favour like that. But the bald "no" there is like kind of obvious lying.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: My other favourite example of this is on Tumblr, sometimes people will reply to a post, particularly in the tags, that they really, really like by saying "I hate this," or "I'm dying," and it means "I actually love it."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Because otherwise why would you even reblog this so much if you hate it, or if you did hate it, you'd have, like, whole paragraphs about why it's problematic or something. You wouldn't just be like, in all caps, "OH MY GOD THIS IS TERRIBLE I CAN'T EVEN"
Lauren: And it's a levelling up of your appreciation for something, so if you're like, "Oh yeah, I really like this. I really, really like this. Oh my god, I absolutely hate this," is like, I can't use any more superlative so I'm going this opposite strategy.
Gretchen: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: So that is Quality. The next principle – I'm not going to lie, like, I like them all equally, but I really like Quantity, this kind of rule of Quantity, especially when it's misused for hijinks – which is to make what you say as informative as required, but it doesn't need to be more informative than is required for this interaction.
Gretchen: Yeah, and that sounds very confusing, but there are some really amazing examples. Possibly my favourite – although, oh my god, there are so many good ones – possibly my favourite is there's a Wikipedia caption that you should definitely look at if you have not seen, which has a Scottish bagpiper at the South Pole whose name is Piper Kerr, and he's playing the bagpipes for a penguin who's standing next to him, which the caption calls an indifferent penguin. And so initially, this is what the caption said: "Piper Kerr plays a tune for an indifferent penguin."
Lauren: Then someone went back and edited it, this is like, this is the gold of Wikipedia. Someone went back and edited it to...
Gretchen: To: "Piper Kerr (right)," as in the person on the right, "plays the bagpipes for an indifferent penguin." And what I love about this is it is entirely unnecessary, right? Like, it is way more informative than required to tell people which person in this picture is the bagpiper and which person is the penguin, because it's very clear which person is the bagpiper and which person is the penguin. Like, if you can't tell the difference between a bagpiper and a penguin, you've got bigger problems than Wikipedia captions can solve.
Lauren: Ah, it's so good.
Gretchen: But adding in the information about which side the piper is on implies that someone might have this difficulty!
Lauren: Yeah, like, coming back and editing it to add it in.
Gretchen: Yeah! And so it just makes the caption so much funnier.
Lauren: My other favourite is, there was this video of this absolute, like, it's just this torrent of ducks walking in a procession along a road in China or something, but just this absolute multitude of ducks.
Gretchen: It's like a swarm of ducks. Thousands of ducks.
Lauren: Yeah. And someone has come along and tagged it, and they're like, "Look at all these ducks, there are at least ten."
Gretchen: And then someone else comes along and says, "Well, you're not wrong."
Lauren: And, like, well, I mean, there are at least ten, but there are probably about, like, 300.
Gretchen: But it's true that there are at least ten ducks, because there are definitely ten there, there's definitely more than ten. But we have this feeling that it's somehow unsatisfying to be like, "There are at least ten ducks in this picture," because the person captioning it can very clearly see that this is not an informative caption. This is violating the Maxim of Quantity, and it makes it really funny. So I actually went back to find this GIF when we were researching this episode (so I'll link you to it) and apparently – so I wrote an article explaining how this GIF interacts with Grice's Maxims a number of years ago, and this article that I wrote about the duck GIF is now cited on the Wikipedia article about the cooperative principle.
Lauren: Yay! It is, like, the canonical example. It should not be the principle of Quantity anymore, it's should be the principle of At Least Ten Ducks.
Gretchen: The At Least Ten Ducks principle. And it's there under "Violating these principles is often used for humour," and I was really excited, because I was like, "Ooh, someone's compiled a list of humorous examples of how this is being done! I love this! I have a list, I want to add to my list!" And then I go to the footnote, and it's like, "Oh, it's me. That was me."
Lauren: Oh, sorry you are so good at this.
Gretchen: So on the one hand, like, I've arrived, on the other hand, I don't get a new example.
Lauren: And you can flout this the other way, so you can be like, "I have literally a hundred million reasons why the cooperation principle is so good."
Gretchen: Yeah, you can go up, like, "I told you once, I told you a million times." You know, we understand hyperbole. One of the other ones that I really like is when people say "Greetings, earthling." And you're like, it is true that I'm an earthling, but this seems really unsatisfying as a greeting. Like, it's a funny greeting.
Lauren: Only reason that you would mention I'm an earthling is if you were not.
Gretchen: Yeah, the only reason that earthling would be a useful quantity of information is that if you were not an earthling, or if it was some people were not earthlings.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And when we establish the colony on Mars, then maybe this example will no longer be good.
Lauren: A lot of these are kind of flouted weirdly in advertising and commercial spaces where people are trying to give you information they think is cooperative and it comes across really uncooperative and I love this. There's an Australian show called The Checkout, which is about consumer rights, which sounds dry but it's actually always hysterical and worth watching. Anyway. But they have a segment regularly where they show you these kinds of things and one of my favourites is a box of running shoes. And on the box it says, "Average quantity: 2."
Gretchen: Like most boxes of shoes!
Lauren: Which is the correct quantity of shoes, but not the correct quantity of information that is needed on this shoe box.
Gretchen: Especially "average!"
Lauren: So I'll put a link to that segment, 'cause they often have a lot of things where you're like, "Why would you be telling me this information?" and sometimes it's 'cause it's too much, but also because it's not relevant.
Gretchen: Yeah, so this brings us to the next Maxim, which is called the Maxim of Relevance. And it's also – I don't know, Quantity may be your favourite, Relevance I think might be my favourite.
Lauren: Okay, sure. I'm glad we don't have to fight over them.
Gretchen: It's so good. So one thing you can do – and this is mentioned by the webcomic xkcd – so xkcd points out that you can say on your cereal box, like, "Does not contain asbestos." And people'll be like, "Ooh, I better buy that one."
Lauren: It does imply that all of the others somehow contain asbestos and are not telling us.
Gretchen: Yeah, like it's somehow relevant to cereal whether there's asbestos in it, whereas that is not an ingredient of cereal. Or, an example that I came across recently – real, real-life example – was I bought some cheese. Mozzarella cheese. And it told me on the outside that there was no gluten in it. Gluten-free cheese.
Lauren: Does... does cheese usually contain gluten?
Gretchen: No. Cheese is made out of milk.
Lauren: Because I had, like, a moment of panic and I was like, "Maybe cheese contains... maybe I shouldn't have been feeding my friend cheese all this time!"
Gretchen: I Googled this just to be sure, and I ended up on a website for Celiac's, and they were like, if you buy a cheese product, it might have gluten in it, like as a powdered thing.
Lauren: Okay, you sent me down a little mini path of panic then, when I was like, "Why are they mentioning this? They can only be mentioning this if, like, all other cheese has gluten in it."
Gretchen: No, but they listed all of the common types of cheese, like the cheddar cheese, and the mozzarella cheese, and the Swiss cheese, and they're like, nope, does not have gluten, does not have gluten, does not have gluten. But now you're standing in the grocery store and your gluten-free friend is coming over and you're like, "Oh, I better buy this cheese because it says it doesn't have gluten in it, but I can't buy this other one because maybe it does!"
Lauren: Maybe it does. On the flip side, I always love when you get, like, a packet of salted peanuts and on the back it says, "May contain traces of nuts." And it is like, I don't... like, it's possibly not relevant to this product. I can imagine it's relevant for all their other products that are made on the same machine and don't have nuts as the primary ingredient.
Gretchen: Well and in fact, it's not even just "may" contain traces of nuts, it does contain nuts! That's the whole point!
Lauren: It very much contains almost exclusively nuts.
Gretchen: Yeah. Another example of this is, so, there was a Twitter account a number of years ago which was a bookstore called Waterstones Oxford Street, and they were really funny, and they've kind of stopped updating, but they had some really great tweets at the time. And they tweeted about some sort of contest that they were in –
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: And they suggested to people, "If anybody wants to send some not poisoned gift baskets to the other contestants, you know, you should feel free to do that."
Lauren: That's very kind of them!
Gretchen: Right, and so you get this interpretation of, like, they're secretly trying to egg people on to poison the competitors, and of course the whole thing's a joke. But the fact that you get from "not poisoned" to "actually poisoned," because normally when you say if you'd like to send your friends some gift baskets, you don't have to specify that they're not poisoned! That just goes without saying, like, you don't poison gift baskets!
Lauren: The default meaning is non-poisoned.
Gretchen: Like, the default state of a gift basket is unpoisoned.
Lauren: Definitely in English, not so much in German, but definitely in English.
Gretchen: Oh, good point. The German word for poison is "gift."
Lauren: Yes, so putting negatives in places suddenly adds a completely – or putting in information that seems completely irrelevant suddenly is, by the principle of cooperation, relevant.
Gretchen: I have another really great example of that. This is my favourite one from the BBC Radio comedy series Cabin Pressure, which has a lot of really fun humour, and they're running a test. And before the test happens, one of the characters is like, "I'm really nervous about this test, I'm not sure what's gonna be on it, I'm stressing about it." And he's talking with the guy – so Arthur's the one that's running the test – he's talking with the guy that gonna be administering the test, and the guy that's administering the test says, "Shall I tell you an interesting fact? Here's this number that you might want to know." And Arthur's like, "That's not very interesting." And the test administrator's like, "It's very interesting. If I were a young lad studying for an exam, I'd find it very interesting." And Arthur's like, "Oh, it might come up!" And then the test guy's like, "Oh, I'm not telling you that, I'm just saying it's... it's interesting." And then Arthur's like, "Yeah, well, thanks, I just don't think it's very interesting."
Lauren: Oh, poor Arthur.
Gretchen: Yeah, poor Arthur. Arthur doesn't really get Gricean Maxims. So, it's like, why is it relevant to out of the blue suddenly come up with this statistic? Well, clearly because he is trying to imply that it's going to be on the test.
Lauren: Yeah, paying attention to – assuming things are relevant is definitely a good pro tip for being cooperative.
Gretchen: Well, and the cool thing about this in conversation is that we do this all the time without even thinking about it, that stuff is relevant. So if, for example, I say, "Do you want a cup of coffee?" and you say, "Coffee will keep me awake," the way that I'm able to interpret that is I assume that the awakeness properties of coffee are relevant to why you would or wouldn't want to drink it.
Lauren: Yeah. Which brings us to the final Maxim, which is about Manner. Which basically means that it's not just what you say, it's the way in which you say it can provide a specific kind of information that's relevant to whatever conversation that you are having.
Gretchen: Yeah, and so this kind of breaks down into if you're being excessively wordy, there's probably a reason for it. Or if you're being – if you're saying something that looks unclear, you're probably doing it for a reason.
Lauren: Yeah. Can I share the canonical example that I remember from undergrad?
Gretchen: Sure.
Lauren: So this is from Steve Levinson's work, which builds on a lot of what Grice did, looking at how we're polite, because a lot of this is, like, if you use or manipulate these cooperative principles, it's often because you're trying to be more or less polite in a conversation, and Steven Levinson's work builds on a lot of this in terms of politeness. And he has an example from his '83 book, which maybe shows that he's a classier individual than I am, but the example is: "I heard you went to the opera last night, how was the lead singer?" And the other person replies, "The singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an aria from Rigoletto."
Gretchen: That's so rude!
Lauren: So rude! But the thing is, there's nothing overtly – the person didn't say the singer was really bad.
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: But because they didn't overtly say the singer was good, but they kind of did this very long-winded "they did the thing which was more or less the thing," there is only one way to read this.
Gretchen: Or like, "How was the movie last night?" "Well... it was a movie..." You're like, I guess he didn't like it, then!
Lauren: Yeah, so, the way in which you say something can add a particular meaning.
Gretchen: One of my favourite authors who manipulates a lot of these kinds of Maxims is Lemony Snicket. He writes A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And there's a quote from him, describing one of his characters, saying, "She was entirely dressed in articles of clothing and had nothing on her feet except a pair of socks and two shoes."
Lauren: No, no, no, wait, what? But that is... but, like, that is what you have on your feet.
Gretchen: What else do you normally have on your feet? You could wear a toe ring, if you wanted to, I guess. But, like, normally!
Lauren: I mean, there's a bit of relevance going on here, 'cause you're like, "Should she have skis on?"
Gretchen: Yeah. Flippers? So there's some Manner here where you're like, the fact that you specify this in a very elaborate sort of way, you know, shows up for this sometimes.
Lauren: There's a really nice set from your blog, funnily enough, that kind of touches on ambiguity but also manipulates these cooperative principles quite nicely, which are ambiguous job recommendations. So if you have to write a letter of recommendation for someone you've fired and perhaps don't really like – we'll have a link to these – and you can see how they are deliberately well- phrased in their manner to kind of not imply what they really mean. So, for a chronically absent employee, you can say, "A man like him is is hard to find." And you're deliberately playing with the manner of what is expected in a job recommendation to convey the opposite of what you really mean.
Gretchen: Or, for example, if you say something like, "This person always showed up to the office more or less on time and was wearing clothing," you know, this is not – these are good traits to have at a job, but they're not sufficient to actually be good at it. But this is also Relevance, because it shouldn't be relevant in a job recommendation letter that the person wore clothing to the workplace, because that's assumed. So, they overlap a lot.
Lauren: Yes, they do indeed. So that brings us through the four: the Quality of what you say, where generally you assume that someone's telling the truth; the Quantity of what you say, so you give as much information as you need to and no more; and the Maxim of Relation, which is that what you say has to be relevant to the particular interaction; and then Manner, so how you say it, which are kind of very broad summaries of these.
Gretchen: One of the fun things about the Maxim of Manner is that it's sometimes phrased in a way that deliberately breaks it, I think for for fun. So it's sometimes phrased as "be perspicuous," which is really not very useful, because you're like, "What does perspicuous mean?" I had to look this up! But it means "don't do this thing, be clear."
Lauren: Yeah, so it's a self-flouting Maxim there.
Gretchen: Or, like, if you're using words that are deliberately more elaborate than – or another version of it is "be brief," which can also be phrased as "avoid unnecessary prolixity."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: Which basically kind of defines itself. But again, it's not so much like, "this is what you should do all the time" as "this is what we generally assume people are doing." So if you're flouting it, then it's for some sort of reason, like you want to convey that you don't actually like the thing.
Lauren: I like people who describe it as like, they're not so much rules for the speaker as guidelines for the listener. Like, as listeners we're trying to make sense of what people are saying based on it being true and relevant and sufficient. So that's a nice – they're not like hard and fast rules that you must obey to do language, but they do show how important context – you know, we're big fans always on the show about, like, language use is often as much about context as it is about grammatical structures and about kind of working with people cooperatively in interaction, and there's such a nice illustration of that.
Gretchen: I think one of the examples that I've gone back to of Gricean Maxims working in tandem, from when I was an undergrad, was if somebody says, "I'm outta gas." You could say, "Oh, there's a gas station two miles up the road."
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: And that would be, generally, a very helpful, cooperative response. But it would not be a cooperative response if you knew that the gas station was closed, or if you knew there was actually another one that was up one mile away instead of two miles, so why are you directing people to the further one?
Lauren: Yep.
Gretchen: Or if you knew that you – if you had some gas on you right now and you were like, yeah, I'm not sharing this, go to that other one.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: So, it depends on the context for whether something is a cooperative response or not as well.
Lauren: We have a few, if you – because I find with these things, I find some people's descriptions or explanations for certain bits and pieces make more sense to me, so we have links to a bunch of different video clips that describe the Maxims and how they work.
Gretchen: And there's a lot of Gricean humour, but I don't know if there are a lot of Gricean memes. But one that I do know of is somebody rewrote the song "Amazing Grace" to be "Amazing Grice" on SpecGram, so we will link to SpecGram as well if you would like to sing the praises of Grice. [Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.
Lauren: I tweet and blog as superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Current bonus topics include language games, hypercorrections, the behind-the-scenes look at doggo speak, and how to explain linguistics to employers, as well as a bunch of others. And you can help pick the next topic by becoming a patron. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay, too. We'd really appreciate it if you could rate us on iTunes or recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.
Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire, and our music is by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
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"For the religious, the miraculous event is the end of an investigation, not the start of one. The 'proof' is the action, and the cause is pre-concluded as being attributable to the Divine."
-- Dean Van Drasek
