Pragmatics - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2002

The notion of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1967, 1989), who defined it essentially as what is communicated less what is said. This definition contributed in part to the proliferation of a large number of different species of implicature by neo-Griceans. Relevance theorists have responded to this by proposing a shift back to the distinction between explicit and implicit meaning (corresponding to explicature and implicature respectively). However, they appear to have pared down the concept of implicature too much, ignoring phenomena which may be better treated as implicatures in their over-generalisation of the concept of explicature. These problems have their roots in the fact that explicit and implicit meaning intuitively overlap, and thus do not provide a suitable basis for distinguishing implicature from other types of pragmatic phenomena. An alternative conceptualisation of implicature based on the concept of implying with which Grice originally associated his notion of implicature is thus proposed. From this definition it emerges that implicature constitutes something else inferred by the addressee that is not literally said by the speaker. Instead, it is meant in addition to what the literally speaker says, and consequently, it is defeasible like all other types of pragmatic phenomena.

This article examines the results of a contrastive empirical study of conventional indirect requests in Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish. The results reveal pragmatic similarities at the level of the linguistic encoding of utterances with both, Peninsular and Uruguayan Spanish speakers showing a negative correlation between (in)directness and social distance. The less familiar the interlocutors are with each other, the more likely it is for their requests to be realised indirectly. On the other hand, pragmatic differences were found in the tentativeness conveyed by the requests in these two language varieties. Uruguayan Spanish requests were more tentative than those in Peninsular Spanish. This tentativeness was achieved through a more frequent and more varied use of external modifications and a much higher incidence of internal modificating devices of the downgrading type.

The phenomenon of “elliptical” expressions in Japanese has been extensively studied in the field of Japanese linguistics. However, this phenomenon has been often treated as a general syntactic feature of Japanese, and the question of how this feature is realized in actual use of the language has been rather neglected. The present paper is intended to analyze how speakers of Japanese actually deal with the task of interpreting unexpressed elements that emerge in their talk in interaction. Using video- and audio-data of naturally occurring conversations in Japanese, it is shown that, in producing and understanding utterances involving unexpressed referents, conversational parties utilize not only their morphological and syntactic knowledge but also various, multilayered resources that are available to them in the immediate context of interaction.

This article describes the way compliments and compliment responses are executed in Kunming Chinese, a Mandarin dialect spoken in Kunming, China. By looking at data collected through DCT questionnaires and natural observations, the author examines the semantic formulas used in forming compliments and compliment responses and the syntactic patterns of compliments in the two types of data. It is found that explicit compliments are the most common form of complimenting in the dialect. Implicit compliments, on the other hand, are much rarer and tend to occur by themselves. Syntactically, over 90% of the compliments fall into one of 4 syntactic structures paid through the third person/impersonal or second person perspectives. In replying to a compliment, speakers of Kunming Chinese are found to be drifting away from the tradition of rejecting compliments outright. They are more willing to accept compliments now although often indirectly. A quarter of the time, in real life situations, they just smile away a compliment they receive. While the DCT data and natural data are similar in the use of a majority of the semantic formulas, some differences are also found between the two types of data. Some methodological and cross-cultural implications are discussed at the end of the article.