Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка для студентов
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лекция по грамматиае
| conversational maxims
. They are also sometimes named Grice’s or Gricean maxims .) They are the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner. − Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. – Speakers should be truthful. They should not say what they think is false, or make statements for which they have no evidence. − Quantity: Give the right amount of information. – A contribution should be as informative as is required for the conversation to proceed. It should be neither too little, nor too much. (It is not clear how one can decide what quantity of information satisfies the maxim in a given case.) − Relevance: Be relevant. – Speakers’ contributions should relate clearly to the purpose of the exchange. − Manner: Be perspicuous [ i.e. clear, easy to follow]. – Speakers’ contributions should be perspicuous: clear, orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity. Of these maxims, the most important is the Maxim of Relation: in listening to someone, we assume that whatever that person is saying to us is somehow relevant to the conversational situation. So, for example, in the following interchange: A: Mary lost a book today. B: Well, I saw Jane carrying around a new book this afternoon. Person A will infer from B’s utterance that Jane is somehow responsible for the disappearance of Mary’s book, even though B did actually not say that Jane was responsible: the Maxim of Relation gives us license to infer that B would not have said what s/he did unless the information B provided was somehow relevant to the statement A made. In this way, B’s statement licensed a conversational implicature. Consider also the following: A: Do you like wine? B: Thanks. 125 If at a party, A stands before B and asks if B if s/he likes wine, B is allowed to infer that A is offering B wine even though A did not literally make an offer of wine. The Maxim of Relation licenses B to infer that A is offering wine since that understanding would make A’s question most relevant to the context in which it was said. In other words, understanding what someone is saying to us involves not just understanding the literal meaning of their utterances, but also making inferences about how that literal meaning is relevant to the current situation. This means that we could infer two different messages from the same utterance depending on how we interpret the situation. So, if someone says, A: You can close the door. we could interpret the statement as a not-too-polite request to close the door or as a statement about the condition of the door [= ‘the door can be closed’] depending on the context in which it is uttered: conversational implicature is sensitive to the context of the utterance. The other maxims are also important. For example, consider the following letter of recommendation: Dear Sir or Madam: Mr. Hardbottom faithfully turns his work in on time and actively жүктеу/скачать 0,5 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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