Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics 9781614513735, 9781614515111

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Istvan Kecskes and Jesús Romero-Trillo (Eds.) Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics

Mouton Series in Pragmatics

Editor Istvan Kecskes Editorial Board Reinhard Blutner (Universiteit von Amsterdam) N.J. Enfield (Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics) Raymond W. Gibbs (University of California, Santa Cruz) Laurence R. Horn (Yale University) Boaz Keysar (University of Chicago) Ferenc Kiefer (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Liuis Payrató (University of Barcelona) François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod) John Searle (University of California, Berkeley) Deirdre Wilson (University College London)

Volume 16

Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics Edited by Istvan Kecskes Jesús Romero-Trillo

ISBN 978-1-61451-511-1 e-ISBN 978-1-61451-373-5 ISSN 1864-6409 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Content Contributors | ix Introduction | 1 Linguistic and cognitive aspects Fabienne Baider Hate: Saliency Features in Cross-cultural Semantics | 7 Valandis Bardzokas The semantics and pragmatics of causal connectives: conceptual and procedural aspects of Modern Greek γiati and epeiδi | 29 Marta Dynel Being cooperatively (im)polite: Grice’s model in the context of (im)politeness theories | 55 Joana Garmendia Irony: making as if we pretend to echo | 85 Elly Ifantidou Pragmatic awareness: An index of linguistic competence | 105 Laura Maguire and Jesús Romero-Trillo Context dynamism in classroom discourse | 145 Socio-cultural aspects Lucía Fernández-Amaya Simultaneous Speech in American English and Spanish Telephone Closings | 163 Maicol Formentelli A model of stance for the management of interpersonal relations: formality, power, distance and respect | 181 Anna Gladkova The Russian social category svoj: a study in ethnopragmatics | 219

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Marinelly Piñango Outlining and proposing the constructs of institutional framework and institutional practice for the study of intercultural communication | 239 Geneviève Tréguer-Felten Can a lingua franca bridge the communication gap between corporations set in different cultures? | 263 Wei Ren, Chih-Ying Lin and Helen Woodfield Variational Pragmatics in Chinese: Some insights from an empirical study | 283 Discourse and stylistics Ana Belén Cabrejas Peñuelas and Mercedes Díez Prados The evaluative function of cohesive devices in three political texts | 317 Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Patricia Bou-Franch Relational work in anonymous, asynchronous communication: A study of (dis)affiliation in YouTube | 343 Agnieszka Grzywna Manipulation and pragmatics in political discourse | 367 Victoria Guillén-Nieto Intercultural business pragmatics: The case of the business letter of introduction | 395 Katya Mandoki Zoo-pragmatics: performative acts among animals | 421 José Santaemilia Ruiz and Sergio Maruenda Bataller Naming practices and negotiation of meaning: A corpus-based analysis of Spanish and English newspaper discourse | 439 Carmen Santamaría-García A compelling need to evaluate: social networking sites as tools for the expression of affect, judgment and appreciation | 459

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Alla Smirnova Strategies of discursive manipulation in the headlines of articles about Russia in the quality British press | 479 Subject index | 492 Person index | 498

Contributors Fabienne H. Baider graduated from the University of Toronto (1999) and is Associate Professor in French Linguistics at the University of Cyprus. She works on semantics and discourse from a sociological perspective. Her research on construction of authority in discourse appeared in books (Homme Galant 2004) and articles (such as in the International Journal of Lexicography, Modern and Contemporary France, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, etc.). Valandis Bardzokas received his doctoral degree at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki. His thesis was about causality and connectives from the cognitivepragmatic angle of the Gricean and relevance-theoretic framework of analysis. It resulted in the book “Causality and connectives: From Grice to Relevance” to be published by John Benjamins. Ana Belén Cabrejas Peñuelas is an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Valencia (Spain). She investigates the cognitive processes involved in second or foreign language writing, in particular the revision process and the use of mother tongue. She is also interested in Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Her most important publications deal with L2 writing processes and evaluation in political language from a contrastive perspective. Patricia Bou-Franch is Associate Professor at the University of Valencia, Spain. Her research interests include computer-mediated communication, gender inequality, identity construction and impoliteness. She has published in international journals like Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. She is currently co-investigator in a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (‘Gender and Sexual (In)equality in Contemporary British and Spanish Society’). Mercedes Díez Prados is Associate Professor at Alcalá University (Spain). Both her teaching and research are mainly concerned with Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics and Systemic Functional Linguistics. Her most significant publications tackle the issues of cohesion, evidentiality and evaluation in written English by native and non-native writers, both expert and novice, occasionally from a gender perspective.

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Marta Dynel, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łódź. Her research interests are primarily in pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms of humour, (im)politeness theory, neo-Gricean pragmatics, the pragmatics of interaction (participation framework), as well as the methodology of research on film discourse. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes, contributing over 35 articles in the space of the past five years. She also authored a book on the workings of humorous one-liners and witticisms entitled Humorous Garden-Paths: A Pragmatic-Cognitive Study and is the editor of The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains. Lucía Fernández-Amaya is a Lecturer in English at the Department of Philology and Translation, Pablo de Olavide University (Seville). She holds a Ph.D. in English Linguistics from the University of Seville. She currently co-ordinates the research group SETIC (Service Encounters, Tourism and Intercultural Communication). Her research interests and publications focus on pragmatics and translation, sociopragmatics (politeness), interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural communication in service encounters. Maicol Formentelli received his PhD from the University of Pavia and is currently lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli. His main interests include the study of varieties of English of both native and non-native speakers with a focus on sociolinguistic, pragmatic and interactional aspects of language, the investigation of interpersonal relations in academic interactions in English lingua franca, the analysis of film dialogue and of audio-visual translation processes. Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her work focuses on im-politeness models, genre theory, identity theory and (traditional/new) media discourse. Recent publications include papers in international journals such as the Journal of Pragmatics, the Journal of Politeness Research, and Intercultural Pragmatics, and two co-edited collection “Pragmatics and context”(Antares) and “Real Talk: Reality TV and discourse analysis in action” (Palgrave). She has also recently edited a special issue for Intercultural Pragmatics and another one for the Journal of Politeness Research. She is the co-editor of the series Advances in Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis – Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Joana Garmendia obtained her PhD in Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, with a dissertation on the pragmatics of irony. She has been (2008–2010) a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Language and Information’s (CSLI) Pragmatics Project (Stanford University), and she is now a Juan de la Cierva researcher at the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI) of the University of the Basque Country. Her main research interests include irony, non-literal speech, fictional discourse, and the semantics and pragmatics of Basque. Her recent publications have been devoted to those fields: “Irony is Critical”, Pragmatics and Cognition (2010); “She is (not) a fine friend: ‘saying’ and criticism in irony”, Intercultural Pragmatics (2011). Anna Gladkova teaches linguistics and applied linguistics at the University of New England, Australia. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University in 2008. Her major research interests are in the areas of semantics, linguistic anthropology, cross-cultural communication and intercultural pragmatics. Agnieszka Grzywna is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Silesia. Her research interests include pragmatics and studies of political discourse. She focuses on aspects of persuasion and manipulation as well as on the role of argumentation and discourse markers in political speeches. Victoria Guillén-Nieto holds a Ph.D. in English Studies (Universidad de Alicante 1994). As a senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Alicante, she coordinated the Master’s degree in English and Spanish for Specific Purposes. She co-edited (with Carmen Marimón-Llorca and Chelo Vargas-Sierra) the book Intercultural Business Communication and Simulation and Gaming Methodology, vol. 83, Linguistic Insights series (Peter Lang, 2009). Elly Ifantidou is Assistant Professor in Linguistics at University of Athens, Faculty of English Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics (University College London). Among her publications are articles published in the Journal of Pragmatics (Elsevier), Pragmatics and Cognition (John Benjamins), Pragmatics (International Pragmatics Association). She also published papers in edited volumes. She has co-edited (with C. Lascaratou and A. Despotopoulou) the book “Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives” (2008), Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Her book on Evidentials and Relevance was published by John Benjamins in 2001.

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Chih-Ying Lin is currently an assistant professor at Feng Chia University, Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, U.K. Her research interests lie in interlanguage pragmatics, cross-/intercultural pragmatics, and politeness. Recent publications include papers in Journal of Pragmatics and Intercultural Pragmatics. Nuria Lorenzo-Dus is Professor at Swansea University, UK, where she is the director of the Language Research Centre. Her research expertise lies in the fields of interactional sociolinguistics and media discourse analysis. She has published widely in journals, including Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Politeness Research and Media, Culture & Society. She is the author of Television Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan 2009) and the editor of Spanish at Work (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). Laura Maguire has been dedicated to teaching since she started her professional and academic career, first at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and now at IE Business School where she is a lecturer and the Executive Director of the Doctoral Programs Department. She has a diverse teaching portfolio which goes across disciplines; from applied linguistics to Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources. Her research interests are bilingualism, second language acquisition, and contextual factors affecting classroom discourse. Katya Mandoki initiated the study of everyday aesthetics publishing six books on this subject: Everyday Aesthetics (2007), Estética cotidiana y juegos de la cultura (2006), Prácticas estéticas e identidades sociales (2006), La construcción estética del Estado y de la identidad nacional (2007), Estética y comunicación (2006), Prosaica; introducción a la estética de lo cotidiano (1994) and various articles on this and related subjects. She is the vice president of the International Association for Aesthetics, as well as honorary president and founder of the Mexican Association for Aesthetic Studies. Sergio Maruenda-Bataller, PhD, is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat de València, Spain. His research interests are in Social and Cognitive Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis (semantic and discourse prosodies) and Translation. He has recently published articles on the negotiation of meaning in discourse through lexical pragmatics and an introduction to teaching translation.

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Marinelly Piñango is a PhD Candidate at the English Studies Department of Universidad Complutense, where she is finishing her Doctoral dissertation in the field of intercultural pragmatics. Her research focuses on understanding the dynamics that arise in intercultural communication and the relationship between language and context. Wei Ren is currently an assistant professor at Feng Chia University, Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, U.K. Her research interests lie in interlanguage pragmatics, cross-/intercultural pragmatics, and politeness. Recent publications include papers in Journal of Pragmatics and Intercultural Pragmatics. Jesús Romero-Trillo is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He specializes in the pragmaticsintonation interface in English. He is a member of the editorial board of “Journal of Pragmatics” and the Review Editor of “Intercultural Pragmatics”. He edited the volume “Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics: A Mutualistic Entente”, (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), and is the director of the CLAN (Corpus of Language and Nature) Project. Prof. Romero-Trillo is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics (Springer) José Santaemilia-Ruiz is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Universitat de València, as well as a legal and literary translator. His main research interests are gender/sex and language, sexual language and translation. He has edited Género, lenguaje y traducción (Valencia, 2003), Gender, sex and translation: The manipulation of identities (Manchester, 2005), and Woman and Translation: Geographies, Voices and Identities (MONTI – 2011), with Louise von Flotow. Carmen Santamaría-García holds a PhD in Linguistics from Complutense University, Madrid, and is a tenured Professor of Linguistics at Alcalá University, Madrid. Her teaching includes pragmatics, discourse analysis and methodology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. These are also her areas of research together with corpus linguistics and computer-mediated communication. Her latest work, focusing on the combination of corpus linguistics with conversation and discourse analysis has recently appeared in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, (John Benjamins).

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Alla Smirnova graduated from Samara State University, Samara, Russia, with a degree in English Linguistics and obtained the degree of the candidate of philological sciences from St. Petersburg State University. The results of her thesis were published in the Sage journal “Discourse and Communication”. She has been working as a technical translator/interpreter and an independent researcher. Her main research interests include Intercultural Pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Argumentation Studies. Geneviève Tréguer-Felten, following a career in business communication for various multinational firms in France, USA, and China, obtained her PhD in linguistics from Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle, France. Her research, centering on English as a lingua franca corporate documents and business emails, is of an interdisciplinary nature. She is also a member of Cediscor-Syled, a Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle discourse analysis laboratory, and of Gestion & Société, an intercultural management CNRS laboratory. Helen Woodfield is currently Senior Lecturer in TESOL & Applied Linguistics and Programme Director of the MSc TESOL at the University of Bristol Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include interlanguage pragmatics, verbal report in second language research, cross-cultural communication and politeness. Recent publications include articles in Multilingua and Evaluation and Research in Education. With Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis (University of Nicosia, Cyprus) she has co-edited a volume on interlanguage request modification (2012, John Benjamins).

Introduction Intercultural Pragmatics is a thriving new discipline that stems from the realization that communication across languages and cultures has become the new challenge for pragmatics research in the 21st century. According to Kecskes (2011: 371) Intercultural Pragmatics investigates how the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages, communicate in a common language and, usually, represent different cultures. This theoretical stance poses a new step forward in the classical studies on communication, both for bi- and multilingual speakers and for the interactions between speakers of different languages (cf. Kecskes 2004). The primary focus of Intercultural Pragmatics, therefore, is not the description of the diverse ways of realizing a certain function or grammatical feature in different linguistic systems (as in Contrastive Linguistics), nor the study of the way an idea is conceptualized in two languages (as in Cross-Cultural Linguistics). In this sense, Intercultural Pragmatics deviates from a purely mechanical approach to linguistic analysis and considers that the language user is the active repository of an indefinite number of features that permeate from cultural and linguistic experiences that solidify in discourse. The philosophical prerequisites for this approach are at the same time challenging and mundane: we, as speakers of a language, can only perform our linguistic activity in the light of the surrounding socio-cultural context but, at the same time, our individual comprehension of language is dependent upon our biographical socio-cultural experience. Intercultural Pragmatics represents an alternative view at the main issues of pragmatics. It does not intend to offer a radically different view from what has been known as the Gricean pragmatics but, rather, its purpose is to look at intercultural interaction from a multilingual rather than a monolingual perspective. Intercultural Pragmatics is based on the idea that interculturality is not only interactionally and socially constructed in the course of communication but that it relies on relatively definable cultural models and norms that represent the speech communities the interlocutors belong to. Consequently, interculturality can be considered an interim rule system that has both relatively normative and emergent components. The normative components are represented by cultural constructs and models that change diachronically, while cultural representation and speech production by individuals changes synchronically. In intercultural communication interlocutors develop intercultures that are situationally emergent and co-constructed phenomena. These both on relatively definable cultural norms and models and on situationally evolving features (Kecskes 2011). These intercultures are created in a communicative process in which these cultural norms and models, brought into the interaction from the prior experience of

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interlocutors, blend with features created ad hoc during the interaction synergetically. The result is an intercultural discourse in which there is mutual transformation of knowledge and of communicative behavior. The emphasis, therefore, is on transformation rather than on transmission. With these premises in mind, Intercultural Pragmatics has witnessed an enormous development in recent times as it represents a creative discipline that combines research and practice to find the solution to “the dilemma … between the two extreme positions: safeguarding the culture-as-culture while attending to the needs of the users” (Mey, 2004: 28). The dilemma suggested by Mey is in fact one of the most salient in the sociological theories that advocate for the increasing role of culture on the understanding of the evolution of history intertwined with social relations. As Touraine (2005) pointed out in his classic theoretical proposal, for centuries the world was depicted in dual terms such as order and chaos, peace and war, power and the State, the king and the nation, etc. With the industrial revolution and the advent of capitalism a new social and multifaceted economic paradigm began with categories such as the social class, the proletariat, strikes and trade unionism, etc. Nowadays, two centuries after the triumph of economy over politics, these traditional social categories have blurred and are being replaced by a new paradigm that considers the primacy of cultures in the organization of the present world, especially after the 9/11 attacks. This new prism illustrates the difficult balance between the search for an individual identity in contrast with the unavoidable identification of the self with the group of origin; a dichotomy that often results in social conflict (Romero-Trillo, 2011). This phenomenon, that we shall call the ‘identification quandary’, finds an impromptu representation in language as it depicts one’s identity against the backdrop of our cultures. In fact, Intercultural Pragmatics does not aim at the classification and analysis of linguistic phenomena per se, but only inasmuch as the linguistic data mirrors the interactional challenges that intercultural communication poses for individuals. In this sense, while bearing in mind that the aim of science is to look for paradigms to explain reality, Intercultural Pragmatics considers the mobility of the present world as an asset to understand language in new cultural contexts and to search for analytical mechanisms that can explain the new social relations arising from globalization. Intercultural Pragmatics relies on the analysis of the dynamic keys that can understand reality on the basis of what we read and hear in a multimedia oriented world context, with the belief that language is shaped by culture and is the medium through which culture is created. The present volume is an attempt to take a kaleidoscopic look at current issues in the realm of Intercultural Pragmatics. Its chapters portray insightful analyses of real language situations in English, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese,

References   

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Spanish, Greek, Filipino or Polish. Through these examples, the contributors approach some of the topics that have been theorized in the recent evolution of the discipline because, as Fetzer & Oishi (2011: 4) suggest, ‘the multilayered outlook on context requires an analytic frame of reference based on methodological compositionality’. The content of the volume is organized in three sections that somehow encompass the primary applications of intercultural pragmatics: the linguistic and cognitive domain, the social and cultural domain, and the discourse and stylistics domain. Istvan Kecskes Jesús Romero-Trillo

References Fetzer, Anita and Etsuko Oishi. 2011. Introduction. In Fetzer, Anita and Etsuko Oishi (eds.), Context and Contexts, 1–10. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kecskes, Istvan. 2004. Editorial: Lexical merging, conceptual blending, and cultural crossing, Intercultural Pragmatics 1. 1–26. Kecskes, Istvan. 2011. Intercultural pragmatics. In Dawn Archer and Peter Grundy (eds.), Pragmatics Reader, 371–387. London: Routledge. Mey, Jacob L. 2004. Between culture and pragmatics: Scylla and Charybdis? The precarious condition of intercultural pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics 1. 27–48. Romero-Trillo, Jesús. 2011. The Representation of Liminality Conflicts in the Media. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 6. 143–158. Touraine, Alain. 2005. Un nouveau paradigm. Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris.

Linguistic and cognitive aspects

Fabienne Baider

Hate: Saliency Features in Cross-cultural Semantics The popular dictionary meaning of hate and the sociological meaning that underlay the adoption of the term should be reconciled with its cultural and political context. (B. Perry, A crime by any other name, 2005.)

Introduction This study attempts to define Cypriot-Greek and Franco-French intra-culturality on the basis of oral and written synchronic data in reference to the emotion called hatred. Our first, and most practical, aim is to make recommendations targeting the lexical needs of exchange students – this will not only improve language learning but will enhance cross-cultural communication among the students. On the theoretical level, the collected data allow identification of public knowledge and the salient collective features (Kecskes 2008) related to the lexical unit hatred within each community as well as variations of salient features across both communities. Indeed, if we consider the Dynamic Model of Meaning Framework (Kecskes 2008), then we will see that the role of public knowledge (common to all individuals in a given community) in defining certain facets of the private context (specific to one individual and based on his/her unique experience) may be different even within the culture: this variation in saliency suggests that an alignment of the public knowledge with the private context is valid for some, but not all, communities within the same society.

1 What is Hatred? Love is a much-debated, studied and commented-upon emotion in semantics and pragmatics: it is the topic of many an article by semanticists in cross-cultural studies such as Anna Wierzbicka. But hatred?

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1.1 Mental state vs. structural patterns Very few articles are devoted to the semantics of hatred. Harré and Parrott’s (1996) book investigating mainly negative emotions is dedicated to the lexical units embarrassment, guilt, shame, grief, regret, shyness– but hatred is not to be found. If not popular in semantics, this feeling is nevertheless of great interest to the cultural artifacts world: how many novels depict hateful relationships, how many movies? Hatred would appear to be a very popular topic among a particular society, even if it is not so to semanticists. Most research is actually sociologically based (Kahan and Nussbaum 1996; Rosebury 2003; Sullivan 1999) and considers hatred as a cognitively based motivation since it is an evaluative and negative judgement of the target of the emotion; it is thus motivated by beliefs, attitudes and thoughts. However, Perry’s (2005) study focusing on the outcomes of the emotion (hate crime and hate speech) concludes that violence triggered by hatred “relies heavily on the history and persistence of relations of advantage and disadvantage” (2005: 135). Therefore, any feeling of hatred has to draw on available cultural sources for meaning (i.e., motivation) and legitimacy. Hatred is hence not an individual state of mind or emotion but is embedded in institutionalised practices, discourses, and everyday practices (Perry 2005: 121). Hatred is thus considered as much a mental state (based on the private knowledge of an individual) as the foreseeable and rational consequence of a system of beliefs inculcated in the society (based on the public knowledge of a given community). It resonates with a network of norms, assumptions, behaviors and policies that are structurally connected and have to be built again and again. This description agrees with a social-cognitivist perspective in which everyday situations trigger thoughts and activities which are then verbalized. This cultural model builds what is called the “public context” in word-meaning value, a value shaped as much by encyclopedic knowledge as by individual knowledge acquired through prior experiences and social encounters (Kecskes 2009:18). Indeed, the Semantic Natural Metalanguage Framework (see Wierzbicka and Jamrozik 1988; Wierzbicka 1992, 1999 for the first publications on emotions) showed that most words are not culturally neutral and bring with them certain culture-specific ways of thinking. We believe, therefore, that investigating cultural lexical associations could explain some language practices and some communication misunderstandings.

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1.2 Cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, cross-cognition Extensive work in cross-linguistics and cross-cultural emotions carried out by Pavlenko (2005, 2008) has shown the complexity of mapping form to meaning in monolingual and bilingual communities. Further, Wierzbicka (2006) explains that we cannot take for granted equivalence between two languages; we have to strive as linguists and from a linguistic point of view to define the verbal and conceptual history of words, the cultural values and assumptions reflected in them considered as “markers of culture”. These differences across languages define what we have called intra-culturality (Baider and Charalambidou 2008; Baider 2010), and they can be analysed as cultural markers which carry implicit social norms and values. Indeed, according to Leontiev (1978) and Vygotsky (1962 [1934]), these markers carry implicit social norms and values as much as national stereotypes. If words encode socio-history and social encounters, it would seem quite difficult for learners of French or Greek to acquire this understanding in the classroom. While most textbooks teach lexical and grammatical competency, learning a language at the second level (L2) is not about learning linguistic expressions but about learning to think in another culture, which implies reconstructing cognitively and culturally what has been learned/taught in level one (L1). In fact, the Common European Reference Framework (CERC) recognizes that intra-cultural meaning values in L1 will reflect the conceptual base of speakers of one community and will influence the comprehension and the production in L2. The CECR (2005, 2006) acknowledges competency in inter-culturality and pragmatics as the fifth competence to be evaluated in language teaching and learning. If the importance of socio-cultural elements should not be underestimated, how can the intra-cultural meanings of specific lexical units and expressions be evaluated?

1.3 Socio-cognitivist frame As Kecskes (2009:5) states, the socio-cognitive approach defines intra- and interculturality as a phenomenon that is inter-actionally and socially constructed, and one that relies on definable cultural models and norms that represent speech communities. The cultural models and norms defining hatred in the FrancoFrench and the Greek-Cypriot communities are the aims of this study. According to Kecskes (2008: 393) a lexical unit can be described with two values, the denotational diachronic relatively constant and objective feature (the coresense) and the actual contextual sense in an interaction (the consense). More precisely, a lexical unit such as hatred can be described as a blend of:

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   Fabienne Baider

General world knowledge: a summary of the most familiar, regular, typical and general, but not always frequent, uses of a word. Word-specific semantic properties (lexicalized part of the world knowledge). Culture-specific conceptual properties or CSCP (culture specific part of the world knowledge).

If the general world knowledge depends on extra-linguistic factors, culturespecific conceptual properties are anchored in the everyday and repetitive use of the language and are the basis for conceptual associations, available to each speaker of that speech community. Hence, if we take the two words for hate (haine and μίσος)¹ we should evaluate the common ground (or assumed shared knowledge) to identify the a priori mental representation which contributes to the socio-cultural background communication (Kecskes 2009). In the socio-cognitive approach (SCA), saliency (the relative importance of an entity in the memory) and egocentrism are important contributors of meaning that can explain the interface of culture and language. Indeed, as interlocutors we rely partly on this mental representation as the most salient knowledge to understand the other, and partly to understand our own reactions and thoughts. Since the CSCP is derived from specific social experiences, it will be different for each community and for each individual. However, it will also contribute the most to the production and interpretation of a lexical unit: “Salient meanings of lexical units are processed automatically, irrespective of contextual information and strength of bias” (Giora 2003: 24, emphasis mine). These salient meanings also carry implicit social norms and values which can be the source of inter-cultural misunderstandings (and intra-cultural misunderstanding when considering subcultures of a given society). Therefore, identifying intra-cultural saliency should be one of the goals of socio-cognitivists, even more so since the second driving notion in the SCA is egocentrism. Egocentrism relates to the fact that speakers activate what they perceive as the most salient information in the construction and comprehension of utterances (Kecskes, 2009:18). Since egocentric endeavors of interlocutors play a decisive role in the initial stages of production and comprehension of an L2 learner (Kecskes 2009: 332), it is important to know the potential salient meanings of the speakers of L2 as well as those possible meanings in their own language.

1 Only a small sample of data will be examined here. A complete description and analysis is published elsewhere (Baider, 2008 and 2010). This research is part of a project (2010–2012) entitled Contrastive Semantics and Intra-cultural Knowledge: from Identity to Identification, Internal Research Grant, University of Cyprus.

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2 CSCP of Hatred in French and Greek Communities To establish the relatively definable knowledge used by individuals belonging to a specific speech community and brought into interactions, we considered conceptual saliency as the main target of our study.

2.1 Methodology As Giora explained (2003), new information will be filtered through prior experience; thus, saliency is the most important function in language processing. Since saliency has been defined as the most frequent, familiar and conventional data, we organised our collected data according to these criteria: – for both communities, the most conventional conceptual associations related to hate were found in lexicographic definitions, common sayings, and proverbs; – for the two countries, the most frequent conceptual associations were identified in the discourse of the three most popular daily newspapers–each of which tends to reflect the policies of the main political parties.² This written linguistic evidence embodies cross-cultural experiences for French and Greek-Cypriot communities; Goddard (2009) considers these as definers of culture. With regard to the oral data: – the most familiar conceptual associations were drawn from individual interviews in which participants explained what associations they make with the word hatred and why; – the most accessible conceptual associations were found in the individual questionnaires which asked for free associations with the word hate and can be analyzed by frequencies. To establish this oral corpus we followed, in part, Averill’s methodology (Averill et  al. 1991; Averill 1996) and that of Kecskes (2001). In his 2001 study, Kecskes gave a list of words and expressions to a group of English speakers and a group of non-native speakers and asked them to write down what came to their mind when they saw or heard a given lexical unit. Their first answer was the most salient

2 Three main daily newspapers representing different political trends for both countries: France: Libération, Le Monde and Le Figaro; Cyprus: Simerini, Politis, Phileleftheros.

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context that came to their minds based on their prior individual experience with the use of the word. This exercise pointed to the fact that words have meaning values without actual situational context. Our objective is then to identify the meaning values of hatred outside interaction. Our data are drawn from two different studies carried out over a period of two years (2008–2010). Studies 1 and 2 involved the same procedure: a questionnaire asking informants (in France and in Cyprus) to freely associate words with the word hatred.³ Studies 3 and 4 explored, with the informants themselves, the model of hatred that could be deducted from their answers.

2.2 Results for written data (public knowledge) Our main written sources of information on word meaning are dictionaries and common sayings.

2.2.1 Dictionaries and proverbs Both the French dictionary, Trésor de la langue française informatisée, and the Greek dictionary, Babiniotis, characterize the feeling of hatred (haine and μίσος) as a feeling of deep antipathy towards the other. The French dictionary emphasizes the will to harm the object of hatred, a frequent answer in the interviews (Table 1). Proverbs in both communities, as shown in Table 2,⁴ are very few and give two main associations for hatred: jealousy and nastiness. However it is also classified as a positive emotion (the will of the strong-hearted for French; better hated than pitied for Greek), a classification not found in the journalistic discourse.⁵

3 The details of the methodology are given in Baider (2010). More than 350 questionnaires were distributed in both countries, France and the Republic of Cyprus, based on a representative sample of the populations according to INSEE statistics (France) and CYSTAT (Statistical Service of Republic of Cyprus); both variables age and sex were taken into account. Fifteen videos were recorded in both countries, and participants were able to explain answers found in questionnaires, to narrate spontaneously an event related to a specific emotion, and to give their own definitions of that specific emotion. A Greek Cypriot young woman carried out the interviews for the Cypriot data. 4 Panagiotis Platis (1992) Collection of proverbs and sayings, Derineia, Cyprus. Leandros Proudzos (1991) Cypriot Proverbs, Konos, Nicosia. Pavlos Xioutas (1985) Proverbs and the Cypriot people, Foundation Archbishop Makariou,Nicosia. 5 See Baider (in press) for an extensive discussion of lexicographic data found in most major French and Greek dictionaries as far as hatred and anger are concerned. These data proved to be quite reliable as far as saliency is concerned.

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Table 1: Lexicographic definitions in Greek and French.

Greek dictionaries

French dictionaries: TLFi

Μίσος: εχθρική διάθεση, έντονη απέχθεια, αντιπάθεια […] Hate: hostility, intense dislike, antipathy […] Μίσος: Αίσθημα έντονης αντιπάθειας και εχθρότητας […]. Συνώνυμο: απέχθεια, αποστροφή. Αντίθετο: Αγάπη. Hate: Feeling of intense dislike and hostility […]. Synonym: disgust, revulsion. Antonym: love

Haine: Sentiment de profonde antipathie à l’égard de quelqu’un, conduisant parfois à souhaiter l’abaissement ou la mort de celui-ci. Synon. exécration, ressentiment; anton. amour. Hate: A feeling of deep antipathy towards somebody, sometimes leading to a wish for the downfall or the death of the person. Syn. resentment, horror. Ant. love

Table 2: Proverbs.

Greek proverbs

French proverbs

Όσον μισώ τα κάρταμα, στα γένια μου βλαστούσιν. As much as I hate this plan it grows on my beard. Απ´αγαπάς ξατίμαζε τζι απού μισάς σιαιρέτα. Curse the ones you love and say hello to the ones you hate Ο πεζός μισεί τον καβαλλάρη. The man on foot hates the man on a horse Το μίσος με άλλο μίσος δε σβήνει. Hate does not go away another. Ας με μισούν όλοι και ας με αγαπά ο Θεός. Let them all hate me and let God love me Καλύτερα να με μισούν παρά να με λυπούνται. Better that they hate me than they feel pity for me Η αγάπη και τα μίση δεν κρατούν πολύ καιρό. Love and hate do not last long Η μέρα περνάει το μίσος δεν περνάει. The day passes by but not the hate.

La haine est sainte. Elle est l’indignation des cœurs forts et puissants. Hatred is holy. It is the righteous anger of strong and powerful hearts. Il semble que l’on soit moins jaloux par amour que par haine. It seems that we feel more jealous when we hate than when we love. L’aversion s’accroît de tous les efforts que l’on fait pour la vaincre. Aversion grows with each effort we make to overcome it.

Media discourse provides the synchronic meaning construction of the word since meaning is created partially through the repeated use in relatively similar contexts. These written discourses become, as much as they create, a part of the core knowledge of a particular lexical item in a specific culture.

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2.2.2 Newspaper discourse Thirty articles containing the word haine or μίσος were investigated over a threeyear period; the articles were taken from three newspapers in each country to diversify the news topic. The data were analyzed with the software AntConc to establish: (1) the most frequent co-occurrences; and (2) the most frequent words in paragraphs containing the word haine or μίσος hatred (see Table 3).

Table 3: Lexical fields for Cypriot-Greek and Franco-French newspapers.

Lexical fields for Cypriot -Greek

Lexical fields for Franco-French

Events and source of the feeling: The prototypical belligerents in the Cyprus conflict: Turkey: 21 (Turkish, Turkey) Cyprus: 20 (Cyprus, Cypriot (s)) Greece: 8 (Greece and Greek (s)) Britain: 3 Israel: 9 (Israel and Jews in relation to Turkey) Armed conflict: 19 (Soldiers, war, attack, commando, EOKA) Politics: 34 (members, parties, politics, fascist, nazi, government) People: 13 Sport: 3 (Football teams) Entertainment: 12 (Film, TV) Cause and consequences to the person: Death and dead (8)

Events and source of the feeling: 45% relate to French politics (Le Pen 25, extreme-right; State council, Chirac, Sarkozy, politics, party, power, government, etc.) 12% describe what hate is (injustice, psychology, human condition, hate speech, the movie La Haine, etc.). Cause and consequences to the person: 43% describe social consequences of hate (war, fear, violence, death, demonstration, social crimes, victims, etc.). In particular, 19% relate it to religious and racial groups (Muslims, Jewish, Blacks, etc.) and other minorities (youth);

In the Cypriot newspapers three lexical fields were defined: – 65% of the co-occurrences relate to the Cyprus conflict (with the prototypical belligerents  – Turkey, Cyprus, Greece and Britain, and the armed conflict– soldiers, war, attack, commando, EOKA); – 20% of the co-occurrences relate to politics (members, parties, politics,fascist, nazi, government); – 15% of the co-occurrences relate to ordinary life (crimes, social entertainment, violence in sports). The meaning of the lexical unit in the Cypriot newspapers is confined primarily to the political world at the expense of other social or cultural dimensions – a fact that has been noted earlier by socio-political scientists (Cockburn 2004;

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Hadjipavlou 2010). Analysis of the oral data, however, shows a conceptualization rooted in a more general human cognitive experience. In French newspapers, politics also dominate the associations (especially with the extreme right), but social manifestations of hatred such as anti-Semitism or racism (especially against Muslims) are more prominent than in the Cypriot newspapers (see Appendix 1): – 45% relate to French politics (Le Pen, extreme-right, State council, Chirac, Sarkozy, politics, party, power, government, etc.); – 43% describe social consequences of hatred: (war, fear, violence, death, demonstration, social crimes, victims, etc.) – more specifically, 19% relate to religious and racial groups (Muslims, Jewish, Blacks, etc.) and other minorities (youth); – 12% describe what hatred is (injustice, psychology, human condition, hate speech, the movie La Haine, etc.). Both the French and the Greek public discourse relate to hatred as a political entity and a social phenomenon. However, in the French newspapers, we see a balancing act between these two categories, national politics and social problems. Further, in the French newspapers the social dimension focused on all minorities, religious and racial, while in the Greek newspapers, this dimension is less frequent. A discourse on what hatred is and why it still prevails is very much part of the French data, which is not true for Cyprus as the political division tends to overwhelm any other issue. Oral data will corroborate the lexical and conceptual associations made as far as the social dimension is concerned and for both communities.

2.3 Results for oral data (private knowledge) In order to establish a comparison of our two corpora (French and Greek), we adopted the typology as found in Goossens (2005), whereby the most frequent words are divided according to: – lexical items related to the source of the feeling (external cause); – lexical items related to the power exerted on the experiencer by the feeling; – words related to the definition of the feeling.

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2.3.1 Salient socio-cultural associations in interviews As for the definitions of hatred (haine and μίσος), both communities associate the feeling with the category of negative and extreme emotion (see Table 4). Table 4: Comparative salient socio-cultural associations in interviews.

Lexical fields for Cypriot – Greek

Lexical fields for Franco – French

Description of the feeling: – with synonyms: a sad feeling, a bad feeling; – with antonyms: love, the opposite of love – with metaphors: a knife, a shield, – with definitions: a feeling one should suppress; a sharp item piercing a soft item – does not exist; nonexistent

Description of the feeling: – with synonyms: xenophobia, anti-semitism, racism, – with antonyms: the opposite of love – does not exist, does not make sense, an unknown feeling – with definitions: a negative emotion, a very strong feeling, extreme, a dangerous feeling, a brief feeling – the movie “La haine”

Sources of the feeling: – Events: taking way something we liked or loved; enemies; snake, cockroaches, spiders – Feelings: fear brings hate; nastiness brings hate to the victim; lies brings out hate; jealousy; – People: opposite football team, women (they bring pain and therefore hate) – Things: something extreme (out of norm), something or someone who wants to harm you, passion power of the feeling on the experience: Consequences to the person – Feelings: sadness; repulsion and disgust; discomfort, unhappiness, nastiness, will to do wrong to someone – Action: arguments, disputes, divorces, will to harm the other one

Sources of the feeling: – People: the Other – Feelings: our own weakness, our inability to forgive, contempt and ignorance – Events: misunderstanding, injustice power of the feeling on the experiencer: Consequences to the person: – Feelings: anger, revenge, loss of control because of the power of the feeling, to dislike someone intensely but briefly. – Action: to want to harm the person, to destroy, to want to vent one’s feeling, to want to blame someone

Et, mais la haine, c’est un sentiment aussi très fort qui peut être, qui peut nous prendre le dessus et que peut, et que nous, que peut nous faire perdre notre contrôle, notre maîtrise de soi […]. Et c’est un sentiment très dangereux quand même, And well, hatred is a very strong feeling which can, maybe, overwhelm us and which can, and which we, which can make us lose control, our self-control […]. And it is a very dangerous feeling all together.

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έβαλα τη λέξη […] πάθος γιατί θεωρώ ότι το μίσος εν ένα πάθος που έχει ο άνθρωπος. I put the word passion⁶ because I believe that hate is a passion that human beings have. μισάς κάτι… κακό. Κάποιος που σου προκαλεί κακό. Κάτι που το θεωρείς υπερβολικό, κάτι που… you hate something… something bad. Someone who harms you. Something that you consider to be extreme.

However, in both communities some informants declared not understanding what it is, since they never felt nor understood such a passion. parce que franchement, avoir de la haine, je sais pas le mot haine, pour moi c’est un peu, ça n’a pas de sens. Haine, ça n’a pas de sens. because to speak frankly, to feel hateful, I don’t know the word hatred, it does not make sense. Hatred, it does not make sense. Στο μίσος έβαλα ανύπαρκτο, […]. Ανύπαρκτο δεν υπάρχει για μένα το μίσος, και μόνο γνωρίζω την ύπαρξή του. For hate I wrote nonexistent, […]. Nonexistent because hatred does not exist for me […] I only know of its existence.

However, as our study data found for the public discourse, social realities such as xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism⁷ are only mentioned in the French interviews: Pour le mot haine, j’ai mis xénophobie, antisémitisme, racisme pour faire simple. Parce que je considère que c’est la haine de l’autre en fait… As for the word hatred, I wrote xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism to simplify. Because I consider that hatred is always the hatred of the Other.

The consequences of the feeling of hatred toward a person describe the situation of victims of extreme and negative feeling, as this was found in the lexicographic discourse (will to harm, rage and anger, etc.): έγραψα τη λέξη καβγάς ε διότι όταν μισάς κάποιον το μόνο που θέλεις είναι να κάμεις καβγά μαζί του… Τζαι έγραψα τζαι τη λέξη κακία διότι θέλεις να κάμεις κακό σε κάποιον που μισάς, τζαι τζείνος που σε μισά θέλει να σου κάμει εσένα κακό.

6 The word πάθος has a more negative connotation in Greek than the word passion in French or passion in English, according to our research (Baider 2010). The quotes are written in the Greek Cypriot vernacular. 7 There was no mention of sexism.

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I wrote the word argue because when you hate someone the only thing that you want is to argue with him… and I also wrote the word evilness / nastiness because you want to harm the one you hate and the one who hates you wants to do something bad to you.

However, the sources of the feeling (and the referential dimension of the sign hatred) are quite different. In the Greek Cypriot data hatred is projected onto specific referents (for instance women or football team) and the informants seem to identify with the experiencer of the feeling. Γυναίκες επειδή εν ούλλες πελλές! Ομόνοια, Ολυμπιακός Πειραιώς αντίπαλες ομάδες. Χωρισμός επειδή πληγώνεσαι άμα χωρίσεις. Women because they are all crazy! Omonia, Olympiacos Piraeus,⁸ the opposing teams. Break up /divorce because you get hurt when you break up. Όταν ακούω τη λέξη μίσος το πρώτο πράμα που μου έρχεται στο μυαλό είναι η αντίπαλος ομάδα, η Ομόνοια γιατί… είναι ο αιώνιος αντίπαλος μας και δεν μου αρέσει να κερδίζει. When I hear the word hatred the first thing that comes to my mind is the opponent team, Omonia because….it has been our opponent for years and I don’t like it when they win.

In the French data, the informant analyzes the source of hatred from an introspective dimension  – this was also attested in the French journalistic discourse. In particular, hatred is associated with weakness and ignorance or/ and as the outcome of a defective social system (injustice and misunderstanding), but the informants did not give specific targets. Par opposition justement au mot colère, non, haine, j’ai mis mépris, ignorance et antécédents, parce que la haine ça n’est pas comme ça, il faut quelque chose qui l’ait provoqué. Ça vient aussi souvent de l’ignorance, parce que… On s’énerve et on développe un sentiment de haine contre ce qu’on ne connaît pas en général. Et mépris parce que souvent la haine s’accompagne de mépris tout simplement. In contrast to the word anger, for hatred, I put despise/ contempt, ignorance and previous events, because hatred is like that, there must have been something to provoke the feeling. It also comes often from ignorance, because… one gets irritated and then there develops a feeling of hatred against that which we do not know or understand, in general. Contempt because, simply put, often hatred goes hand-in-hand with contempt. Pour la haine, j’ai pensé aussi, enfin, à l’incompréhension, l’injustice, à une émotion négative; au contraire, le mot haine c’est le contraire de l’amour.

8 These are football team names. Football is not only a passion in Cyprus but it also defines which political ‘camp’ you are in (with all the social consequences and networks it entails), traditionally with the OMONIA team representing the left wing partisans and APOEL the right wing party.

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For hatred, I also thought of lack of understanding, injustice, of a negative emotion; for its opposite: hatred is the opposite of love.

2.3.2 Salient socio-cultural associations in the questionnaires As in the interviews, the questionnaires illustrate tensions between the broad human experience, presumably held by all human beings, and the specificities for each social and cultural situation, the socially specific variations. Regarding these markers, Table  5 shows first the core element related to hatred: anger, an element not mentioned in any of the lexicographic definitions, nor in any proverbs. Both communities experience similar sources of hatred (war, enemies, nastiness and violence), and consequences on the experiencer are also typical of the human condition (nastiness, violence and vengeance). These lexical units could constitute the inherent salience – characterized as a preference for a lexical unit built into our conceptual and linguistic knowledge because of our human condition.

Table 5: Comparative salient socio-cultural associations in questionnaires.*

Lexical fields for Cypriot – Greek

Lexical fields for Franco – French

Synonyms of ‘hate’ related to the intensity of the feeling: απέχθεια ‘aversion, disgust’ (3.2%)

Synonyms of ‘hate’ related to the intensity of the feeling: détester ‘to dislike intensely’ (10%), rage ‘rage’ (4%)

Sources of the feeling: Εχθρός ‘enemy’ (12%), πόλεμος ‘war’ (6.8%), τούρκος ‘Turk(s)’ (16.8%), ζήλια ‘jealousy’ (4%), αδικία ‘injustice’ (3.6%), κακία ‘nastiness’ (15.2%) power of the feeling on the experiencer: Θυμός ‘anger’ (16.4%), νευρά ‘nervousness’ (4.8%), πόνος ‘pain’ (4%), απογοήτευση ‘disappointment’ (3.2%), εκδίκηση ‘vengeance’ (3.2%).

sources of the feeling: Méchanceté ‘nastiness’ (13%); guerre ‘war’ (8%), racisme ‘racism’ (6%), ennemi (6%), Violence (6%) power of the feeling on the experience: Colère and rage ‘anger, rage’ (24%), détester ‘dislike’ (15%), Violence (6%), vengeance (8%), rancœur and rancune ‘resentment’ (8%).

* some answers are in several categories since questionnaires cannot clarify whether it is the source of the feeling or the feeling is a consequence of an action

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However the differences in the sociological realities of the two communities are quite telling. The words racism and xenophobia found in the French interviews and the questionnaires recall the movie La haine (1995), describing the problematic relationship between races in urban France and the often violent relationship between the urban youth of different ethnic backgrounds living in the banlieue or cite⁹ and the police. The word war may just as easily refer to this urban warfare lived daily in these suburbs as to the traditional open conflict between two countries. On the other hand, if racism is not mentioned in the Cypriot corpus, the Cyprus problem and its archetypical enemies, as it was true in the newspaper discourse, figure prominently in the answers. These associations define the 1974 conflict which led to the actual division into two parts of both the island and the capital city. Finally, and in contrast with the results found for the concept love (Baider 2010), the physical dimension of hatred is more present in the Cypriot corpus with νευρά nervousness (4.8%) and πόνος pain (4%) than in the French corpus. This physical dimension could reveal an emotion very much and painfully alive in the socio-cultural environment. We would then conclude that the salient conceptual markers above at the same time reveal the different sociological realities of both communities and define the group inclusiveness for each community. If both data corroborate most lexical and conceptual associations across cultures, only the oral Cypriot data confirms a political dimension for the private knowledge of the hatred. The data show the feeling conceptualised within the limits of the Cyprus problem  – just as the public discourse does. These data confirm that the meaning of words conveys information about the history of their use in public discourse first and foremost.

3 Discussion 3.1 Cultural knowledge as a shared cognitive space Both prior personal experience and actual situational experience are equally important in meaning construction and comprehension. For example, in the Cyprus context, only those French speakers who are aware of how acute the conflict still is (which this study illustrates) can avoid certain pragmatic pitfalls, 9 Densely populated suburbs that have become almost ghettos on the outskirts of every major French city.

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e.g., using the word border (hence recognizing the northern zone as a country) instead of Green Line, which has divided the country since 1974. Differences in conceptualizing the words examined can be explained by referring to the different models of social interaction in French and Greek-Cypriot cultures, as well as different cultural attitudes towards emotional expression. These differences could be described using Hall’s (1976) theory on high and low context cultures and they were also described in works specifically related to relationships and interactions in the Greek-Cypriot society (Cockburn 2004). For instance, in our research related to fear, while both communities mentioned social circumstances such as failure and loneliness as sources of fear, social circumstances are four times more prevalent in the Greek-Cypriot data (13.5%) than in the French data (3.5%). As said before, this may be typical of what Hall identified as high context society and culture, in which social relationships are culturally dense, social networks intersect and most relationships are seen as long-term.

3.2 Salience disconsolidation? Our data also revealed intra-cultural quantitative and qualitative changes in saliency: “Salient information can be disconsolidated when its salience dies off and the information in question ends up as less salient or non-salient” (Kecskes 2011:68). Indeed, looking at the Cyprus corpus, collective salience was different according one’s age and sex. As far as gender is concerned, most associations are common to both sexes whether in reference to the cause of the emotion (enemies, injustice and nastiness) or the consequences for the person (anger, revenge). Hence for both women and men, anger and enemies are among the top associations (35% for men and 20% for women, respectively) with hatred. The main difference between the sexes is in the distribution of the associations: – for men, associations with current political problems and warfare are much more prevalent than for women: 24% of the conceptual associations for men are related to the Cypriot conflict (war- πόλεμος 9%, Turkey- Τουρκια 4%, Turks-Τουρκοι 9%,) but only 5% of the conceptual associations for women relate to war- πόλεμος, without a specific enemy; – for women, social situations (jealousy-ζήλια 6.5% and disappointmentαπογοήτευση 6.5%) are present whilst they are not statistically significant for men. Τη λέξη ζήλια γιατί κάποιος μπορεί να μισήσει κάποιον επειδή τον ζηλεύει…. The word jealousy because someone could hate someone else because they are jealous of them

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Further, women place greater emphasis on the physical consequences of hatred, the embodiment of the emotion so to speak, using words such as pain – πόνος (7.5%), grief / sadness – λύπη (5%), fear – φόβος (4%), violence – βία (4%), realities not statistically significant in male data; either they (women) identify more with the victims of hatred or they feel the physical sensations more keenly than the actions prompted by the feeling (revenge, rage). This difference is also true for the association with anger a feeling very close to hatred: men and women link anger with injustice, screams, fights, rage and hatred; however only women refer to violence, lies and tears.¹⁰ In this regard, the journalistic discourse associations match the men’s responses but not the women’s. This dominant discourse  – or at least the discourse that dominates in the press – corresponds to the way men conceive hatred: Is that because they write the news? Or perhaps it is because men are considered the primary audience and therefore the main consumers of the newspapers? Saliency also seems different depending on age group. On one hand, similar and rather vague associations with hatred, such as nastiness and enemies, are found across ages; this implies a regularity that can be explained by the fact that as human beings, we react to the same emotion in a similar fashion. However, the distribution is statistically different across ages: nastiness and enemies are much more common among the 25–50 year olds (50%), and much less frequent among those under age 25 (30%) and those over age 50 (35%). The younger and older generations are more precise in terms of having a specific target. Furthermore, there is a noticeable variability in this target across ages. For the youngest generation, sport is an important reference of hatred (14%), an association actually mentioned in the Cypriot newspapers as a “new trend”. Among the older generation, the Cypriot conflict dominates the answers (with the Cyprus problem in the forefront with as evidenced by the 15% for the words Τουρκια and Τουρκοι). It is difficult to say whether the younger generation, not having experienced the conflict of 1974, is less sensitive to it, or if because they do not yet follow the journalistic discourse and are less immersed in the public knowledge, they are less involved in/socialised into the conflict. For the middle-age group, the reasons for hatred are more diverse, with jealousy and war equally represented. However, for that generation, the enemy now is as much the person on the other side of the Green Line (with the occurrences of the lexical unit Turks–Τούρκοι for 5.5%) as it is the foreign, third-world workers (with the occurrence of the lexical unit Black  – Μαύρα for 4.5%). Indeed this

10 See Baider 2012 and Baider in press for the semantic and the social differences in both feelings (anger and hatred) within the respective languages and communities.

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lexical change testifies to a social change in the Cypriot society, which has seen an unprecedented influx of foreign workers since the year 2002–2003. Thus we see that the meaning value of lexical items can change over time; in the above example we observe how a linguistic expression prompts a different referential meaning. Reference varies according to the individual’s social situation, upon which one relies to make sense of messages and novel situations. We then subscribe to the understanding of emotions as a special type of socially shared script, which manifests itself in both the language and behavior of a given social group (Kitamaya and Masuda 1995).

4 Conclusion Differences in conceptualizing the words examined in this study can perhaps be explained by referring to the different models of social interaction in French and Greek-Cypriot cultures, as well as different cultural attitudes towards emotional expression and by the material reality lived by both communities. These differences can be described and interpreted using Hall’s (1976) theory on high and low context cultures; they have also been described in works specifically related to relationships and interactions in the Greek-Cypriot society (Cockburn 2004). However in order to understand, teach and learn this difference, we need as much to describe the core meaning common to both communities, as well as the socio-cultural differences built into this meaning. These socio-cultural differences inform the material sense of the word, and in some ways describe the reference of the signifier hatred (haine and μίσος). This referential dimension is significant due to the fact that it forms a part of the meaning value of the word for the two specific communities. Knowledge of this referential dimension is imperative if one is to speak of cross-cultural semantics or more precisely here of “Interlanguage pragmatics” since we focus on the acquisition and use of pragmatic norms in L2, how their pragmatic competence develops overtime (Kecskes, 2011: 68). With regard to language teaching, our study has identified the lexical needs of students of different nationalities/languages who attempt to learn each other’s language. Moreover, sensitivity to certain lexical usages and knowledge of appropriateness of the lexicon in the target language could enhance cross-cultural communication. Such data could help exchange students better understand the host culture (inter-culturality), as they would be aware of these “other” socio-cultural norms which could make them more sensitive to their own cultural norms and semantic models (intra-culturality). For instance, if exchange students know the pain still associated with the Cyprus problem, they would be more likely to

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understand the importance of not using the word border in Cyprus, but rather use the word Green Line to describe the geographical division of the island. The expression Green Line emphasizes that no solution has yet been found, whereas the word border would imply two different countries in their own right, which is not legally, nor officially the case. On the theoretical level, the collected data enable us to identify the public knowledge and the salient collective features (Kecskes 2008) related to the lexical unit hatred (haine and μίσος) within each community, as well as the variations of salient features across both communities. Since these collective features carry the culturally specific conceptual properties of the given communities they can explain some misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication related to this particular lexical unit. However, our study highlights two important issues. First, oral data and written data within the same community do not always concur on which features are salient and to what degree. Therefore, we may have identified how private knowledge (oral and personalized data) and public knowledge (journalistic discourse and institutionalized discourse) regarding a specific lexical unit may differ. Second, variations in saliency may also occur within a community if we consider the informants’ gender and/or age. This intra-cultural variation could lead us to reconsider whether the culturally specific knowledge of a word’s conceptual properties is derived from a specific space (generally a country) or from a shared fundamental ontological difference (being a male or a female, young or elderly).

Appendix 1 Abstracts from French newspapers Un facteur peut cependant être mentionné concernant les explosions massives de haine nationale et raciale dans l’époque moderne. C’est précisément parce que, dans le cas du racisme, l’objet de la haine doit demeurer inconvertible que l’imaginaire raciste doit invoquer ou inventer des caractéristiques prétendument physiques, donc irréversibles, chez les objets de sa haine; la couleur de la peau, les traits du visage, sont l’étayage le plus approprié de cette  haine  à la fois parce qu’ils signeraient l’étrangeté irréductible de l’objet et élimineraient tout risque de confusion entre lui et le sujet. Le président du Front national, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a été relaxé jeudi 2 décembre par le tribunal correctionnel de Paris, devant lequel il était accusé d’avoir, par des affichettes de campagne “Non à l’islamisme” diffusées sur Internet, incité à la haine envers la population musulmane.

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Dans un second temps, la Licra, soutenue par SOS-Racisme et le journaliste algérien Mohamed Sifaoui, a porté l’affaire devant la justice parisienne pour provocation à la haine envers une religion Un grand-père raciste, qui n’a jamais accepté que son petit-fils soit né d’un père algérien et lui a inculqué la haine de l’autre, à commencer par la haine de soi. Peu à peu, lynchages et slogans de la haine ont fait tâche d’huile, gagnant la banlieue de Moscou (Zelenograd, Solnetchnogorsk), puis la province

Appendix 2 Abstracts from Cypriot newpapers Στις μικρότερες και μεσαίες επιχειρήσεις, η επιχειρησιακή σύμβαση προκαλεί μίσος και τρόμο «Οι Τουρκοκύπριοι άρχισαν, όχι μόνον να απομονώνουν αυτούς που έχουν έρθει από την Τουρκία, αλλά και να διατρανώνουν εναντίον τους, πολύ ανοικτά, την οργή και το μίσος τους». Οι εκπομπές των λεγόμενων «φιλάθλων», που το μόνο που προσφέρουν είναι μίσος, ειρωνεία και απαξίωση, των ομάδων και των ανθρώπων Αυτό το τέρας οργάνωσε την ΤΜΤ, κάνοντας όλες εκείνες τις σκευωρίες, δολοφονίες και προβοκάτσιες, για να προκαλέσει το μίσος μεταξύ των Ελληνοκυπρίων και Τουρκοκυπρίων. Το μίσος μπήκε στον αθλητισμό. Υπάρχει απίστευτο μίσος ανάμεσα σε φανατικούς οπαδούς των δύο ομάδων. Μίσος που στο παρελθόν οδήγησε σε θανατηφόρες συμπλοκές. Μίσος που ξέφυγε από το κέντρο της χώρας, αφού υπάρχει και εμφύλιος ανάμεσα σε Αθήνα και Θεσσαλονίκη. Είναι τρελά. Είναι με το μίσος που θα κάνουμε στρατό; Όχι φυσικά. Αυτές οι πολιτικές, «Ἐνωσις και μόνον Ἐνωσις», δεν περνούν πια. Κάποιοι υπερπατριώτες αποκαλούσαν τον Μακάριο προδότη κ.λπ. Ἐγινε αυτή η οργάνωση ΕΟΚΑ Β, που έσβησε την εικόνα της ΕΟΚΑ του ‘55–‘59 που μαζί την φτιάξαμε, γιατί ήμουν κι εγώ μαζί με το Γρίβα τότε, και καλλιεργήθηκε το μίσος.

References Averill, R. J., G. Catlin, and K. K. Chon. 1991. Rules of Hope, New York: Springer-Verlag. Averill, R. J. 1996. Intellectual emotions. In R. Harré and W. G. Parrot (eds.), The emotions. Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, 24–39. London: Sage Publications.

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Baider, F. and C. Charalambidou. 2008. Réseaux associatifs et ‘intra-culturel’: l’acquisition du vocabulaire chez les apprenants à Chypre In J. Burston et al. (eds.), Languages for Intercultural Dialogue Conference, 60–71. Nicosia: Publications of the Ministry of Education. Baider, F. 2010. Intra- and inter-cultural issues in teaching a foreign language: the case of Cypriot Greek and French languages. Proceedings of the Canadian International Congress on Education (CICE), CD ROM. Baider, F. 2012. Haine et colère: approche socio-cognitive et explicitation en métalangue sémantique naturelle. CMLF 2012, 1701–1717. Paris: Institut de linguistique française. Baider, F. in press. Bad feelings (within a MSN approach). In F. Baider and G. Cislaru (eds), Linguistic expression of emotions in context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CECR, Cadre commun européen de référence pour les langues (2005 and 2006), Division des politiques linguistiques, Paris: Didier. Cockburn, C. 2004. The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus, London-New York: Zed Books. Giora, R. 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goddard, C. 2009. Cultural scripts and anglo-cultures divergences between Australian English, English English and American English. In IPRA11 (paper presented at 11th International Pragmatic Congress), Melbourne, Australia, 11–17 July. Goossens, V. 2005. Les noms de sentiment-esquisse de typologie sémantique fondée sur les collocations verbales. Lidil 32. 103–121. Hadjipavlou, M. 2010. Women and Change in Cyprus, Istanbul: Tauris Academic Studies. Hall, E. 1976. Beyond Culture. New York: Doubleday. Harré, R. and W. G. Parrott (eds.). 1996. The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, London: Sage Publications. Kahan, D., and M. Nussbaum. 1996. Two conceptions of emotion in criminal law, Columbia Law Review 2. 270–374. Kecskes, I. 2001. The graded salience hypothesis in second language acquisition. In M. Pütz, S. Niemeier, and R. Dirven (eds.), Applied Cognitive Linguistics 1, 249–271. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kecskes, I. 2008. Dueling context: a dynamic model of meaning, Journal of Pragmatics 40(3). 385–406. Kecskes, I. 2009. Dual and multilanguage systems, International Journal of Multilingualism, 1–19. Kecskes, I. 2011. Interculturality and intercultural pragmatics. In Jane Jackson (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Intercultural Communication, 67–84. London: Routledge. Kitamaya, S. and T. Masuda. 1995. Reappraising cognitive appraisal from a cultural perspective, Psychological Inquiry 6. 217–223. Leontiev, A. N. 1978. Activity, Consciousness, and Personality, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Pavlenko, A. 2008. Conceptual representation in the bilingual lexicon and second language vocabulary learning. The Bilingual Mental Lexicon. Clevendon, Multilingual matters. Pavlenko, A. 2005. Emotion and Bilingualism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perry, B. 2005. A crime by any other name: the semantics of “hate”, Journal of Hate Studies 4. 1. Rosebury, B. 2003. On punishing emotions, Ratio Juris 16(1). 37–55. Sullivan, A. 1999. What’s so bad about hate?, The New York Times, September 26. Vygotsky, L. S. 1962[1934]. Thought and Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Wierzbicka, A. 1992. Defining Emotion Concepts, Cognitive Science 16(4). 539–581. Wierzbicka, A. 1999. Emotional universals, Language Design 2. 23–69. Wierzbicka, A. 2006. English: Meaning and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. and E. Jamrozik. 1988. L’amour, la colère, la joie, l’ennui. La sémantique des émotions dans une perspective transculturelle, Langages 89. 97–107.

Valandis Bardzokas

The semantics and pragmatics of causal connectives: conceptual and procedural aspects of Modern Greek γiati and epeiδi 1 Introduction Pragmatic investigation has primarily developed out of a constant concern to determine the interface between semantics and pragmatics and the levels of interpretation that compose the scope of each field of study: truth-conditional vs. non-truth-conditional meaning, what is said vs. what is implied, explicit vs. implicit content. To this effect, research of this sort has employed a limited set of connectives since Grice (1975), for instance, but, therefore, so, and while the study of a marker like but has generated an ‘industry among semanticists’ (Blakemore 2002), it is hardly the case that such an investigation has received feedback from a study of typical causal connectives. In this connection the intention of this paper is to contribute in this direction. In addition, rather than constricting the concerns of the current research to the consideration of a definite exponent of conjunctive meaning that a singleminded, non-contrastive perspective would involve, according to common practice in pragmatic work on connectives in English, we intend to increase the challenge of the meaning description we are about to undertake. To this effect, we will contrast the two prototypical, mono-lexemic causal markers in a language that affords more than one linguistic resource for the typical expression of causal subordination, i.e. Modern Greek epeiδi and γiati, both typically rendered as because into English translation versions, in a wide range of contextual applications¹. Our aim is to uncover finely grained distinctions in causal meaning, particularly aspects of meaning attached to the diversity of uses of the aforementioned markers.

1 Pre-posed cases of adverbial clauses, i.e. because q, p, are left out of the scope of our discussion here despite the pervasive distributional proclivity of the configuration at hand or the potentially differentiating pragmatic information it communicates. This choice was made in view of the syntactic constraint that Modern Greek imposes on this configuration licensing exclusively the use of epeiδi. In this respect, the purpose of the present contrastive meaning investigation is optimally served in the context of the type of conjunctive environment, i.e. q because p, that secures equal, as it were, terms of distribution.

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To pursue our objective, we will follow the framework of a more recent and promising model of pragmatic analysis, that of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]). More specifically, we will focus on the well-known distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning (Blakemore 1987, 2002), designed essentially as a point of a reference in describing types of lexical contribution to utterance interpretation. In this sense, the aim of this discussion is two-fold, in that it will also take interest in the plausibility of a relevance-theoretic account of causal connectives with respect to the requirement of demonstrating sensitivity to the observation of finely grained distinctions of conjunctive meaning. As a result, we will be on the lookout for possible amendments with respect to the definition of procedural or conceptual encoding in the interest of accommodating causal meaning along the proposed theoretical guidelines. For instance, despite the increasing literature on connectives in this background, we would like to argue in favour of a more rigorous identification of conceptual aspects of conjunctive, in our case causal, meaning. Also, even the adequately developed definition of procedural encoding seems to have been challenged on several occasions, especially in the area of discourse markers. In this sense, our concern will also lie with a reappraisal of what qualifies for procedural classification so that the description we offer accounts for cases of discourse markers that would otherwise appear to defy inclusion in this category of meaning despite their nonconceptual behaviour. In sum, our interests reside in an economical, integrative account of encrypted causal meaning. In this sense, we expect our discussion to profit from the versatility of a theoretical model of meaning description affording the required methodological apparatus for what may turn out to be a variegated description of causal interpretation. In order to proceed with the promised analysis, some preliminary remarks are necessary.

2 Preliminary remarks Contrast the following causal expressions in Modern Greek, the English versions of which were borrowed or adapted from Sweetser (1990): (1)

Ο Γιάννης επέστρεψε επειδή/γιατί την αγαπούσε. John came back because (bc 1/bc 2) he loved her.

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Ο Γιάννης είναι σπίτι γιατί /*2 επειδή τα φώτα είναι αναμμένα. John is home because (bc 2/ *bc 1) the lights are on.

Notice that case (2) underspecifies the causal conjunction, in the sense that the proposition in the subordinate clause is not taken to cause the state of affairs contained in the specifications of the main clause, as is the case in (1). Rather, the fact that the lights are on has an effect on the speculative conclusion on the part of the communicator that John is home, though the communication of concluding remains unarticulated. In this line of interpretation, the cause-and-effect relation in (2) contrasts with that in (1) being explicitly encoded. It is also noteworthy that while the propositional encoding of the conjunction in (1) allows for the use of either connective, the epistemic conjunction in (2) seems to license only the use of γiati. For the sake of lucid exposition, epeiδi will be glossed as bc 1 and γiati as bc 2 in English translations. We surmise that these distributional proclivities of the two connectives can be expounded in relevance-theoretic terms, and in particular, in terms of Blakemore’s (1987, 2002) proposal for the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning. That is, causal content can be organized under these two categories of meaning. In building our case we will follow up on Kitis’s (2006: 254–256) claim that the primary role of epeiδi is to bear conceptual meaning, as opposed to the multifunctional role of γiati.

3 Causality and conventional implicature From Grice onwards the type of analysis that has allegedly stood out as most plausible with respect to treating issues of causal meaning is that in terms of the conventional implicature carried by the use of therefore. However plausible this suggestion may seem, an account of because running parallel to that of therefore appears to yield unfavourable results on the operation of the model, as will become evident. As a consequence, in face of pursuing the more challenging objective of determining the meaning nuances between two ‘becauses’ from a cross linguistic perspective, the analyst’s attention is ultimately deflected toward a theoretical model that meets the requirement of sensitivity to the observation of sharp and subtle variations in meaning. For the sake of the argument, however,

2 Granted that the grammaticality of the range of examples in the paper has been secured, question marked or asterisked utterances are taken to reflect constraints on natural language application, ranging from unlikely to markedly dispreferred uses of causal connectives, respectively.

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before embarking on this project we will sketch a brief and tentative account of causal meaning from the Gricean angle of analysis in a bid to make up for the regular and glaring omission of because from descriptions of connectives since early pragmatic research. Given the well-known fact that Grice’s business in setting up his framework of implicated meaning was with salvaging truth conditional semantics, it stands to reason that his commitment to connectivity essentially serves a philosophical interest, rather than the interest of exhaustive descriptions of meaning. It is then, not a coincidence that he discerns a single causal use, as illustrated in the following timeworn example (Grice 1975): (3)

He is an Englishman, he is, therefore, brave.

Under these one-dimensional, as it were, contextual circumstances, an array of aspects of causal meaning become invisible from Grice’s perspective. These obscure interpretation options, for instance, of the explanatory in contrast to the inferential causal type (Kitis 1982, 2010; Blakemore 1987), or what Sweetser (1990) describes as content and epistemic applications of cause in subsequent research. Now, in the hypothetical event of Grice heeding the differing contextual uses of because below, it seems that he would have encountered the predicament of acknowledging the two distinct readings at the same time as indiscriminately assigning conventionally implicated meaning to both uses of the connective (4)–(5). (4)

John came back because he loved her.

(5)

John loved her because he came back.

More specifically, ‘what is said’ or the logical meaning of (4), John came back & he loved her, seems indistinguishable from that of (5), John loved her & he came back. But on the assumption that the logical meaning is identical in both instances, the question that arises relates to the manner in which the same class of meaning that operate in addition to what is said, i.e. the detachable conventional implicature, can make any kind of contribution to the interpretation distinction at issue, while performing an indiscriminate pragmatic task. Alternatively, in terms of indirect quotation, once the conventional implicature of cause has been detached from what has been said in each sentence, both examples are reportable alike: he said that John came back and he loved her or the converse, he said that John loved her and he came back.

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It follows, then, that, despite its overall pragmatic orientation, the Gricean method loses sight of the finer contextual contributions to the development of the underdetermined linguistic logical form directing verbal communication to the explicit content of full-fledged assumptions underpinning felicitous understanding.

4 Linguistic Underdeterminacy and Relevance The view that linguistic meaning underdetermines the speaker’s intended meaning, may this be composed into propositional content or a wider range of the speaker’s communicative intentions, emerged as a reaction to the Gricean perspective of the notion of what is said, strictly circumscribed in terms of sentence meaning that is fully propositional, semantically complete and truth-evaluable, while the determination of it requires no recourse to inference, with the possible exception of the role of reference assignment and semantic disambiguation in determining the full identification of what is said (Grice 1975). This reaction to Grice’s semantic orientation involved methodizing investigations of meaning that have recently culminated in intense pragmatic research in acknowledgment of the decisive contribution of contextual information to the communication of meaningful propositional content (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]; Bach 1994; Recanati 1991, 2010; Carston 2002). The pivotal tenets of relevance theory seem to have emanated from this kind of dissatisfaction with the Gricean construal of utterance meaning. In this respect, the sensitivity that relevance-theoretic accounts demonstrate to issues of correlating the speaker’s communicative intentions with aspects of explicit content appears to set up the type of research environment that encourages sharp observations of varieties of pragmatic contributions to propositionhood. Also, these varieties are a reflex of a diversity of sources linguistic underdeterminacy. Leaving aside types of lexically encoded material that have been consolidated in the relevant literature as cases underdetermining of the proposition expressed, i.e. reference fixing and disambiguation, the following instances have been shown to represent linguistic abbreviations of full, speaker-intended propositional forms. (6)

It is raining. [where?]

(7)

I’m tired. [Carston 2002: 22–27]

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On a general note, there is a requirement for a contextual supply of the bracketed or linguistically unencoded information in an example such as (6), which is prior to evaluating the utterance for truth. Also, delivering the interpretation of (7) seems to rely on the lexical concept tired, in the corresponding semantic representation, undergoing an occasion-specific pragmatic process of lexical adjustment that results in a more context-sensitive denotation (Carston 2004; Wilson and Carston 2007). On this stipulation, the linguistic sense of tired is inferentially narrowed to that of being too tired to engage in an activity. Inferential operations of the type in (6)–(7) are held to impact the determination of an utterance’s truth conditional or explicit content. In this sense, then, such pragmatic determinants of explicit or propositional content constitute explicatures of the basic level (Carston 2002), that is explicatures contributing to the building of propositional meaning. Basic-level explicatures are regarded as resulting from the propositional development of the logical form. In this sense, this sort of inferential process differs from the one underlying the identification of implicatures, inasmuch as the point of departure of implicature derivation is not seen in relation to the logical form (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]). However, it transpires from more recent pragmatic research (Wilson and Sperber 1993) that the explicit content of an utterance is not exhausted by its propositional content. That is, the logical form of a sentence may also be intended to give rise to higherorder assumptions embedding the proposition of the utterance, for instance, illocutionary forces or intentional attitudes. The fleshing out of higher-order assumptions schemas of this sort includes the propositional form of an utterance and, thus, represents part of its explicit content. The following example (8), then, may be interpreted in context as revealing the speech act of asking for information in (9). (8)

What are you doing tonight?

(9)

The speaker asked me what I was doing tonight.

On the assumption, then, that the source of higher-order explicatures is a combination of linguistic decoding and pragmatic inference, as in the case of basicorder explicatures, representations of this level, too, constitute explicitly communicated assumptions. From this perspective, it would not sound strained to argue that unarticulated higher-level assumptions are also viewed as contextually supplied information underdetermining the linguistic representation of the full communicative intentions of the speaker’s utterance, i.e. higher-order intentions, as it were.

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To sketch but a brief account of the model at hand, now, relevance is a property of utterances, which are thought of as input to inferential or cognitive processes. “It is a positive function of cognitive effects and a negative function of the processing effort expended in deriving those effects” (Carston 2002: 44). The cognitive effects that may be achieved by the integration of the information conveyed by the speaker’s utterance into the hearer’s store of contextual assumptions can a) strengthen an existing assumption by providing further evidence for it, b) eliminate an existing assumption that appears to be false, and, c) consist in the derivation of a new assumption or, in other words, a contextual implication. In this regard, it is the search for relevance that appears to regulate issues of understanding an utterance, may this understanding rest on the derivation of explicatures or implicatures. In this connection, the speaker’s choice of linguistic form only provides the linguistic evidence required in inferential processes for the construction of an interpretive hypothesis that may underpin the derivation of either explicit or implicit content. The construction of an interpretive hypothesis assigned to the intended meaning of an utterance seems aligned to the conceptual representation of the communicator’s intention, i.e. propositional representation or, even, representation over and above propositional content. And this level of representation is viewed as resulting from the operation of pragmatic effects on the manipulation of contextual assumptions sustaining an interpretation that incorporates the conceptual structure encoded by a phrase into the representation of a full-fledged assumption. In this line of argumentation, linguistic expressions may be of two types depending on the kind of contribution they make to utterance interpretation. On the one hand, conceptual expressions represent decoded material that forms part of the conceptual representation. On the other hand, there are expressions encoding linguistic constraints on pragmatic procedures required for arriving at the conceptual representation, the terminal point of searching for relevance; hence the distinction between conceptual and procedural encoding. In what follows, we will exploit the distinction between conceptual and procedural encoding, which has turned out to be a major point of reference in the literature on the classification of discourse markers.

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5 Procedural aspects of causal meaning 5.1 Procedural meaning and implicatures The connection of procedural encoding to relevance theoretic considerations rests in the assumption that procedural expressions constitute linguistically encoded constraints on relevance. In this respect, the notion of procedural meaning has been justified and described especially in relation to discourse markers, and, specifically, by means of a classification of discourse markers based on the constraint that they are taken to impose on the three types of contextual effect prescribed in relevance theory, in the interest of reducing the hearer’s mental effort expended in recovering the speaker’s intention to communicate an assumption. To illustrate this, consider the way the application of so, for instance, constrains the implicature associated with the effect of deriving a contextual implication: (10)

(a) Ben can open Tom’s safe. (b) So he knows the combination. [Blakemore 2002: 95]

Rather than constituting part of the conceptual content of (10), the marker at hand is taken to perform a procedural function in that it facilitates the comprehension process so that the hearer ends up with a conceptual representation (Blakemore 2002: 90–91). More specifically, so indicates that the hearer is to be inferentially led to segment (10) (b), being a conclusion derived from the premise in (10) (a). In this case, (10) (b) is relevant by virtue of being a contextual implication. Clearly, underspecificity in (2) cannot be explained on procedural grounds, along these lines, as what seems to be constrained here by the use of a connective is a higher-order explicature embedding the proposition of the main clause, rather than an implicature. However, is it only the derivation of implicatures that procedural encoding constrains?

5.2 Procedural meaning and higher-order explicatures Subsequent research, but not in the field of discourse markers, has shown that the bounds of procedural meaning can be extended to accommodate expressions that constrain explicatures, too, in the sense that inferential tasks performed by the hearer may not be exclusively directed towards the generation of implicatures but may also have a role to play in the derivation of explicit content. Thus, Wilson

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and Sperber (1993) suggest that procedural expressions may concern higherorder explicatures. For instance, the dissociative particle huh in (11) reveals the higher-level explicature in (12): (11)

Peter’s a genius, huh!

(12)

The speaker of (11) doesn’t think that Peter is a genius. [Wilson and Sperber 1993: 22]

Accordingly, this sort of reasoning seems to find application with regard to the realization of the γiati-clause in the epistemic-reading case in (2), which is justified on a procedural view as facilitating the task of the hearer in deriving the higher-order representation of concluding. In other words, the subordinate clause offers the linguistic evidence required for retrieving the speaker’s intention to communicate a speculation, constraining, in this way, the higher-order assumption that integrates the proposition expressed. In fact, it appears that this line of interpretation readily assimilates one more of Sweetser’s (1990) categories of causal meaning, specifically, that of speech-act cause. Conside the following case from her data. (13)

Τι κάνεις απόψε, γιατί /?επειδή έχει μια καλή ταινία στο σινεμά. What are you doing tonight, because (bc 2/?bc 1) there’s a good movie on.

Again, the adverbial clause is taken to contain a marker encoding procedural information, which directs the hearer to the construal of the main clause as embedded in a higher-order representation, i.e. asking someone out. In fact, it seems to be the case in both examples, (2) and (13), that removing the subordinate clause would cancel the interpretation of underspecified cause, in that the corresponding propositions in John is home or What are you doing tonight are read as regular assertive content or a real question, respectively. Interestingly, although Iten’s (1997) analysis of epistemic and speech-act data also involves the derivation of higher-order explicatures, the operation of this level of representation is not envisaged in connection to procedural (or conceptual, for that matter) interpretation in her account. To conclude our discussion of the contribution of higher-order explicatures to the description of conjunctive meaning, the particular level of representation seems pertinent in accounting for a class of causal encoding that was only recently identified as a means of causal expression (Kalokerinos 2004). The type of expression at issue has been labelled ‘metacommunicative’ or ‘metamodal’.

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The metacommunicative operation is described in terms of a causal marker used to pick up “elements of the communicative setting to justify not an illocutionary act but a higher-order act of communication” (Kalokerinos 2004: 37). For instance, γiati in (14) below marks a justification of the repetition of an illocutionary act, rather than the illocutionary act being repeated. (14)

Ο Γιάννης την αγαπάει, γιατί /*επειδή δεν το άκουσες. John loves her, because (bc 2/* bc 1) you didn’t hear it. [Kalokerinos 2004: 37]

Indeed, this class of causal meaning seems to be distinguished from Sweetser’s non-content domains on account of the fact that the interpretation of a case like (14) does not bear the hallmarks of epistemic or speech act readings. In other words, it is taken to express neither a speculation nor a non-declarative sentence-based speech-act. On the other hand, however, there seems to be nothing intrinsically distinctive about the meaning of a metacommunicative expression or its defining property that is not amenable to the guidelines adduced in the relevance-theoretic framework. From this perspective, the adverbial clause-framed information describing the communicative setting is seen as resonating with a justification for conveying a speech-act explicature, in this case, I repeat that p. On the whole, then, example (14) along with (2) and (13) can be explained uniformly and economically on the assumption of procedural contribution to a higher level of explicature.³ On a final note, the conjunctive realization in all the instances of underspecified cause above seems to achieve relevance by virtue of capturing the linguistic material that is intended by the speaker as evidence for the retrieval of higherorder explicatures and, in turn, the retrieval of the explicit content of the causeand-effect relation. As a result, γiati, rather than epeiδi, is the preferred marker for expressing a procedural constraint on the pragmatic processes leading to the conceptual representation attached to a full-fledged causal assumption.

5.3 Procedural meaning and base-order explicatures Having settled the issue of the workings of procedural constraints on higher-level assumptions, we consider three more questions worth addressing in the discussion that follows. To begin with, is it possible that procedural expressions can also encode constraints on base-order explicatures or the proposition expressed, 3 For a detailed critique of Kalokerinos’s (2004) treatment of the so-called metacommunicative cause as a special case of causal meaning see Bardzokas (2012).

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in Sperber and Wilson’s (1995 [1986]) terms? Developing Benveniste’s (1966) idea that there are procedural constraints on truth-conditional content in their discussion of ‘shifters’, Wilson and Sperber (1993) note that pronouns, like I, for example, impose constraints on explicatures because they guide the search for the intended referent, which is part of the proposition expressed. In light of the enriched definition of procedural meaning, which includes both higher-order and base-order explicature considerations, then, two more questions seem to be of essence. Firstly, does this augmented definition of procedural encoding apply to discourse markers? After this potential has been explored, we will attempt a discussion that will widen our perspective with considerations of conceptual, apart from procedural, meaning. In pursuing this goal, we will attempt to answer the following question: do procedural analyses exhaust a thorough description of discourse markers? In other words, are there any discourse markers that can be characterized conceptually? Concerning the former question, evidently, to the extent that research on pronouns has broadened the scope of procedural perspective, discourse connectives may be seen as contributing in this direction with the base-level of explicature, too. Put differently, we can expect more types of constraint on base-level explicatures than the case of pronouns (Wilson and Sperber 1993). Specifically, γiatiintroduced clauses can be said to get a procedural interpretation if they are used to constrain the inferential process required in expanding the logical form of the main clause into a full proposition. The examples below (15)–(16) are an illustration of the causal marker hinging on some unarticulated constituent that only appears in brackets in the corresponding version of fully propositional form (17)–(18). (15)

Το αφεντικό υποβίβασε το Γιάννη γιατί/*επειδή τον χρειάζεται. The boss demoted John because (bc 2/*bc 1) he needs him. [adapted from Bach 1994]

(16)

Τελικά βρήκε γυναίκα, γιατί/?επειδή είναι κι αυτός σε ηλικία γάμου. He found a woman, after all, because (bc 1/?bc 2) he is at the right age for marriage, too.

(17)

Το αφεντικό [απλώς] υποβίβασε το Γιάννη επειδή/γιατί τον χρειάζεται. The boss [only] demoted John because (bc 1/bc 2) he needs him.

(18)

Τελικά βρήκε [μέλλουσα σύζυγο], επειδή/γιατί είναι κι αυτός σε ηλικία γάμου. He found [himself] [a future wife], after all, because (bc 2/bc 1) he is at the right age for marriage, too.

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As becomes evident, neither (15) nor (16) appear to receive a fully explicit cause-and-effect interpretation, as the reason for John’s demotion could not have been that John was needed, and, likewise, being at an appropriate age for marriage is not customarily seen as a reason for finding a female person. In this connection, the realization of the conjunction makes sense with respect to expanding the propositional content of the main clause by means of pragmatic enrichment (Carston 2002, 2004). Put differently, the γiati-introduced clause in (15) is intended to evoke contextual information that makes up for the missing element, i.e. only demoted, in the subpropositional matrix clause. By the same token, the adverbial clause in (16) is taken to effect the pragmatic adjustment of the encoded sense of woman by way of ad hoc concept construction (Carston 2002, 2004). This lexical type of adjustment seems to involve a narrowing of the general sense of the noun so that a more context-specific denotation is achieved. Such observations effectively open up the option of another application of propositional explorations of causal meaning (besides the distinction between conceptual and procedural encoding): the contribution of underspecified causal conjunctions to the study of lexical pragmatics, a relatively recent but rapidly growing field in pragmatic research (Wilson and Carston 2007). Having expounded the connection between procedural encoding and explicit content in causal meaning analysis, we would like to focus on responding to the last of enquiries that we made earlier; can we speak of conceptual markers at all? In this respect, it is interesting that, as a rule, relevance-theoretic analyses of discourse markers have typically been carried out on procedural grounds (see Wilson and Sperber 1993). Nonetheless, recent research in Modern Greek causal connectives illustrates that epeiδi-subordinate clauses can operate as conceptual constructions (Kitis 2006). But advancing this argument requires reaching a consensus regarding the identification of the nature of conceptual cause.

6 Conceptual aspects of causal meaning The problem that pertains to considerations of conceptual meaning is that its definition has not been pinned down or delineated in the same way as procedural meaning with respect to conjunctive encoding. In a bid to develop the notion of procedures, Blakemore (2002) sets out to discuss discourse markers starting off with the following comment:

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If we recall what has been said about procedural encoding so far, we will see that we seem to know more about what procedural meaning is not than what it is. Specifically, an expression which encodes procedural information encodes information which is not a constituent of the conceptual representations over which inferential computations are performed. (Blakemore 2002: 82)

Interestingly, however, the reverse also proves to be the case, in that the central stage position that procedural exploration has occupied in recent pragmatic research has mediated a backgrounding of conceptual description. Following Wilson and Sperber (1993), Blakemore (2002) puts forth the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning as not co-extensive with the traditional distinctions between description and indication, in speech-act theoretic accounts, or truth-conditional and non-truth conditional meaning in semantic studies. Leaving aside this specification, the distinction under discussion appears to have primarily been backed up with an emphasis on explicating the nature of procedural markers. However, Wilson and Sperber (1993) seem to have taken several steps in the direction of tracing conceptual meaning to a variety of phenomena. Specifically, they identify some of the defining features of concepts. A conceptual representation differs from a phonetic, phonological or syntactic representation in two main respects. First, it has logical properties: it enters into entailment or contradiction relations, and can act as the input to logical inference rules. Second, it has truthconditional properties: it can describe or partially characterize a certain state of affairs. (Wilson and Sperber 1993:10)

Further, they add that, unlike procedures, conceptual representations can be brought to consciousness. In this light, the question that is now left to address is: are there any discourse connectives that appear as candidates for a conceptual analysis? Starting from the latter criterion of accessibility to consciousness, consider, for instance, the two prototypical, monolexemic causal connectives in Modern Greek, i.e. γiati and epeiδi. Reportedly (Iten 2005: 75–76), Wilson (unpublished) notes that English speakers can say whether two conceptual expressions, for instance, the prepositions over and on, are synonymous or not without having to think about it for any length of time or test whether they are intersubstitutable in all contexts. Relating this hypothesis to speakers of Modern Greek, there may be reason to doubt that this test would work in the case of the above-mentioned markers, as most native speakers would impulsively think of the two expressions as synonymous or near-synonymous in expressing cause. This claim, however, is falsified given that unlike γiati, epeiδi tends not to occur in contexts of causal

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underdeterminacy. First appearances, then, might only puncture a rather conspicuous distinction in distribution and, ultimately, meaning between the two markers under scrutiny. Moving on to the criterion of concepts or conceptual expressions possessing logical properties, what is interesting to see here is whether a marker suspected of conceptual proclivity (in the sense that it resists contexts of underspecified conjunction), like epeiδi, does enter logical relations. The answer in what follows seems to be affirmative. To begin with, regarding the relation of contradiction, it appears that a conceptually used marker can be negated as in the following cases, where an explicitly encoded cause-and-effect relation, such as the one expressed in example (1), licenses the denial of the connection between the propositions conjoined: (19)

Ο Γιάννης επέστρεψε, όχι επειδή/γιατί την αγαπούσε, αλλά επειδή/ γιατί ήταν πλούσια. John came back, not because (bc  1/bc  2) he loved her, but because (bc 1/bc 2) she was rich.

(20)

Τον συνάντησα, όχι επειδή/γιατί είχα χρόνο, αλλά επειδή/γιατί ήταν επείγον. I met him, not because (bc  1/bc  2) I had enough time, but because (bc 1/bc 2) it was urgent.

On this account, the negation of content-reading examples is readily handled as an instantiation of challenging the conceptual relation. On the other hand, negating the conjunction does not appear to be an option with procedurally marked conjunctions, i.e. epistemic or speech-act utterances of cause, in the sense that an epistemic-reading, for example, conjunction, such as that in (2), is ordinarily taken to frame a spontaneously drawn, tentative conclusion the suspension of which is not an issue. (21)

*Ο Γιάννης είναι σπίτι, όχι γιατί/επειδή τα φώτα είναι αναμμένα, αλλά γιατί/ επειδή άκουσα θόρυβο. *John is home, not because (bc 2/bc 1) the lights are on but because (bc 2/bc 1) I heard a noise.

The same type of reasoning also seems to hold for speech-act interpretations (22). Indeed, acts of invitation performed ‘on line’ are typically phrased in time-saving, underdetermined structures. These do not seem subject to voicing reconsiderations, which would require propositional explicitness and additional processing

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time for reevaluating the original utterance, as can be in the case of indirect speech (23). (22)

*Τι κάνεις απόψε, όχι γιατί/επειδή έχει μια καλή ταινία στο σινεμά αλλά γιατί/επειδή έχει ωραίο καιρό. *What are you doing tonight, not because (bc  2/bc  1) there’s a good movie on but because (bc 2/bc 1) the weather is nice.

(23)

Με ρώτησε τι θα κάνω απόψε όχι γιατί/επειδή έχει μια καλή ταινία στο σινεμά αλλά γιατί/επειδή έχει ωραίο καιρό. He asked me what I was doing tonight, not because (bc 2/bc 1) there’s a good movie on but because (bc 2/bc 1) the weather is nice.

As becomes evident, the fully explicit version fulfils conceptual requirements that seem to provide access not only to epeiδi but, also, to γiati, the latter proving to be a multifunctional marker that may also find conceptual applications. The same generalization holds for the conceptual rendering of the epistemic case: (24)

Συμπέρανε ότι ο Γιάννης είναι σπίτι, όχι γιατί/επειδή τα φώτα είναι αναμμένα, αλλά γιατί/επειδή άκουσε θόρυβο. He concluded that John is home, not because (bc 2/bc 1) the lights are on but because (bc 2/bc 1) he heard a noise.

Moreover, conceptual representations can act as an input to a logical inference rule such as of the modus ponendo ponens type. This logical regularity of concepts is especially understood in the case of fully encoded causal conjunctions (realized again either by epeiδi or conceptually used γiati) entering the scope of the antecedent of conditionals. In this connection, (25) or its integration in (26) represents the operation of the foregoing logical rule on the propositional explicitness of the connection, also paraphraseable in alternative formulations that accommodate the criterion of full linguistic specification of cause: the reason why q is p (27)–(28). (25)

Ο Γιάννης επέστρεψε επειδή/ γιατί τη αγαπούσε. John came back because (bc 1/bc 2) he loved her.

(26)

Εάν ο Γιάννης επέστρεψε επειδή/γιατί τη αγαπούσε, τότε είμαι καλός ψυχολόγος. If John came back because (bc  1/bc  2) he loved her, then I’m a good mind-reader.

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(27)

Εάν ο λόγος για τον οποίο ο Γιάννης επέστρεψε είναι ότι την αγαπούσε, τότε είμαι καλός ψυχολόγος. If the reason why John came back is that he loved her, then I’m a good mind-reader.

(28)

Εάν ισχύει ότι ο λόγος για τον οποίο ο Γιάννης επέστρεψε είναι ότι την αγαπούσε, τότε είμαι καλός ψυχολόγος. If it is true that the reason why John came back is that he loved her, then I’m a good mind-reader.

On the other side, conjunctions earmarked as procedural, i.e. epistemic, speechact, metacommunicative, base-order cases, seem to fail the paraphrase test, as is illustrated below, inasmuch as no encoded cause-and-effect relation is expressed in the antecedent that the consequent is conditional upon: (29)

*Εάν ο λόγος για τον οποίο ο Γιάννης είναι σπίτι είναι ότι τα φώτα είναι αναμμένα, τότε είμαι καλός ψυχολόγος. *If the reason why John is home is that the lights are on, then I’m a good mind-reader.

(30)

*Εάν ο λόγος για τον οποίο τι κάνεις απόψε είναι ότι έχει μια ωραία ταινία, τότε είμαι καλός ψυχολόγος. *If the reason why what are you doing tonight is that there is a good movie on, then I’m a good mind-reader.

(31)

*Εάν ο λόγος για τον οποίο ο Γιάννης επέστρεψε είναι ότι δεν το άκουσες, τότε είμαι καλός ψυχολόγος. *If the reason why John came back is that you didn’t hear it, then I’m a good mind-reader.

(32)

*Εάν ο λόγος για τον οποίο το αφεντικό υποβίβασε τον Γιάννη είναι ότι τον χρειαζόταν, τότε είμαι καλός ψυχολόγος. *If the reason why the boss demoted John is that he needed him, then I’m a good mind-reader.

It transpires, then, that the ‘logical entries’ requirement is a valid test for distinguishing concepts. In this connection, the test seems to work with separating conceptual from procedural aspects of Modern Greek causal connectives. On the other hand, a thorough deliberation of logical parameters inevitably suggests the case of one more test that can be implemented in distinguishing conceptual from

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procedural cause, and this test originally separates truth-conditional from nontruth conditional meaning. This point can be elucidated by recourse to Kempson’s (1975: 214) claim that discourse markers can be used truth-conditionally. It is, of course, an established fact that most connectives do not constitute logical operators. Nevertheless, if truth-value judgments cannot be made in correlation with the truth-value tables of logical constants, from which causal markers are absent indeed, they can be secured, instead, with regard to the truth conditional contribution they make to the proposition of a conjunction that contains them as a whole. The way Frege (1892) would have it, the substitution of a because-introduced subordinate clause for another would result in the change of the truth value of the conjunction. Conceivably, it is in this spirit that Kempson envisages the assignment of a truth-conditional role to a connective that falls into the scope of a logical operator, such as if…then, in conditional sentences. In practice, this sort of scope test does not seem to take us all that far from the prescribed relevance-theoretic constraint on conceptual interpretation, i.e. conceptual representations act as input to logical inference rules. But given the additional prediction that conceptual representations have truth conditional properties (Wilson and Sperber 1993), evidence of truth conditional meaning may identify with evidence of conceptual meaning. In Kempson’s terms, then, the causality marker therefore used in co-ordinate structures (non-parenthetically), as in the following example, can be embedded within the scope of the antecedent in the following conditional so that the truthvalue of the sentence depends on whether the connection holds. (33)

If Bill hit Mary and therefore she was covered in bruises, she will have won her suit for damages. [Kempson 1975: 214]

On this interpretation, therefore seems to contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance that contains it. At this point, we will use Kempson’s test with Sweetser’s (1990) well-known examples of because in the content (1), epistemic (2), speech-act (13), metacommunicative (14) and base-order explicature (15)–(16) domains of causality, respectively: (34)

If John came back because he loved her, he made the mature choice.

(35)

*If John loved her because he came back, he made the mature choice.

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(36)

*If what are you doing tonight because there is a good movie on, you made the mature choice.

(37)

*If John is home because you didn’t hear it, he made the mature choice.

(38)

?If the boss demoted John because he needs him, he made the mature choice.

It is notable, then, that of these cases, it is only the content-reading one that can be integrated intact in the scope of if…then. Being the only case that is amenable to the truth-conditional analysis proposed, it is not surprising that (34) is also paraphrased in the following terms suggesting a logical connection, in terms of q resulting from p, between the two segments, i.e. John made the mature choice and he came back because he loved her: (39)

The reason why John made the mature choice is that he came back because he loved her (and not because he…).

This is not the case with, say, (35). Any attempt to paraphrase this utterance along these lines would lead to an interpretation that would sound outrightly unacceptable, whereas an acceptable version would be taken to involve the explication of the illocutionary force embedding the that-clause: (40)

*The reason why John made the mature choice is that John loved her because he came back.

(41)

The reason why John made the mature choice is that I have concluded that John loved her because he came back.

But does it follow from this observation that the meaning of a marker used truthconditionally is to be construed in conceptual terms at the same time? Suffice it to say that to deny the truth-conditional interpretation of because, as in (1), in terms of the conceptual specifications of the paraphrase in the reason why would be to isolate truth conditional analysis from linguistic description. But the repercussions of such an insulating approach would be far from trivial in pursuing the type of linguistic enquiry that demonstrates sensitivity to issues of determining the role of pragmatic input to propositional content, and, in effect, distinguishing semantic from pragmatic contributions to the delivery of the speaker’s intended interpretation in concerted efforts aimed at communication. Consider, for instance, the conditional sentence in an example like (42), the justification of

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which in terms of searching for the relevance of the relation would seem to be at stake. But in this case, the legitimacy of isolating the truth evaluation of the conjunction notwithstanding, its linguistic sense would be intractable. (42)

If John came back because he loved her, I’m a flying Dutchman.

On this picture, then, truth-conditional readings reflect a logical connection between the two segments of a causally related conjunction, while this logical connection also seems to suggest a conceptual character.

7 Possible counter-arguments to the alignment between conceptual and truth-conditional meaning It might be argued that our analysis so far has accentuated the assumption that conceptual meaning and truth conditional meaning are in correlation when it has been pointed out in recent pragmatic research (Wilson and Sperber 1993) that the two types of distinction in meaning are not co-extensive. For instance, a) sentence adverbials, like frankly and seriously, encode concepts which are constituents not of the proposition expressed but of higher-level explicatures (Ifantidou-Trouki 1993), and b) personal pronouns, like I and you, encode procedural constraints on truth-conditional content, in the sense that reference assignment required for determining a proposition is an inferential task (Kaplan 1989; Wilson and Sperber 1993). But what transpires from this claim is that evidence in favour of the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning crosscutting the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning is constricted to the cases of sentence adverbials and pronouns and, thus, is not taken to affect considerations of discourse connectives in the range of their functions. In the final analysis, the provisions made for these cases are not seen as precluding the possibility of discourse markers operating both conceptually and truthconditionally, in which case truth-conditional meaning may underlie conceptual encoding. Secondly, it is usually objected on Fraser’s (2006, 2009) view of procedural-conceptual analysis of various exponents of conjunction, illocutionary adverbials and pronouns that they may bear both conceptual and procedural meaning concurrently. For instance, the indexical element he is construed as being used in its conceptual sense to invariably express a male entity and also

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in its procedural sense to refer to its contextual referent. However the case with pronouns may be, this suggestion does not seem applicable in the case of the Modern Greek causal exponent epeiδi, which resists a procedural treatment, or, even with γiati, which, as we have witnessed, operates either conceptually or procedurally in mutually exclusive terms depending on its distribution. In this connection, the explicit content of conceptual causal conjunctions is communicated truth-conditionally or by virtue of encoding the propositional form of the conjunction, while the explicit content of underspecified or procedural causal relations is communicated or delivered in the context triggered by the linguistic means of the utterance. To continue our discussion of potential counter-arguments to the generalization proposed, i.e. conceptual in relation to truth-conditional meaning, an allencompassing account of the marker γiati may be made exclusively on conceptual grounds following up on Rouchota’s (1998) treatment of because, vis-à-vis the claim that non-truth-conditional interpretations of the connective at hand, as in epistemic or speech-act uses, may be deemed conceptual. We do not intend to challenge any substantiated claims made in connection to the English prototypical exponent of causal subordinate expression. However, we find it counterintuitive to carry this proposal over to a description of the polyfunctional case of γiati for several reasons. For instance, for Rouchota (1998: 34–35), both of the following examples of because mark a conceptual relation, inasmuch as speakers using a connective encoding a concept lay themselves open to charges of untruthfulness, despite the non-truth conditional use of the latter: (43)

A: Mary resigned because her boss insulted her. B: You’re wrong. Mary did not resign because her boss insulted her but because her salary was too low.

(44)

A: Are you busy tonight? Because there is a good movie on. B: You’re not being honest. You’re not asking me out because there is a good movie on but because you don’t want to spend the evening working (as you should).

Still, one cannot help noticing that there seem to be two problems connected with the phraseology of the truth-judgment test in (44), as is also argued in Bardzokas (2012). To begin with, it might be argued that questions of honesty do not necessarily amount to questions of truthfulness. Consider, for instance, that although the phrase you are wrong in (43) can serve to secure a contradiction of the causal connection, as becomes evident in speaker B’s response, the phrase you’re not

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being honest in (44) does not obviously do so, as can be illustrated in the following versions of the test: (45)

A: Mary resigned because her boss insulted her. B: You’re wrong.

(46)

A: Are you busy tonight? Because there is a good movie on. B: You’re not being honest.

What this contrast appears to suggest is that B’s answer in (46) is crucially intended to express doubt about the sincerity condition of the invitation. But then, what seems to be at stake here is the felicity of the particular illocution rather than the validity of the reason for a course of action as in (43). In this sense, falsifying the reason for a course of action contrasts with questioning the speaker’s motives, the latter interpretation deriving only implicitly based on speculation rather than factual information. On the other hand, if speaker B’s answer in (46) were you’re wrong, as in (45), then its interpretation would be taken to affect the truth of the fact that there is a good movie on, rather than the causal connection itself. These observations lead us to another shortcoming in the phrasing of the test in (44) in relation to (43). More specifically, the wording seems to have been adjusted to fit a more explicit linguistic environment that may serve as more appropriate for truth evaluation. On the other hand, achieving truth evaluation in speaker B’s response in (43) does not depend on such a phraseological manipulation. What is worse, however, is that this test of truth or honesty evaluation can be questioned on the whole in view of its limiting application. To illustrate this, we wish to replace (44) with the following case: (47)

Is John home? Because the lights are on.

Judgments of honesty or truth do not seem to make any sense here, to the extent that the following response on the part of the interlocutor does not make sense: (48)

?You’re not being honest. You’re not asking me this question because the lights are on but because you heard noises.

Moreover, Rouchota (1998: 39) puts forward a treatment of all the Sweetsereansounding examples below as conceptual conjunctions along Ifantidou-Trouki’s (1993) proposal in favour of a conceptual treatment of sentence adverbials.

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(49)

Mary will resign because her boss insulted her.

(50)

Mary will resign because her boss told me so.

(51)

Will Mary resign? Because she keeps on fighting with the boss.

According to Ifantidou-Trouki (1993) the adverb confidentially in the sentence below encodes conceptual meaning and contributes to the explicit content of the sentence: (52)

Confidentially, Mary is having an affair.

She stipulates an analysis of a double speech act or proposition. Along these lines of interpretation, (52) communicates the two propositions below, out of which (53) represents the proposition expressed, while (54) expresses a comment on (53) contributing to a fine-tuning of its interpretation. (53)

Mary is having an affair.

(54)

The speaker says confidentially that Mary is having an affair.

By the same token, in Rouchota’s terms the speaker of (50) communicates (55) and (56), while (51) communicates the propositions in (57) and (58): (55)

Mary will resign.

(56)

I believe that Mary will resign because her boss told me so.

(57)

Will Mary resign?

(58)

I am asking you whether Mary will resign because she keeps on fighting with her boss.

Indeed, Ifantidou-Trouki’s conceptual account of sentence adverbials seems plausible considering that the sentence adverbial confidentially is used to explicitly mark the propositional attitude integrating the utterance in (53), in the sense that it contributes the concept that it encodes to the explicature, as becomes manifest in (54). In other words, the lexical concept confidentially in (52) expresses strong linguistic evidence of the type of explicature derived. But the situation is very different with examples (50) and (51). The realization of the because-conjunction

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in (50) does not seem to mark the propositional attitude description in (56) by virtue of the concept that it allegedly encodes. In fact, the attitude to the related utterance might be one of supposing or concluding to name but a few options. As for (51), suffice it to say that the kind of proposition we have in (57) remains to be discussed. In this respect, it is understood that sentence adverbials and causal connectives are not to be treated on a par. All parameters considered, we surmise that the most conclusive piece of evidence in support of a diversified account of a causal connective that appears multifunctional derives from considerations of cross-linguistic variation. Specifically, we do not think of it as a coincidence that in languages other than English, i.e. Modern Greek, the divergence between the two types of processing causal conjunctions, namely by way of decoding and inferring communicated content, which is the sort of divergence that crucially sustains the distinction in conjunctive meaning between conceptual and procedural encoding, is salient enough to motivate a distinction in lexicalization. Hence, in Modern Greek expressions of cause, epeiδi is reserved for conceptual uses as opposed to γiati, which has a multiple role to fulfil in discourse. From this angle of investigation, it is hardly the case that Rouchota’s suggestion below explains her decision to subsume because into the conceptual category of encoding. That is, given that procedural meaning may constrain inferential processes which pertain to the implicatures or the explicatures of an utterance (Wilson and Sperber 1993), she notes: If that’s right, we would expect that there are two categories of connectives with procedural meaning: some procedural connectives constrain the implicitly communicated content of an utterance and some constrain the explicitly communicated content of an utterance. (Rouchota 1998: 37)

And while the marker so is a procedural marker that purportedly instantiates this claim (Rouchota 1998: 38–39), the choice is made for an overall conceptual view of because.

8 Conclusions In the current meaning analysis we undertook a description of the two connectives with the widest range of application in the discourse of causal relations in Modern Greek: γiati and epeiδi. The results of this analysis dispel any suspicion of intersubstitutability of the two connectives in context. In fact, as it turns out, although the use of either connective is licensed under contextual circumstances

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of fully encoded cause-and-effect propositional relations, the same does not hold of underdetermined conjunctive environments, which only seem to host the occurrence of γiati. To secure the accomplishment of any mission of exhaustive research and sharp observation of a linguistic phenomenon, what is crucially required is proper regard to the choice of a model of analysis demonstrating sensitivity to subtle but interesting linguistic facts associated with the object of observation, facts that may otherwise remain invisible. The aptness of a theoretical model deployed to serve the purpose of the present concerns could only be considered in respect of its contribution to the development of notions that are criterial of pragmatic research, i.e. inference, context, linguistic underdeterminacy. In this sense and in the interest of observing the minute details of the meaning description that the two connectives were subjected to for the purpose of a thorough survey in causality, we employed the range of methodological means of investigation that relevance theory proves to afford. The divergences in causal encoding that have been found have been portrayed in relation to the proposed distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning, and this portrayal is attained in an economical, integrative account. Moreover, in large-scale applications of a theoretical framework, it is not uncommon to recommend amendments to stipulations that are instrumental to its operation, if these are to warrant an integrative account. In this connection, it has been shown that both definitions of procedural and conceptual meaning in the study of discourse markers need to be augmented. On the one hand, the definition of the former notion must be enriched so as to accommodate markers used to affect not only implicatures but also explicatures at both levels: the proposition expressed as well as higher-order embeddings. On the other hand, the conceptual meaning of discourse markers must be characterized with some accuracy. To this end, a number of tests have been proposed for determining conceptual features as distinct form procedural ones. In this line of argumentation, it transpires that the two causal connectives under discussion are not intersubstitutable across linguistic contexts. In the relevance-motivated account of causal meaning undertaken here, we concluded that, in principle, epeiδi constitutes a vehicle of conceptual cause realizing fully propositional conjunctive relations. On the other hand, γiati has been proposed to earmark a type of hybrid lexical item encoding either a procedural constraint in linguistically underdetermined conjunctive environments or conceptual information, though not in tandem. Ultimately, it is the speaker’s communicative intention in making causal choices in conjunctive context that is taken to sustain the hearer’s interpretation decisions in identifying the kind of causal meaning encoded.

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References Bardzokas, Valandis. 2012. Causality and Connectives: From Grice to Relevance. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bach, Kent. 1994. Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9. 124–162. Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, Diane. 2002. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benveniste, Émile. 1966. Problèmes des Linguistique Générale. Paris: Gallimard. Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Malden: Blackwell. Carston, Robyn. 2004. Explicature and Semantics. In Steven Davis and Brendan Gillon (eds.), Semantics: A Reader, 817–845. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, Bruce. 2006. On the conceptual-procedural distinction. Style 40. 24–29. Fraser, Bruce. 2009. A critical review of the conceptual-procedural distinction. Paper presented at the International Conference on Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, Madrid, 15–17 October. Frege, Gottlob. 1892. On sense and reference. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100. 25–50. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Ifantidou-Trouki, Elly. 1993. Sentential adverbs and relevance. Lingua 90. 69–90. Iten, Corinne. 1997. Because and although: a case of duality? University College London Working Papers in Linguistics 9. 55–76. Iten, Corinne. 2005. Linguistic Meaning, Truth Conditions and Relevance: The Case of Concessives. London: Palgrave, Macmillan. Kalokerinos, Alexis. 2004. The justifying connection, mostly in Greek. Journal of Greek Linguistics 5. 27–80. Kaplan, David. 1989. Demonstratives. In Joseph Almong, John Perry and Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, 565–614. New York: Oxford University Press. Kempson, Ruth. 1975. Presupposition and the Delimitation of Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitis, Eliza. 1982. Problems connected with the notion of implicature. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Warwick University. Kitis, Eliza. 2006. Causality and subjectivity: the causal connectives of Modern Greek. In Hanna Pishwa (ed.), Language and Memory: Aspects of Knowledge Representation, 223–267. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kitis, Eliza. 2010. A reconsideration of conventional implicature and its implications for speech act theory. Paper presented at the 4th Intercultural Pragmatics Conference, Madrid, 15–17 November. Recanati, François. 1991. The pragmatics of ‘what is said’. In Steven Davis (ed.), Pragmatics. A Reader, 97–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-conditional Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rouchota, Villy. 1998. Connectives, Coherence and Relevance. In Villy Rouchota and Andreas Jucker (eds.), Current Issues in Relevance Theory, 11–57. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1995 [1986]. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Deirdre. unpublished. Semantic theory. Lecture notes, University College London, 1998–1999. Wilson, Deirdre and Robyn Carston. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In Noel Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, 230–259. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber. 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90. 1–25.

Marta Dynel

Being cooperatively (im)polite: Grice’s model in the context of (im)politeness theories 1 Introduction Grice (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978], 1989c) is widely known to have launched one of the most important pragmatic models of conversation, which can be applied to all forms of human communication (e.g. speeches, letters or advertisements). In his seminal lecture published as an article, Grice (1989a [1975]) propounds the Cooperative Principle (CP) and several subordinate maxims captured under four categories (Quality, Quantity, Relation and Manner), the flouting (overt violation) of which gives rise to (conversational) implicatures (Grice’s neologism for “implying”, commonly used in reference to the meaning implied). The model of conversation based on the CP, together with the notion of speaker/utterer meaning (Grice 1957 [1989d]), provides the backdrop for a large proportion of the pragmatic literature on politeness, both the well-entrenched theories (Lakoff 1973, 1977, 1989; Leech 1983, 2003, 2005; Brown and Levinson 1987, 1987¹) and more recent developments (e.g. Haugh 2002, 2007; Pfister 2010); as well as the complementary impoliteness² frameworks (e.g. Lachenicht 1980; Culpeper 1996, 2005, 2008, 2011; Culpeper et al. 2003; Bousfield 2008a, 2008b, 2010). As will be shown here, the literature on (im)politeness is replete with controversial claims consequent upon the authors’ misinterpretations of the Gricean philosophy. In addition, inspired by Grice’s notions of implicature and maxims, authors offer debatable extensions regarding politeness, notably politeness as invariably couched in implicitness (not Grice’s what is said, which is equal to speaker-intended literal/explicit meaning), politeness as implicature, and a politeness maxim. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Fraser 1990, 2005; Braun 1988; Held 1992; Watts 1992a; Terkourafi 2003; Bousfield 2008a; Dynel 2009b),

1 Brown and Levinson’s 1978 article was published as a book in 1987. However, it is only the monograph that is henceforth referred to here. 2 Given the notion of speaker meaning endorsed here, the present focus is on impoliteness, but not (unintended) rudeness (Culpeper 1996, 2005, 2008, 2011; Bousfield 2008a, 2008b, 2010). For a different view of the terms, see Terkourafi (2008).

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authors rarely address the inadequacies in (im)politeness literature related to the Gricean framework. This paper aims to tease out the problematic interdependence between the Gricean model of communication and the scholarship on politeness and impoliteness which draws on it. It will be argued that some (im)politeness researchers’ postulates tend to be anchored in unfounded interpretations and modifications of the Gricean account. Consequently, it is postulated that (im)politeness can be viewed in the light of Grice’s original work on communicative rationality and intentionality, which underlie literal/explicit or implicit meanings.

2 (Im)politeness in the light of cooperation and rationality Many a theoretical problem arises from (im)politeness researchers’ misinterpreting the notion of the Cooperative Principle. Contrary to the folk understanding of the word, the technical term “cooperation” put forward by Grice should be understood as interlocutors’ rationality, which is a prerequisite for the success of their communicative exchanges (Davies 2000, 2007; Dynel 2008, 2009a). The Gricean philosophical framework concerns prototypical, that is successful, conversation (and other forms of communication, cf. Dynel 2010), not accounting for communicative failures, which can occur even if interactants are rational and, therefore, cooperative. Grice’s cooperation resides primarily in logic and communicative rationality, laying foundations for rational and intention-based communication. This view has been frequently misunderstood. In response to other researchers’ unsubstantiated criticism of his work, Grice (1989c: 369, quoted later in this section) feels the need to explicate that it is only rationality that he has aimed to discuss in the context of the CP. Essentially, the fundamental tenet underpinning the CP is that the speaker and the hearer are rational language users (Grandy and Warner 1986), which is also their mutual presumption. Specifically, the hearer to a given utterance holds a view that the speaker is rational and that a logical interpretation of this utterance is to be sought, even if it should flout maxims, thus being couched in implicitness. On the other hand, the speaker produces an utterance and invites the hearer’s understanding, trusting that the latter will infer the meaning accordingly. Therefore, communicative rationality does not necessitate that the speaker should produce only literal utterances free from implicitness. Cooperation, does not entail the speaker’s benevolence or his/her avoidance of imposition on the hearer. It is not the case that for the sake of efficiency, the speaker needs to refrain

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from causing the hearer to invest his/her time or cognitive resources with a view to inferring implied meanings, as some authors wrongly suggest (see Davies 2007). Brown and Levinson (1987) tacitly assume that the CP is premised on rationality, as originally posited by Grice, but state that maxims are “guidelines for achieving maximally efficient communication” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 95), whereas politeness is “a major source of deviation from such rational efficiency” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 95). Firstly, hardly cogent is Brown and Levinson’s suggestion that politeness must always capitalise on maxim floutings (see Section 4), even if some of those are indeed produced for the sake of politeness. Secondly, the postulate that politeness (or maxim flouting in general) is inefficient is scarcely well-founded. Rational efficient communication should not be equated with literal means of expression and lack of implicature, whilst politeness can be carried by what is said or implicature. Additionally, the authors state that politeness requires “rational explanation on the part of the recipient who finds in considerations of politeness reasons for the speaker’s apparent irrationality or inefficiency” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 4). A similar misinterpretation of the Gricean model as predicated on efficiency (between cooperative, rather than aggressive, participants) can also be found in a paper by Pfister, who insists that the maxim of politeness he proposes (cf. Section 6) “is not conceptually tied to maximally efficient exchange of information and rational conversation [materialised by following Grice’s maxims], but it is conceptually tied to rational conversation among potentially aggressive parties” (2010: 1277). On the strength of these quotations, it emerges that the authors hold the opinion that the Gricean model and politeness have two distinct goals, even if they are not mutually exclusive per se and both operate on rationality. Brown and Levinson (1987) and Pfister (2010) imply that politeness entails apparent irrationality or inefficiency on the speaker’s part. The hearer must rationally infer the polite speaker’s intended meaning, which is only apparently “irrational”. However, it is sensible to assume that, in ordinary/ prototypical situations, the speaker is rational even if he/she is polite or potentially aggressive. Interestingly, Brown and Levinson do see an intrinsic paradox in the fact that politeness entails “the speaker’s apparent irrationality” (1987: 4) and simultaneously “a dash of rationality” (1987: 55). This paradox is entirely due to their ill-judged claim concerning the ambivalent notion “rational efficiency” as the cornerstone of the Gricean framework. While the CP is indeed inherently associated with interlocutors’ rationality, it legitimises maxim floutings as the grounds for implicature. The Gricean model is not geared towards communicative efficiency, whether understood as literal expression (what is said) subject to an easy inferential process or richly informative communication. Conversation, in accordance with the CP, is not centred on conveying information, as Lakoff (1973, 1977, 1989) and Terkourafi (2008) mistakenly state. In

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other words, the Gricean rationality model is not reliant on the stipulation that the main reason for communication is the exchange of informative content (see Dynel 2008, 2009a). A similar problem arises in Leech’s (1983) work. He appears to misinterpret the CP, holding a social goal sharing view of it (Bousfield 2008a). Leech asserts that the CP “has the function of regulating what we say so that it contributes to some assumed illocutionary or discoursal goal(s)” (Leech 1983: 82). Nevertheless, the CP is not pertinent solely to clearly delineated discoursal goals (such as to convey particular information). Having found himself misunderstood, Grice (1989c) clarifies that irrespective of whether the aim of a conversation is specified or whether it is indeterminate, the CP will invariably obtain. Goals are very broadly conceptualised and may also be second-order ones, as in the case of a casual chitchat, in which “each party should, for the time being, identify himself with the transitory interests of the other” (Grice 1989a [1975]: 29). The model does, therefore, encompass interactions produced as the Malinowskian phatic communication merely in order that politeness routines should be completed, with practically no informative content being conveyed. In turn, Watts (1992a, 2003) notes that politeness theories (Lakoff 1973, 1977, 1989; Leech 1983, 2003, 2005; Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) pivot on a misunderstanding of the Gricean model, taking “the principle of optimal cooperation” as “the controlling principle”, while it is only “an ideal state of communicative cooperation”, against which “participants in interaction are able to evaluate deviations from that principle” (Watts 1992a: xxxvi). This observation may engender doubts, though. Taking the Gricean model as their departure point is by no means a methodological problem of politeness conceptualisations (on condition that the authors interpret the model correctly). Contrary to what Watts suggests, participants in an interaction neither contravene nor deviate from the CP, which is invariably in operation, as long as they are rational. This misinterpretation is also manifest in Watts’s (2003: 203) claim that “there’s an inherent contradiction […]: polite language is a form of cooperative behaviour but does not seem to abide by Grice’s Cooperative Principle”. By the same token, according to Culpeper, “departures form Gricean cooperation in no way imply departure from polite, social cooperation; in fact, in the classic politeness theory perspective, departures from Gricean cooperation can be motivated by the wish to maintain polite, social cooperation” (2008: 24). Such fallacious claims (see also Leech (1983)) stem from the authors’ misunderstanding of Grice’s “cooperation” as a rule that can be regularly disregarded for the sake of politeness. It must again be stressed that it is not the case that deviations from, not to mention violations of, the CP are commonplace, since the principle always holds unchanged among rational communicators (while it is the maxims that may be, and frequently are, flouted to generate implied meanings). This is why little support can be given to

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Culpeper’s (2011: 158) claim that “the operation of the Cooperative Principle will depend on the context. For example, what counts as a clear and straightforward expression will partly depend on the genre of which it is a part.” It is indeed the case that different genres of discourse and communicative contexts will manifest their peculiarities in terms of maxims’ use, for example in relation to implicitness. However, one may find Culpeper’s (2011) claim indefensible, given that the CP, which boils down to rationality, (ideally) operates the same way across contexts, whilst the maxims are flouted or observed. As transpires from the discussion above, politeness researchers frequently perceive politeness as diverting from the CP, rather than viewing the latter as a principle of rationality underpinning polite communication. Locher (2004) is yet another researcher nurturing this misguided belief. Revisiting Leech’s (1983) work, Locher (2004: 65) uses the concept “violation of the CP”, which Leech does not mention. CP violation would be tantamount to irrationality, something Grice (1989a [1975]) does not allow for in his idealised picture of communication (see Dynel 2009a). In essence, politeness, if an intentional and rational activity, does not violate the CP. Sharing a similar view, but also misinterpreting Grice’s original proposal, Kallia (2004, 2007) and Kingwell (1993) suggest extending Grice’s view of rationality so that it captures politeness. Actually, each of such proposals is more of an explication rather than an extension, given Grice’s all-encompassing definition of cooperation as rationality. Watts labours under a misapprehension in recognising, the Gricean cooperation as social goal sharing, as does Leech (1983). This misinterpretation has a bearing on the impoliteness framework. Watts (2003: 20) postulates that in impoliteness, which invalidates the statement that “all interaction is geared towards cooperation”, “we are prepared to abandon the Gricean assumption of cooperation”. Similarly, Culpeper (2005) ventures to claim untenably that being impolite, the speaker is not “cooperative in Grice’s (1975) sense” (Culpeper 2005: 44; but see Culpeper 2011). Indeed, impoliteness is frequently associated with non-cooperative behaviour (Kienpointner 1997, 2008; Garces-Conejos Blitvich 2009, 2010). For instance, Kienpointner (2008: 245) describes impoliteness as “non-cooperative or competitive communicative behaviour” which disrupts interpersonal relationships, and “creates or maintains an emotional atmosphere of mutual irreverence and antipathy.” Nonetheless, this non-cooperativeness should be understood literally, not as being at odds with Grice’s cooperation, that is rationality, underlying his principle. Mullany (2008) rightly acknowledges that impoliteness is rational but, when motivating this, provides argumentation which displays her misunderstanding of the Gricean model. From her perspective, accusations that impoliteness is rare or irrational

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are a consequence of traditional Brown and Levinson-influenced models of conflict-avoidance, due to their reliance on Grice’s (1975) co-operative principle. Engaging in impolite behaviour is perfectly rational, and is far more ‘normal’ than is predicted by Gricean-based theories of human communication (Kienpointner 1997, Culpeper et al 2003). (Mullany 2008: 236)

What must be emphasised again is that the Gricean approach does not disallow, and even naturally embraces, conflicts, disagreements and quarrels, which do show “at least a mutually accepted direction” (Grice 1989a [1975]: 26) and which frequently manifest impoliteness. As Lumsden (2008) observes, Grice (1989a [1975]: 26) seems to suggest that normally extralinguistic cooperation comes into force when referring to “a common purpose of a set of purposes”, but if it should be absent, linguistic cooperation suffices (cf. “a mutually accepted direction”). The CP can be deemed to promote “linguistic goal sharing”, as Thomas (1986) and Bousfield (2008a) suggest, or “linguistic cooperation” (Lumsden 2008) even if the interlocutors’ objectives or roles at a given moment are complementary opposites (e.g. reproaching and being reproached, or interrupting and being interrupted). Similarly, after Culpeper (2011: 157) states: “Of course, it may seem absolute nonsense to apply a ‘co-operative’ principle to data that are strikingly uncooperative”, thereby subscribing to the opinion that the Gricean cooperation should be equated with the folk definition of the word; he seems to concede to the view that linguistic cooperation needs to be distinguished from extralinguistic/ social cooperation (a dichotomy which is here considered redundant) and that either suffices as the grounds for communication according to the CP. Nonetheless, a quotation from the “Retrospective epilogue” bears as the best testament to the conclusion that the CP embraces impoliteness, for example arguments or conflict talk, not because of the underpinning cooperation, but because of the rationality of (im)polite conduct: One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp practice are far too common to be offenses against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice. (…) so, nothing which I say should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of particular issues for conversational exploration; it is the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct which I have been concerned to track down rather than any more general characterization of conversational adequacy. (Grice 1989c: 369)

On the whole, it is not the matter of the subtypes of cooperation (Thomas 1986; Bousfield 2008a; Lumsden 2008) that is central to the thesis that the CP captures impolite talk. It is, instead, the notion of rationality that is germane to all communication, whether polite or impolite.

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In conclusion, politeness is a rational communicative behaviour which exhibits no incongruity with the CP (Kingwell 1993, Burt 1999), and the same holds true for impoliteness. Both polite and impolite utterances conform to the CP, hinged on interlocutors’ mutual assumption of rationality in their communication (Terkourafi 2005b). Rightly, Terkourafi (2008) argues that all communication is based on the CP and facework, both of which rest on rationality. However, the faulty assumption that politeness is contingent on violation of, or at least departure from, the CP is the springboard for the need to introduce a Politeness Principle, which is complimentary to, and even mutually exclusive with, Grice’s principle.

2.1 Cooperative Principle (and conversational maxims) vis-à-vis Politeness Principle (and its maxims) Lakoff’s (1973, 1977, 1989) approach to politeness displays a number of inconsistencies. She regards Grice’s notion of the Cooperative Principle as being insufficient and argues in favour of the Politeness Principle as an indispensable appendage, whose aim is “to reduce friction in personal interaction” (Lakoff 1989: 64). Moreover, Lakoff champions two rules of pragmatic competence: “be clear” (which embraces the Gricean CP and maxims) and “be polite”, which usually (but not always) conflict with each other. Additionally, depending on relationship types and contextual factors, Lakoff distinguishes three sub-maxims of the “be polite” competence,³ viz. R1 Formality/Distance: don’t impose or remain aloof, R2 Deference: give options, and R3 Camaraderie: show sympathy (by acting as equal with the addressee and making him/her feel good). First of all, this proposal of an alternative principle is premised on Lakoff’s ill-advised claim that while the CP is geared towards conveying information, the PP is focused on social issues. This dichotomisation of goals is misguided, since the Gricean principle does not exclude communicative goals other than relaying informative messages and holds for phatic language use as well, as discussed above. Secondly, Lakoff subsumes clarity (which, in her view, is tantamount to following the Gricean maxims) under the “don’t impose” rule, arguing that “we can look at the rules of conversations as subcases of Rule 1: their purpose is to get the message communicated in the shortest time with the least difficulty, that is to avoid imposition at the addressee” (Lakoff 1973: 303). This indicates the author’s misconception of the Gricean framework as if it focused on information convey3 Lakoff’s parlance changes in the span of over one and a half decades, which is why alternative terms are provided here.

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ance with minimal processing costs incurred by the hearer. Another problem is that Lakoff (1973) perceives one of the two rules of politeness which she contrives as being superior to the Gricean maxims which she refers to as “rules of conversations”. It transpires that Lakoff (1973) fails to appreciate that maxims capture the nature of communication in general and can be legitimately flouted, politeness phenomena regardless. Thirdly, Lakoff (1973) states that the PP usually supersedes the Gricean principle and maxims in informal encounters (R3), while the latter model obtains for cases of formality (R1). This untenable statement leads to the conclusion that the applicability of Grice’s model (which she fails to see as being pivoted on rationality) is context-dependent and manifest primarily in formal encounters vis-à-vis informal ones, with R2’s status being left unexplained. Additionally, Lakoff (1973) implicates that politeness/Grice’s model in formal contexts (R1) cannot involve indirectness, given that the Gricean maxims are followed there, in contrast to informal situations, where indirectness is prevalent. It cannot be denied that politeness will present itself differently in different relationships and situations, yet it is not the case that politeness infringes the Gricean communicative rationality, which is an all-encompassing concept. Finally, Lakoff (1975: 75) asserts that women are preoccupied with indirectness, which is correlated with politeness (cf. Section  4), while men are guided in their communicative strategy by informativeness, thereby suggesting that the choice between the CP and the PP is gender-dependent. If one appreciates the essence of the CP, Lakoff’s statement appears to indicate that women are, by nature, irrational, which Lakoff cannot possibly wish to claim. Whether the differences in gendered idiolects are so sharp is another problem addressed in more rigorously conducted linguistic gender studies. Leech (1983, 2003, 2005) also juxtaposes his Politeness Principle (together with its subordinate maxims), later renamed as the Grand Strategy of Politeness, with the Gricean Cooperative Principle. Mistakenly perceiving the CP as orientated towards the conveyance of meaning, Leech (1983) formulates the Politeness Principle (PP) and argues that “the PP has a higher regulative role than this: to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place” (Leech 1983: 82). Leech hence avers that his PP controls the CP in that it facilitates social interactions and cooperation. Moreover, Leech claims that the Politeness Principle “rescues the CP from serious trouble” (Leech 1983: 80) and is its “necessary complement” (Leech 1983: 80) explaining phenomena that, from his viewpoint, cannot be subsumed under the CP, inasmuch as it fails to explain “why people are often so indirect in conveying what they mean” (Leech 1983: 80). This reveals Leech’s faulty understanding of the Gricean model, which does account for, and

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is actually focused on implicatures emerging from maxim floutings on the understanding that the CP holds. Failing to appreciate this, Leech (1983: 82) attests that the speaker may “blatantly” break “a maxim of the CP in order to uphold the PP”. Based on this tenuous postulate, Leech (1983) provides examples of maxim “breaches”, which may be deemed regular maxim floutings yielding implicatures (motivated, among others, by politeness-related intentions), which are by no means mutually exclusive with the CP, a principle that invariably obtains in communication. Leech (1983) transparently misunderstands the Gricean cooperation as being synonymous with the folk/dictionary understanding of the word. Contrary to what Leech suggests, interlocutors need not always be “friendly” or even benevolently cooperative but still abide by the CP. Although participants in an interaction have a common immediate aim, their ultimate respective aims may be “independent and even in conflict” (Grice 1989a [1975]: 29, 1989c). Interestingly, politeness as such does not need to entail interactants’ full agreement or friendliness (e.g. a professional exchange between business adversaries). Politeness may reside in mitigation strategies underlying verbal acts which are inherently facethreatening. On the whole, Grice’s CP is an unchangeable presumption, which is operative in all interpersonal encounters (with a few exceptions when interlocutors are not rational), while politeness is socially controlled and can be violated. The speaker may be rational and, therefore, cooperative in the Gricean sense, without necessarily being polite, and even being patently impolite. Thus, it is misguided of Leech to assume that interlocutors’ politeness regulates, and is superior to, their conversational rationality. Finally, an emerging question is if all interactions and utterances therein can actually be assessed for their (im)politeness value (e.g. a teacher delivering a lecture devoid of any references to the students). Beyond a shadow of a doubt, all social encounters are guided by etiquette norms, most of which are taken for granted and will be consciously observed in first order politeness, which concerns lay language users’ perspective (for the distinction between first and second order approach, see Watts et al. 1992; Watts 1992a, 2003; Eelen 2001), only if breached (cf. Kasper 1990; Fraser 1990, 2005; Jary 1998). Also, many interactions or utterances can hardly be considered politeness-orientated, but rather politic, i.e. appropriate (cf. Watts 1989, 1992a, 1992b). Overall, both Lakoff (1973, 1977, 1989) and Leech (1983, 2003, 2005) view their Politeness Principles as being mutually exclusive with the Gricean CP and its subordinate maxims, for they fail to acknowledge the sense of the Gricean cooperation and the legitimacy of maxim floutings, whether or not giving rise to (im)politeness (see Section 4). Whilst a distinct principle of politeness (coupled with its subordinate maxims) might be a useful theoretical tool for politeness

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researchers, it is nothing but otiose when conceptualised in contrast to the CP. Incidentally, isolating a separate principle of politeness might necessitate infinite proliferation of principles for various phenomena, which are easily captured by the CP (Brown and Levinson 1987).

3 Speaker-intended meaning and (im)politeness Grice’s (1989d [1957]) notion of utterer’s meaning or speaker meaning appears to have an impact on those (im)politeness researchers who emphasise the importance of the speaker’s intention when communicating meanings and/or the hearer’s recognition of it (e.g. Culpeper et al. 2003; Culpeper 2005, 2008, 2011; Bousfield 2008a, 2008b, 2010). Some researchers, however, argue that intention recognition is irrelevant and that discourse is co-constructed by interlocutors (Terkourafi 2005b, Locher and Watts 2008, Haugh 2007), given that intentions cannot be probed with full certainty. What is also of relevance in determining (im)politeness is the hearer’s perception of the speaker’s communicative intention. In the first order approach, this even takes priority over the speaker’s actual intention, in Locher and Watts’s (2008) view. In defence of the advocates of (im) politeness based on the speaker’s intention, it can be said that hearers need not consciously determine speakers’ intentions (and their intentions to have those recognised, cf. Grice’s notion of reflexivity) before gleaning meanings, but usually take it for granted that the meanings they infer are indeed speaker-intended. This is related to the problem of a priori vs. post factum intention. Brown and Levinson’s (1987), as well as Leech’s (1983), work is premised on the Gricean notion of the speaker’s a priori intention (Culpeper 2011), that is intention that exists before he/she produces an utterance. A priori intention tends to be superseded in the literature by its post facto counterpart (Haugh 2008, Culpeper 2011). This concept captures cases when interlocutors use the notion of intention explanatorily, accounting for their utterances and actions, especially in the case of communication troubles or alleged violation of politeness norms (Haugh 2008). The hotly debated issue of reflexivity aside (see Dynel 2010), speaker meaning may be interpreted as serving intentional and rational communicative purposes and as lying at the heart of the CP model. To reformulate, the Gricean notion of cooperation is equivalent to the speaker’s rationality, which necessitates intentionality (Davies 2000, 2007; Dynel 2009a, 2010). On the assumption that the CP holds, the hearer computes literal meanings and implicatures, by making rational inferences, based on his/her (tacit) recognition of the speaker’s communica-

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tive intentions. The hearer receives communicated messages, which he/she (subconsciously) considers to be speaker-intended, albeit recruiting conventional meanings of words. Rooted in the Gricean framework, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model also centres on the speaker’s intention (see Section 5), and thus it implicitly adopts the notion of speaker meaning. However, the detailed list of substrategies⁴ indicates that the authors ascribe conventional meanings to them, the speaker’s particular communicative intention notwithstanding. On the other hand, Culpeper et  al. (2003) rightly emphasise that their impoliteness strategies are dependent on context and the speaker’s intentions (see also Bousfield 2008a, 2008b, 2010; Culpeper 2011). Nevertheless, Culpeper’s model runs the risk of being perceived as encoded in language, as it is grounded in the inversion of Brown and Levinson’s framework (Mills 2005; Bell 2009). On the whole, no linguistic form invariably carries politeness or impoliteness (cf. Fraser and Nolen 1981; Watts 2003; Locher 2004; Locher and Watts 2005; Mills 2005). However, it cannot be denied that certain forms of expression are commonly associated with politeness or impoliteness, especially in the first order approach (Bousfield 2010; Culpeper 2010). For instance, thanking is normally associated with politeness, but it may also be used with a sarcastically ironic undertone for the sake of impoliteness. On the other hand, taboo words are most frequently regarded as impolite, whilst they may actually be deployed to foster humour and testify to solidarity politeness (Dynel 2011). Whether particular instances of conventional formulae subscribe to the salient patterns or less typical uses must be judged individually in the light of particular speakers’ intentions.

4 (Im)politeness and indirectness/implicitness In the literature on (im)politeness, the term “indirectness” is used in reference to what may be called “implicitness”. Technically speaking, the latter term seems preferable, since it is relevant to the Gricean account, whilst indirectness is associated with Speech Act Theory, in which it pertains to conveying one act by means of another (e.g. the assertive, “I’m thirsty”, may perform the role of the request, “Bring me a glass of water, please”). Nonetheless, in the literature overview pre-

4 Also, some of the strategies provoke serious misgivings. For instance, it is hardly conceivable that irony conveying criticism should be recognised as a politeness strategy, as Brown and Levinson (1987: 222) suggest, for the face-threat frequently appears to be exacerbated rather than mitigated, owing to the irony deployed.

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sented in this article, the cited researchers’ terminology is employed, while the term “implicitness” occurs in the present authors’ comments. As already indicated, Lakoff (1973) views politeness as originating in nonclarity, that is indirectness, which is contrasted with clarity, allegedly underlying the Gricean model, in which implicitness actually enjoys a high status. Although Lakoff rightly attests that if a Gricean maxim is not followed, interpreters seek a plausible explanation in politeness (yet, as is argued here, not a separate principle), it cannot be assumed that politeness is the sole reason for/result of maxim non-observance, for implicatures may not be motivated by politeness, while politeness may also be based on literal means of expression. The same misinterpretation inheres in Lakoff and Ide’s (2005: 8) claim concerning the alleged interdependence between politeness and indirectness, as well as its advantage over clarity of expression. In their words, “in many types of discourse politenessbased implicature supersedes clarity-based Maxim-adherence (…) when faced with a choice between clarity and politeness, people normally opt in favor of the latter. That suggests that politeness is not just a superficial addition to a grammar in which directness (i.e., non-politeness) is basic” (Lakoff and Ide 2005: 8). Lakoff and Ide (2005) wrongly juxtapose and contrast politeness, which, in their opinion, coincides with indirectness, with clarity stemming from maxim fulfilment. Also, that language users in general (should) choose implicatures geared towards politeness, rather than explicitness (allegedly inherently offensive, but actually basic in human communication), appears to be an unsubstantiated generalisation, which shows also in another quotation from Lakoff: “it is more important in a conversation to avoid offense than to achieve clarity” (Lakoff 1973: 297). Clarity, understood as literal means of expression, need not involve any offensiveness, whilst impoliteness may also reside in implicitness. Also, besides etiquette norms, it depends on a particular speaker (and contextual factors) whether he/ she wants primarily to convey an unmitigated message or avoid potential offence (e.g. by giving up the clarity of expression). Leech (1983, 2003, 2005) also argues that politeness is associated with indirectness, as it decreases the feeling of imposition on the hearer. Nevertheless, Leech (1983: 171) himself notes that indirectness may lead to more face-threat, and thus to impoliteness. Incidentally, Leech’s (1983: 171) example of a customs officer’s question, “Haven’t you something to declare?”, appears to be indicative of decreasing politeness, yet not necessarily impoliteness, as Leech suggests. This is because it can hardly be perceived as an overtly aggressive attack on the hearer, as the prevailing definitions of impoliteness hold. As already hinted at (see Section  2), Brown and Levinson’s (1987) conceptualisation of politeness is centred on implicitness. Brown and Levinson (1987: 95) assert that politeness necessarily depends on maxim floutings, which sug-

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gests that implicitness is actually necessary for politeness to arise. Surprisingly enough, while Brown and Levinson associate politeness with the specious notion of “deviation from rational efficiency” and thus “indirectness”, or rather implicitness (which always depends on maxim floutings), they present only one super-strategy of politeness, that is going off record, as entailing maxim floutings. Brown and Levinson (1987: 69, 94) posit that the strategy of doing an act baldly on record, i.e. without any redress, is tantamount to “speaking in conformity with Grice’s Maxims (Grice 1975)” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 94), whereas going off record coincides with maxim nonfulfilment.⁵ The off-record strategy is employed when the face-threat is extreme, and yet the speaker does not refrain from issuing it. Brown and Levinson (1987) associate this politeness strategy with implicitness engendered by floutings of conversational maxims. By contrast, the bald-on-record strategy can be employed in situations where the speaker is powerful or where not much face is at stake, for instance in cases when maximum efficiency is needed (in the state of emergency). It must be noted that in some circumstances, the bald-on-record strategy may still be conceived as a manifestation of politeness. Incidentally, in first order politeness, on-record utterances (e.g. a mother ordering a child to eat dinner, or a customs officer asking passengers to form a queue) stand little chance of being found polite by ordinary language users, but will not count as impoliteness, either.

5 Another problem is that redressive action via positive and negative politeness strategies can also be materialised by flouting or following Grice’s maxims, while off-record strategies are also face-directed. In other words, both negative and positive politeness may be communicated literally (on record), i.e. by means of what is said, or implicitly (off record) by dint of implicatures consequent upon floutings (cf. Bousfield 2008 for impoliteness). This methodological shortcoming (the overlap in the taxonomy) results from the fact that Brown and Levinson’s (1987) super-strategies are based on two unrelated criteria (observing/flouting the Gricean maxims and face orientation) and, consequently, are not indiscrete (see also Strecker 1988, Bousfield 2008). Brown and Levinson do concede that they “may have been in error to set up the three superstrategies, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record, as ranked unidimensionally to achieve mutual exclusivity” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 18) and that there is a “possibility that the off-record strategy is independent of, and co-occurrent with, the other two super-strategies is something which definitely requires closer investigation” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 21). Modelled on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness framework, the first two classifications of impoliteness strategies (Lachenicht 1980, Culpeper et  al. 2003) suffer from the same methodological problem as Brown and Levinson’s account in that they merge two criteria: face address and implicitness/literalness, whilst negative and positive impoliteness strategies can also entail literalness or implicitness. Rightly, Bousfield (2008) conflates strategies introduced by Culpeper and co-researchers under on-record and off-record impoliteness, depending on whether it is performed by implicitness or literal means, respectively.

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A claim that politeness inheres in implicitness does not tally with their general model of the five superstrategies of performing face-threatening acts. A question arises as to whether politeness is only implemented by going off record or whether it also includes the other strategies. Arundale (2005) observes that many authors misinterpret Brown and Levinson by failing to observe that the latter ascribe politeness only to implicitness, namely going off record. However, this is an untenable line of defence, insofar as the remaining strategies of performing face-threatening acts are also presented as realisations of politeness (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1987: 91). The model then manifests an internal contradiction (see also Section 5). Overall, politeness need not be associated with implicatures or implicitness, frequently referred to, thanks to Brown and Levinson (1987), as “going off record” in (im)politeness research (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1987, 1990, 1992; Fraser 1990; Turner 2003; Culpeper et al. 2003; Locher 2004; Bousfield 2008a), with impoliteness rendered via implied meanings being the most striking example. Obviously, implicatures may indeed be grounded in politeness, for speakers may flout maxims with a view to mitigating the face-threatening force underlying their utterances. Nevertheless, a speaker may be polite but produce a literal utterance (a case in point being formulaic expressions, such as: “Thank you” or “You’re welcome”). Even beyond such formulaic expressions, straightforward and blunt statements may sometimes coincide with politeness, which is what happens when the onrecord strategy is used in the case of minimal face-threat in certain contexts. For instance, a woman may bluntly tell her friend who is trying a dress on, “This dress does not become you.”, which may be interpreted as a display of solidarity politeness and the speaker’s care about the friend’s positive face, notwithstanding the form of this verbalisation. This is in tune with what Dillard et al. (1997) point to when discussing the correspondence between literalness and perceived politeness in close relationships. In addition, implicitness is not a homogenous construct, but it is divided into conventional and unconventional subtypes and it shows degrees (cf. Holtgraves 2002). Following Blum-Kulka (1987), one may distinguish between conventional and unconventional indirectness. Admittedly, while the latter is typically associated with politeness, the former need not be perceived as polite but neutral, at least on the level of first order politeness. Moreover, implicitness which does coincide with politeness shows cross-cultural differences (see e.g. Blum-Kulka 1987; Marti 2006; Ogiermann 2009). Thus, users of different languages may make utterances displaying different levels of implicitness, being considered polite in one culture, yet less polite or even impolite when assessed by language users from a different culture.

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Finally, implicitness may be associated with impoliteness rather than politeness. Culpeper et  al. (2003) and Culpeper (2005) rightly observe that higher implicitness (e.g. when hurling abuse) may sometimes exhibit more impoliteness. For example, sarcastic irony intensifies the force of criticism (“Your idea is just brilliant!” vs. “Your idea is silly!”). Impoliteness may then reside in both literal and implicit means of expression. Similarly to politeness formulae, irrespective of their (non-)literalness, impolite expressions may be conventionalised, as reflected by Culpeper’s (2010) concept of contextually conventionalised impoliteness formulae, which need not be dependent on people’s first-hand experience but knowledge of impoliteness metadiscourse. In conclusion, the (im)politeness of each implicit or explicit verbalisation must be judged in isolation. Based on a particular context, interlocutors’ relationship and the speaker’s intention, one utterance may communicate a literal meaning (what is said) or an implicature, with each of them showing different relationships to (im)politeness issues. For instance, “Aren’t you cute?” may carry several (im)polite meanings. When uttered by a woman to a toddler in a pram, this is a polite conventionally implicit compliment (literally, “What a cute baby!”) addressed to the child and directed primarily to his/her mother (cf. Dynel 2012). On the other hand, the same utterance may carry an implied meaning related to the speaker’s jocular criticism (“Your being silly, but it’s somewhat cute.”) if it serves as a young man’s reaction to his fiancée’s blunder. Even if implicitly critical and face-threatening, this utterance subscribes to solidarity politeness. Thirdly, the same utterance may act as a manager’s reply to a question, “What shall I do now?”, posed by a woman who has just been dismissed from her secretarial post. The abrupt and unequivocally impolite reply conveys the implied meaning that she might perform a job which entails exploiting her physical appearance (e.g. being a stripper).

4.1 Flouting maxims A problem related to implicitness concerns Brown and Levinson’s (1987) proposal regarding the means by which implicatures arise. The Gricean implicatures, including those motivated by politeness, rest on the assumption that maxims are flouted, while the CP invariably holds. Incidentally, failing to recognise this, Lakoff (1973, 1977, 1989) and Leech (1983) (see Section  2.1) view politeness as being mutually exclusive with the Gricean interpretative model of communication. Brown and Levinson (1987) do appreciate the process of implicatures’ emergence. However, rather than admit that maxims are legitimately flouted under

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their off-record strategy (as well as any other strategies involving implicitness), while the CP invariably holds, they aver: It is only because they [maxims] are still assumed to be in operation that addressees are forced to do the inferential work that establishes the underlying intended message and the (polite or other) source of departure – in short, to find an implicature, i.e. an inference generated by precisely this assumption. (Brown and Levinson 1987: 95)

Brown and Levinson (1987) thus unduly change the status of maxims to principles which always obtain. Moreover, in their view, off-record politeness conflates various ways of being indirect by inviting conversational implicatures or by being vague or ambiguous. The former stems from “violations” (by which they actually mean their overt types: “floutings”) of the Gricean “Relevance” (or rather Relation, as proposed by Grice), Quantity and Quality maxims underlying efficient communication, while the latter originates from Manner Maxims’ violations (Brown and Levinson 1987: 211–226). While the authors are correct in stating that maxims can be overtly violated because of the concerns about the face, their conceptualisation gives rise to misgivings. First of all, implicatures derive from floutings, synonymous with overt violations (vs. covert ones). Using the term “violation” without any epithet is ambivalent. Secondly, Manner maxims are also conducive to (politeness) implicatures. As a result, it is difficult to appreciate Brown and Levinson’s motivation in distinguishing them as a distinct category.

5 Communication of (im)politeness implicature As already indicated in Section 4, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) approach presents an internal paradox. Whilst arguing in favour of a hierarchy of politeness strategies, they maintain that politeness is immanently rooted in implicature. Also they are adamant that politeness is accomplished by implication (Brown and Levinson 1987: 5, 22, 55, 95, 271), for instance: Linguistic politeness is therefore implication in the classical way […] politeness has to be communicated and the absence of communicated politeness may, ceteris paribus, be taken as absence of the polite attitude. (Brown and Levinson 1987: 5) Politeness is implicated by the semantic structure of the whole utterance (not sentence), not communicated by ‘markers’ or ‘mitigators’ in a simple signaling fashion which can be quantified. (Brown and Levinson 1987: 22)

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If politeness must arise by implication, no politeness can be associated with the on-record strategy, which corresponds to fulfilling the Gricean maxims (Fraser 2005), or with any utterance based on what is said but representing any other politeness strategy. One may solve this problem by conceding that what Brown and Levinson (1987) mean is a higher level of implication. Irrespective of whether an utterance as such is couched in implicitness, politeness is an implicated metamessage, “I intend to be polite” (cf. Fraser 2005).⁶ To reformulate, whether or not entailing maxim flouting (going off record), Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness may be seen as a distinct level of meaning communicated beyond the central meaning of an utterance. As Fraser (1990: 228) observes, Brown and Levinson are adamant that “the failure to communicate the intention to be polite may be taken, ceteris paribus, as absence of the required polite attitude” (cf. Brown and Levinson 1987: 5, quoted above). A query arises, nonetheless, as to whether impoliteness is always a communicated message. Haugh (2002, 2007), rather than following in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) footsteps, presents a different conception of politeness implicature. He advocates a view that politeness arises by virtue of implying something, in addition to what is literally said and is necessarily co-constructed by the speaker and the hearer. Implicature is an additional level of communication jointly materialised by interlocutors. Haugh stresses that “while it is debatable whether politeness itself can be considered an implicature, the existence of politeness implicatures (an implicature which gives rise to politeness) is indisputable” (2007: 92). To illustrate this claim, Haugh (2007) provides an example of an apology issued by a museum attendant towards a woman who is unwrapping her food and is about to start eating on the premises. The apology alone generates the speaker-intended implicature that she is not allowed to do this, which the addressee duly infers. A question arises as to whether the attendant is cognisant of the fact that by apologising and implying a meaning which would otherwise be conveyed via a more imposing (albeit possibly still polite) utterance, he is communicating politeness as a message, and whether the woman does appreciate this. Unquestionably, the apology functions as a conventional act inherent to etiquette (coinciding with first order politeness) ingrained in the interlocutors’ minds, which in this case carries the implicature, “You’re not allowed to eat here”. Politeness is more of a backgrounded premise guiding the attendant’s construction of this implicature,

6 Fraser (1990, 2005) and Pfister (2010) view this type of implicature as the central one and the only one that Brown and Levinson (1987) postulate regarding politeness. Here, however, a different belief is espoused: politeness is a backgrounded assumption, and very rarely a metamessage, while an utterance carries what is said or an implicature, even if related to politeness.

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not a communicated message, not to mention an implicature arising from the utterance. Whilst the researchers quoted so far treat implicature as a generic term, admittedly exemplifying their claims with the particularised type (Grice 1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]), Terkourafi (2003, 2005a) concentrates on generalised conversational implicature, which she divides into two subtypes (meaning presumed with minimal context and in all contexts), as the source of politeness. This is because “rather than engaging in full-blown inferencing about the speaker’s intention, the addressee draws on that previous experience (represented holistically as a frame) to derive the proposition that ‘in offering an expression x the speaker is being polite’ as a generalised implicature, the addressee may then come to hold the further belief that the speaker is polite” (Terkourafi 2005a: 251)

On the whole, the argument that, at least in some cases, the hearer may take an inferential shortcut and recognise the speaker’s polite utterance is by no means counterintuitive. However, conceptualising a polite message as generalised implicature is unfounded. Again, politeness seems to be the assumption, motivation or communicative goal, which does not need to be overtly recognised by the speaker or the hearer, while chosen meanings (including generalised implicatures) are communicated. Overall, politeness can hardly be seen as inhering in implicature, hence constituting a consciously conveyed and received meta-message conceived as a special case of Grice’s implicature (Fraser 1990, 2005; Jary 1998; Pfister 2010⁷). It would be wrong to assume that polite intent is implied or consciously observed in all cases, inasmuch as politeness is frequently taken by default and acknowledged if violated (Kasper 1990; Fraser 1990, 2005; Kingwell 1993; Jary 1998; Terkourafi 2003). In other words, politeness “constitutes the unmarked way of speaking in a community, which accounts for use of polite forms passing unnoticed” (Terkourafi 2005b: 109). Plausible is Fraser’s (1990) conversational contract, 7 Pfister (2010) provides argumentation in favour of “being polite” as perceived both by the speaker and by the hearer, which is not supported here, although most of his observations as such are by no means inapt. Averring that both politeness and impoliteness arise even when no corresponding implicatures are present, he addresses cases of communicative failures (the speaker’s wrong understanding of how politeness is communicated and the speaker’s unintended verbalisation which the hearer finds offensive). Such failures are exceptions (anomalies) which should not be regarded as being of central importance if an ideal intention-based model of communication is in focus (which is the case of the models addressed here). In this ideal model, tacitly adopted by most researchers, the speaker’s intention to be (im)polite is compatible with the actual performance and the hearer’s inference (but see Bousfield 2010).

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according to which politeness is more of a backgrounded norm rational participants accept by default within the negotiated constraints of a conversation. Thus, the speaker does not signal any intention to be polite. On the other hand, as Meier (1995) observes, sometimes politeness is the primary goal, rather than be merely “piggy-backed” to another communicative act. A case in point is fellow travellers’ striking up a conversation about the weather, with the topic as such being less important than the very act of breaking the silence in a train compartment. However, even then interactants do not need to (but may) consciously perceive one another as communicating and gleaning politeness-orientated messages. Such observations are primarily pertinent to first order politeness and should also be transposed onto the level of second order politeness. Also, since etiquette underlies most interpersonal encounters, politeness seems to serve as the bedrock for all talk, unless impoliteness comes into play. Scholarly pursuit of politeness in all utterances would be a gross exaggeration and a superfluous theoretical complication. This may also explain why authors decide to reorient their research and focus on facework (e.g. Terkourafi 2005b) or relational work (e.g. Watts 2003; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008). Admittedly, in certain interactional contexts (e.g. a presentation of a theory) politeness may not come into play, being more a matter of unmarked politic behaviour (Watts 1989, 1992a, 1992b), alternatively called appropriate behaviour (e.g. Meier 1995, Locher 2004). It comprises a set of rules which remain latent but are observed only if transgressed, as indicated also by Fraser (1990) in his conversational contract account. Politeness, or politic behaviour, may then work only as a general presumption, a set of norms that will not be evaluated, unless violated (e.g. if a lecturer suddenly offends the audience, e.g. “You must be retarded if you can’t get this”). The problem of impoliteness in relational work and as a communicated message is more vexing, since it hardly is a normatively prescribed communicative behaviour, although authors acknowledge phenomena such as conventionalised aggression (Harris 2001) or sanctioned aggressive facework (Watts 2003). Mills (2003, 2005) even contests the use of the term “impoliteness” in reference to prevalent verbal aggression in certain communities of practice (e.g. in the army) (cf. Culpeper 1996, 2005; Bousfield 2008a), insofar as it is more of a norm, rather than transgression of a norm. However, even if sanctioned, blatant aggression need not be, and usually is not, neutralised in context, which is why it should still be recognised as impoliteness (Culpeper 2005, 2011). This means that, in certain contexts and situations, impoliteness may be expected but is always salient, rather than being taken for granted. On the other hand, regarding the aspect of implicature, similar observations can be made as were made concerning politeness. It is highly unlikely that impoliteness should emerge as a speaker-intended

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implicated meta-message, even if the hearer may consciously judge the speaker’s utterance offensive. The impolite speaker will have certain communicative goals on his mind (e.g. to criticise, to denigrate or to reprimand), but will hardly mean to have himself/herself or his/her utterance consciously considered impolite.

6 Politeness maxim While proposing a set of conversational maxims captured by four categories, Grice (1989a [1975]) hesitantly suggests that there may be complementary maxims, notably the one pertinent to politeness. There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as ‘Be polite,’ that are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures. The conversational maxims, however, and the conversational implicatures connected with them, are specially connected (I hope) with the particular purposes that talk (and so, talk exchange) is adapted to serve and is primarily employed to serve. (Grice 1989a [1975]: 28)

The thrust of the quotation above, one may infer, is that it is not Grice’s contention that a Politeness maxim should be put on the same footing as the conversational maxims subsumed under the four categories. Politeness is more of a social and moral rule, rather than a maxim of conversation. Therefore, linguistic politeness, which can manifest itself in a variety of ways, will correspond to the fulfilment and flouting of conversational maxims, just as any other intentional meanings serving various communicative purposes. Nevertheless, Grice also mentions that the “Be polite” maxim, albeit normally observed, can indeed engender nonconventional implicatures. Given Grice’s laconic remark, it is difficult to account for what such implicatures are like and how they come into being. It seems that they emerge from observing the maxim, rather than flouting it. Grice then seems not to allow for impoliteness, a prevalent communicative phenomenon which has only recently been given meticulous scholarly attention. It is perhaps due to Grice’s marginal remark concerning politeness that several authors have propounded the notion of a politeness maxim, as an addition to the Gricean account (Burt 1999; Kallia 2004, 2007; Pfister 2010). This should not be mistaken for maxims of politeness advanced under a separate principle of politeness, which allegedly transcends the Gricean model (Lakoff 1973, 1977, 1989; Leech 1983, 2003, 2005). Burt (1999) endorses a view that a single Politeness Maxim (PM) should be added to the Gricean ones, since politeness is also based on rationality, as are the

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Gricean maxims, and is by no means mutually exclusive with the CP. Rightly, she asserts that politeness is rational and displays no clash between politeness and CP” (Burt 1999: 2). She also affirms that her politeness maxim will show features typical of other maxims. Hence, it may clash with other maxims, and the speaker may opt out of it or flout it. Similarly, Kallia (2004, 2007) proposes that politeness arises in the same way as other conversational implicatures and that the Maxim of Politeness should supplement Grice’s maxims. Also, politeness subscribes to the Cooperative Principle by capturing the social dimension of rationality (see also Kingwell 1993). The maxim reads as follows: Be appropriately polite (i.e. politic in Watts’ sense) in form (choice of how) and content (choice of what). – Submaxim 1: Do not be more polite than expected. – Submaxim 2: Do not be less polite than expected. (Kallia 2004: 161)

As is the case of the Gricean maxims, this one can be observed or flouted, thereby producing different implicatures (Kallia 2004). However, contrary to Grice’s maxims, Kallia’s maxim yields implicature even if observed. The implicature revolving around the observance of the Maxim of Politeness is a standard implicature, a weak, usually unnoticed, background message that the rules are being followed. When the maxim of politeness clashes with other conversational maxims or when the maxim of politeness is flouted either because of politeness (Submaxim 1) or rudeness (Submaxim 2), multifarious politeness implicatures can transpire, expressing the speaker’s positive or negative attitude towards the hearer, respectively. To illustrate this, Kallia provides an example cited from Kingwell’s (1993), in which the speaker changes the topic, thereby avoiding a critical response to a question about the interlocutor’s haircut). Conversely, rather than flout the maxim of politeness, on the neo-Gricean view, the speaker flouts the Relation maxim. It seems, therefore, more sensible to postulate that conversational maxim flouting may be motivated by politeness, instead of postulating a redundant maxim. On the other hand, Pfister (2010) states that the maxim of politeness can generate implicatures, inasmuch as Grice’s conversational maxim is “violated” (by which he means “overtly violated” or “flouted”), owing to its clash with the maxim of politeness. It is then not so much the flouting of the politeness maxim per se as the flouting of conversational maxims that promotes implicature (cf. Brown and Levinson 1987). At the same time, Pfister (2010) argues that the

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maximof politeness⁸ can be followed or “disregarded”/“violated”. Pfister (2010: 1277) emphasises that the maxim can be easily “violated”.⁹ leading to impoliteness. Given the thrust of this claim, Pfister’s violation must mean overt violation, i.e. flouting, for an impoliteness act is typically recognised by the hearer. Such ambivalent terminology blurs the picture. Moreover, Pfister claims that because the maxim is pertinent to rational conversations necessarily held by potentially aggressive parties, it does not always apply in rational interactions, specifically when interlocutors are aggressive. On the other hand, he postulates: “Since the maxim of politeness is a maxim that underlies rational conversation, utterances in a rational conversation will in general be polite” (Pfister 2010: 1272). This line of reasoning seems to be based on circular logic and contradicts the idea of “violation” as a commonplace occurrence, which Pfister also champions. This convoluted reasoning cannot be accepted primarily because the speaker can be polite or impolite while being rational, and may overtly violate the Gricean maxims (thereby generating implicatures), with the alleged politeness maxim having no bearing on it. Another problem is that, in conformity with the perception of politeness as a continuum (Fraser and Nolen 1981: 97), Pfister is of the opinion that the maxim of politeness shows degrees, as do the Gricean maxims, but for the maxims of Quality. However, Grice’s theoretical model is contingent on the speaker’s intention to convey a particular meaning, while the maxims are either obeyed or flouted to yield implicatures, and they are not to be judged in terms of their gradability or idiosyncratic perceptions (for a different view, see Bousfield 2008a). All of these proposals of politeness maxims display a number of problems (some already indicated), which point to the fact that a politeness maxim, however conceptualised, does not display the status or importance of the Gricean conversational maxims. The problem central to all the approaches is a maxim’s covert or overt nonfulfilment. A violation (a covert non-fulfilment) could, admittedly, be tantamount to the speaker’s deception coinciding with covert impoliteness to the hearer (e.g. materialised by a backhanded compliment). This could also be explained as Quality violation, with impoliteness as the motivation/undisclosed meta-message. On the other hand, a flouting of the politeness maxim would

8 Pfister (2010) attributes this notion to Lakoff (1973) and Leech (1983), both of whom put forward principles of politeness vis-à-vis the CP. Thus, their maxims, subsumed under the Politeness Principle, constitute entirely different phenomena, which can hardly be compared to the Gricean maxims. 9 Pfister (2010) also adds that it is flouted more easily than the Gricean maxims, which gives rise to misgivings, thanks to the frequency of occurrence of implicatures and their key theoretical status.

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lead to overt impoliteness, not necessarily couched in implicitness. Additionally, treating the maxim as a norm which must be observed (which does not apply to the Gricean maxims), some might claim that impoliteness is an anomaly if politeness is treated as the norm (even if the notion of flouting denotes a legitimate action). Nevertheless, impoliteness is by no means an anomaly (Culpeper 1996, Culpeper et al. 2003), owing to its frequent occurrence in various discourses. This is then yet another argument in favour of not regarding politeness as a distinct phenomenon in the context of the Gricean framework (Bousfield 2008a). More importantly, impoliteness cannot be treated as a natural implicature based on politeness, given that it is a distinct communicative phenomenon, not a type of implicature by nature. As already stressed, it is the flouting of Grice’s conversational maxims that engenders implicatures that may be motivated by politeness or impoliteness. However, politeness and impoliteness may also underlie literal messages. Overall, contrary to the Gricean maxims which promote implicatures, a politeness maxim does not seem to share this capacity. It is noteworthy that, while propounding the maxim of politeness, Pfister (2010) indicates that politeness is not a conversational maxim, but a matter of convention, which is in tune with Grice’s (1975 [1989a]) suggestion. Therefore, politeness should be kept separate as a convention or backgrounded norm, rather than being conceptualised as a maxim complementary to Grice’s. Additionally, forming a separate politeness maxim would raise a question as to whether impoliteness, and other conversational phenomena (e.g. humour, persuasion, or agreeing), should not be assigned their own maxims, leading to an otiose open-ended list, as already observed by Brown and Levinson (1987). Finally, a politeness maxim would be burdened with other problems, such as cross-cultural differences in its applicability (e.g. Spencer-Oatey and Jiang 2003). There is then no need for an extension of the Gricean proposal of conversational maxims.

7 Conclusions This paper aimed to explore a number of theoretical problems germane to (im)politeness research whose bedrock is Grice’s model of communication, which embraces the CP, together with the subordinate maxims, implicature, and speaker meaning. The aim was to corroborate a claim that some of the (im)politeness literature, its merits notwithstanding, is replete with methodological problems rooted in the authors’ misreading of the Gricean framework or its doubtprovoking extensions.

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First of all, the prevailing models of politeness are grounded in a distorted view of the CP, thus ascribing politeness to a deviation from “rational efficiency” or cooperation, understood according to the lay definition of the word, whether in terms of linguistic or social cooperation. In opposition to this, it was argued that all communication, whether orientated to politeness or impoliteness, is based on the CP, which necessitates only interlocutors’ rationality (as well as intentionality). Hence, the CP is superordinate to any other communicative principles, which may be independently advocated. Whilst the CP is advanced as a tacit mutual agreement, a communicative sine qua non, maxims need not be observed but may be flouted, i.e. overtly violated (among other forms of non-fulfilment). Maxim floutings, which generate implicatures, by no means contravene the CP, which always holds by default. Therefore, contrary to what a few authors postulate, (im) politeness and the Gricean framework are not mutually exclusive, which is why a politeness principle is neither its necessary compliment nor its opposite. If this were the case, another principle might have to be added to account for impoliteness. Nor is a politeness maxim an indispensable extension of the framework. This is because it would not subscribe to the characteristics of the Gricean CP. Any meanings associated with (im)politeness can be successfully explained with the conversational maxims. Moreover, while some implicatures may be motivated by (im)politeness, no basis can be found for the claim that (im)politeness is invariably communicated as implicature. Politeness (together with politic behaviour) is rarely consciously communicated or acknowledged by the hearer but is rather assumed by default, with its violations being salient. Finally, there does not appear to be any clear correspondence, let alone correlation, between (im)politeness and implicitness. It is also literal meanings (the Gricean what is said) that may convey polite meanings, depending inter alia on the nature of the relationship between interlocutors; whereas implicitness may carry impoliteness. Nor is it reasonable to state that (im)politeness must invariably reside in particular means of expression, even if certain tendencies can be observed. Essentially, no linguistic form can be labelled as being inherently polite or impolite but must be assessed anew for each utterance produced in an interaction, with special attention being paid to the speaker’s intention, as well as the hearer’s interpretation. To conclude, the Cooperative Principle obtains in rational and intentional communication and encompasses all rationally and intentionally produced meanings, inclusive of those motivated by, or orientated towards, politeness or impoliteness. Communicated intentional meanings geared towards politeness or impoliteness can be couched in what is said or implicatures consequent upon conversational maxim floutings, legitimate as they are in the light of the CP. Essentially, no tenets put forward in reference to (im)politeness can be at odds with the Gricean logic of conversation.

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Joana Garmendia*

Irony: making as if we pretend to echo Gezurra esan nizun, oihartzunak egia itzuliko zizulakoan. (Katamalo, Gotzon Barandiaran)

When theorizing about ironic communication, we must distinguish between two different (though related) explanatory tasks. On the one hand, we must answer the following question: “What makes an utterance ironic?” On the other hand, we must try to solve the following puzzle: “How do speakers actually communicate by being ironic?” In the first case, one looks for what all ironic utterances have in common. In the second case, one tries to clarify which strategies speakers use when uttering a sentence ironically. In this paper, I will claim that Sperber and Wilson (in their “Echoic Mention Theory”) and Clark and Gerrig (founders of the “Pretense Theory”) have confused these two explanatory tasks. More precisely, they have claimed that their theories offer an answer to what irony is, when, in fact, they explain how irony (usually) works. I will also demonstrate that the Asif-Theory is the correct answer for the first task. In the first section, I examine the concepts of echo and pretense, in order to use them precisely and consistently throughout the main discussion. In the second section, I analyze two actual examples of ironic utterances, and I will try to apply the concepts of echo and pretense to both of them. We will see that even if in some examples either an echo or a pretense can be easily detected, this is not always the case – there are indeed ironic utterances in which the speaker does not echo or pretend. These results will be explained in the third section, in which I will introduce the Asif-Theory and show that the examples that were problematic for other theories can be elegantly explained within this account. Some concluding remarks bring the paper to an end.

* I would like to thank John Perry from the CSLI (Stanford University) and Kepa Korta from the ILCLI (University of the Basque Country), for their help and suggestions. I’m also grateful to the editors and anonymous referees. I thank the Basque Governmnet (IT 780–13) and The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (FFI2012-37726) for support.

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1 The concepts We will first take a look at how the foundational concepts of echo and pretense are used in the Echoic Mention Theory and the Pretense Theory, respectively. What I aim to show is that as the theories developed, echo and pretense lost a significant amount of the suggestive kernel of meaning they once had. By showing this change that the concepts have undergone, I intend to make clear what I do not include in my use of the two terms. Whenever I use the terms “echo” and “pretense”, I refer only to the intuitive, basic ideas that they once suggested.

1.1 Echo According to Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, ironic utterances are echoic mentions that have a distinguishing characteristic: the speaker echoically mentions a proposition (instead of using it) in such a way as to make it clear that she rejects it as being ludicrously false, inappropriate, or irrelevant (Sperber and Wilson 1981: 557). Thus a typical example of an echoic ironic utterance would be this: Peter: (1)

“It’s a lovely day for a picnic.” They go for a picnic and it rains. Mary (sarcastically): It’s a lovely day for a picnic, indeed. (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95: 239)

This morning Peter said these very words to Mary: “It’s a lovely day for a picnic.” When Mary uttered (1), she repeated Peter’s words, and she expressed a negative attitude towards them. At this point, it may seem that echoing a proposition simply means repeating an utterance already existing in the speaker’s and hearer’s (close) context. But were the echo intended to be understood as such, many examples of ironic utterances would not fit into this theory. Consider the following. Ainara and Fran don’t know each other. They happen to be at a party tonight. Fran, 30 years old, is playing the fool all the time. Ainara: (2)

How old are you?

No echo, in the original, narrow sense of the concept, can be found in this example. Nevertheless, Sperber and Wilson claim that every ironic case can be explained by their theory, although there may be differences among echoic mentions:

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It seems more accurate to say that all examples of irony are interpreted as echoic mentions, but that there are echoic mentions of many different degrees and types. (Sperber and Wilson 1981: 558)

And so they somehow widen the notion of echo that may be found in ironic utterances: Not all ironical echoes are as easily recognisable. The thought being echoed may not have been expressed in an utterance; it may not be attributable to any specific person, but merely to a type of person, or people in general; it may be merely a cultural aspiration or norm. (Wilson and Sperber 1992: 60)

Step by step, the idea of the echo becomes wider and wider. At this point, Sperber and Wilson are even willing to accept a thought that is simply attributable to anybody, to “people in general”, as the source of an echo. This may be a way to bring problematic examples closer to their theory, but arguably, with this solution they do it more harm than good. When the concept of echo is inflated in this way, it lacks the suggestive kernel of meaning it may have had in the beginning. In order to clarify this point, let us look at the following condition Sperber lays down for irony: In other words, in order to be successfully ironic, the meaning mentioned must recognizably echo a thought that has been, is being, or might be entertained or expressed by someone. Here echo is used in a technical sense that is wider than its ordinary sense (but not really wider than its conventional metaphorical sense). (Sperber 1984: 131)

So, coming back to our example, if we want to find an echo somewhere, we will have to suppose that Ainara, or someone else, may at some time have asked Fran how old he is. It is easy to suppose that. It is so easy, that the same can be supposed regarding any utterance. Thus, if we are echoing something when we utter “How old are you?”, we are likewise echoing something when we say something as simple as “What’s the weather like today?” or as complex as “Yesterday at 3:47 P.M., I ate 24 eggs and drank apple juice while watching opera on my pink TV”  – because these thoughts might be expressed or entertained at some time by someone, whatever the context may be.

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The echo, defined like this, can include anything. One may even question whether there is any meaning that no one has ever expressed or entertained. Certainly, there is no meaning that no one could ever express or entertain.¹ The wider the echo becomes, the vaguer it looks. The notion becomes so weak that any utterance can be ‘something’s’ echo. But if anything can be something’s echo, then the echo cannot be what distinguishes cases of irony from non-ironical ones. The problem posed by this weakness is shown clearly in the following example by Robyn Carston: (3)

Anyone who thinks Joe’s a genius is crazy. (Carston 1981: 30)

As Carston herself explains, The underlying parts of these utterances mention propositions and are as “echoic” as S-W require them to be. They express overtly the kind of attitude we associate with ironical expression, but they are not ironical utterances. (Carston 1981: 30)

Thus the echo, if we make it wide enough to take in some ironic examples, becomes too imprecise to be able to distinguish ironic utterances from all nonironic ones. Nevertheless, I think that despite the limitations of the Echoic Mention Theory, the original, intuitive concept of the echo deserves a place in an account of irony. Whenever I use the concept of an echo in this paper, it is in this first, intuitive sense; that is, echoing something is repeating it.

1.2 Pretense Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig proposed the Pretense Theory for explaining irony. Let us see how the notion of pretense works within this approach, looking at the explanation they give of the following example:

1 This definition seems to contradict itself somewhat (at least if we take into account the literal meaning of the verb “to entertain”): how could one possibly say about an idea that nobody could ever entertain it, without entertaining this very idea? Even Robyn Carston, a well-known author of the Relevance Theory, directs a similar criticism at the wide conception of the echo offered by Sperber and Wilson: “(…) surely any proposition I can think of is a view that someone might hold (…)” (Carston 1981: 29).

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Trust the Weather Bureau! See what lovely weather it is: rain, rain, rain. (Clark and Gerrig 1984: 122)²

The speaker, when uttering (4), is pretending: she is pretending that she is a fool who is telling her audience how lovely the weather is. But the speaker wants the audience to see beyond the pretense; in fact, it makes no sense that the speaker would say that, because it is pouring rain. A negative attitude also plays a role in this approach to irony, as it did in the Echoic Mention Theory: the speaker intends for the audience to realize that she aims to ridicule any person who might have made that utterance or any hearer who might accept that claim (Clark and Gerrig 1984: 122). Clark and Gerrig base their explanation of irony on the notion of pretense. But what exactly is pretending? We don’t find any immediate answers in Clark and Gerrig’s approach.³ Instead, they turn to what has been said by other authors, and that is how they build their notion of pretense, adding one detail to another. First of all, they consider Grice to be a pioneer because Grice himself mentioned the ironic speaker’s pretending in his brief notes about irony. So let us look at what Grice writes about pretense: To be ironical is, among other things, to pretend (as the etymology suggests), and while one wants the pretense to be recognized as such, to announce it as a pretense would spoil the effect. (Grice 1967/1989: 54)

Grice says that if we look at the etymology of irony we shall run into pretense; this is also what Clark and Gerrig say. By studying these roots, we find another small characteristic of pretense: The word irony comes from Greek eironeia, meaning “dissembling, ignorance purposely affected” (Oxford English Dictionary). (Clark and Gerrig 1984: 121)

The concept “dissembling” is usually mixed up with pretense when explaining irony. There is one more concept that Clark and Gerrig sometimes use instead of pretense: “make-believe”. For a characterization of this concept (or even of pre-

2 The authors direct us to the following work to find the original example: Jorgensen et  al. 1984: 114. 3 In Clark (1996), the author gives some explanations about the Pretense Theory, but these explanations don’t add much new material to the claims of Clark and Gerrig (1984), at least not on the level of the analysis we are now doing.

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tense itself), Clark and Gerrig direct us to Kendall Walton’s works. Walton himself shows that these two concepts are usually confused: “To pretend, in the sense in question, is to participate verbally in a game of make-believe” (Walton 1990: 220). It seems, then, that pretending consists of dissembling, playing the fool. It is also a certain way of being insincere: Suppose S is speaking to A, the primary addressee, and to A’, who may be present or absent, real or imaginary. In speaking ironically, S is pretending to be S’ speaking to A’. What S’ is saying is, in one way or another, patently uniformed [sic] or injudicious, worthy of a “hostile or derogatory judgment or a feeling such as indignation or contempt” (Grice, 1978:124) [Grice 1967/1989: 54]. A’ in ignorance, is intended to miss this pretense, to take S as speaking sincerely. (Clark and Gerrig 1984: 122)

In the absence of a more concrete definition, the sum of all these notions helps us build up an approximate characterization of Clark and Gerrig’s notion of pretense. It also seems that this broadly characterized notion is applicable to the ironic speaker of our last example: it seems intuitively correct to maintain that the speaker is playing the fool, dissembling, pretending to be S’ addressing A’, playing make-believe or showing a purposely affected ignorance when uttering “See what lovely weather it is: rain, rain, rain.” So far so good. However, when we go deeper into the concept of pretense, we find three problems. First, as with the concept of the echo, as soon as we move to some other examples of irony, maintaining that the speaker is pretending no longer seems so intuitive. Let us consider the following example: Jaime and Lucrece go to Hawaii on their honeymoon. They had dreamed about sunny weather and the beach. Unfortunately, the weather was terrible during their stay: it did not stop raining; it was awfully windy; and they even had a hurricane. The day they come back home, Christina picks them up at the airport. They are pale, and they look tired, frustrated and angry. Christina asks politely, “So, how was Hawaii?” Jaime replies dryly: (5)

Wonderful.

Claiming that Jaime is pretending, playing the fool, showing a purposely affected ignorance, making-believe, seems rather forced. In order to find pretense in certain examples of irony we would be forced to inflate the notion to an undesirable extent. Second, Clark and Gerrig’s notion of pretense has the same problem the other way around: it’s too weak to tell some non-ironic examples apart:

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Eneida (8) and Oier (7) are playing make-believe: Eneida is an Indian defending her land, and Oier a cowboy attacking Eneida. Oier: (6)

I’ll kill all your cattle and burn your lands!

Both children know that Oier’s words are not to be taken in the ordinary sense. This is reflected in Eneida’s reaction: she hasn’t run off to get help, nor has she answered Oier with: “How can you possibly kill my cattle if you don’t have a gun, and if I don’t even have any cattle?” Eneida understands that Oier is makingbelieve, playing the cowboy; she knows that Oier is pretending. Oier is pretending to be speaking to an unknown hearer, that is, to someone who does not realize that he does not have a gun. It is absurd that Oier should say this (because both he and Eneida know that he does not believe that he can kill any cattle), and what he has said deserves a hostile attitude, Oier being the wicked cowboy who intends to kill the poor Indian’s cattle. Therefore, the two children’s behavior easily fits the account of pretense that has been proposed. But the two children are not being ironic. They’re playing, pretending, makingbelieve. Thus, pretense is too broad a concept to explain irony while distinguishing it from all other cases. In fact, it is possible for a speaker to pretend something, ridiculing what is being pretended, and nevertheless not be ironic. Finally, in Clark and Gerrig’s works, one more notion is added to the characterization of pretense: pretending is acting, which is considered to be the pretense an actor engages in on stage: As Ryle (1950) said about pretense, “Actors in speaking their parts before the audience are not, strictly, using their words. They are not being defiant, remorseful, loving or desperate, but only pretending to be so. Their utterances cannot be classified as either ‘use’ or ‘mention’.” (p. 339). (Clark and Gerrig 1984: 123)

But what actors do on stage  – call it “pretense” or not– is something rather different from the pretense that might be found in (certain cases of) irony. When somebody is acting, she is not using words in the strict sense; however, the way an “acted” discourse diverges from paradigmatic speeches is different from the way irony differs. When somebody acts, some very basic rules of language do not hold. For example, many indexicals are filled in differently. Moreover, the beliefs we have about acted discourses are not common beliefs; rather, they are what John Perry calls “p-beliefs” (Perry 2001: 171). Let us suppose that an actor playing the character of Apollo on stage addresses the hearers (the audience) and utters:

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I’m Zeus’s son.

Had (7) not been uttered within an acted discourse, it would surely convey That the speaker is Zeus’s son. However, that is not what our actor intended to communicate when uttering (7) on stage, but rather That the character whom the speaker is playing is Zeus’s son, or That Apollo is Zeus’s son. The indexical “I” is not filled in as the general rules of language dictate. But the same does not happen in an ironic utterance. When Ainara utters “How old are you?”, she is ironically expressing That Ainara wants to know how old Fran is, no more, no less. On the other hand, the audience of the actor above will p-believe That Apollo is Zeus’s son. In fact, we cannot say that this p-belief is true (because for this belief to be true both Apollo and Zeus must exist), but we can indeed say that the p-belief is correct, if within the pretense there is any information to believe that the fictional Apollo is the fictional Zeus’s son within the fictional story. On the contrary, when a speaker is being ironic she simply communicates “plain” beliefs. When Christina hears Jaime claiming that their honeymoon has been “wonderful”, she will understand (because she has enough clues in the context to do so) that Jaime is intending to make her believe that their holiday has been far from wonderful. This belief will be true or false, no more, no less. Thus, actors’ speeches do not function the way paradigmatic speeches do, but neither do the way irony does. That’s because an actor’s pretense follows the rules of fiction (Garmendia 2007: 252–264; Perry 2001: 170), and irony has nothing to do with fiction.⁴ Therefore, as with “echo”, when I use “pretense”, I use it in its basic and intuitive sense. Pretending is (accentuated) dissembling, playing the fool, showing a purposely affected ignorance.

1.3 Pretense vs. Echo⁵ It is clear that the notions of echo and pretense are closely related. Leaving aside smaller details, if the source of the echo of an ironic utterance is a thought that

4 I do not mean that it is impossible to distinguish between different characterizations of pretense, such as an actor’s acting, the one found in children’s games, or the one more linked to playing make-believe. What I mean is that we cannot distinguish between them using the characterization of pretense that Clark and Gerrig have proposed. 5 There are some additional theories that have attempted to enter the debate dominated by the Echoic Mention Theory and the Pretense Theory by proposing somewhat revised notions to be

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somebody could have entertained at some time, this person who could have entertained that thought can be taken to be the object of pretense. And conversely, if we can maintain that in an ironic utterance the speaker is pretending to be a so-called character, we can also claim that this speaker is echoing a thought that this character could have entertained.⁶ Note, though, that to equate the two notions, we have to understand them in their broader senses, precisely those which I have intentionally refrained from using. I want to maintain that echo and pretense, in their basic, intuitive sense, are two different notions: the first holds for repetition, and the second for dissemblance. Only when they lost their original, intuitive meanings and became artificially inflated concepts, did they start to become confused with each other.

2 Some real examples Let us consider a couple of examples of irony, and see whether an echo (that is, a repetition) and/or a pretense (that is, some sort of dissembling) can be found in them.

2.1 Pretense essential; no echo Ekain, Mikel, Iñaki and Caminos are having a drink in a pub. Iñaki is giving the others his opinion about gays: they’re strange people, and it’s obvious that they’re all very confused. They’re ill, and he would be traumatized if he were to realize that his son was gay. Ekain feels that Iñaki is speaking seriously, and thus he’s completely silent because he cannot agree with his friend. The other two are dubious: they don’t really know whether their friend is joking or not. Mikel tries to guess Iñaki’s intentions: “You can’t be serious! You sound like a… like

considered in replacement of echo and pretense. The most important ones may be Kreuz and Glucksberg’s (1989) “Echoic Reminder Theory” and Kumon-Nakamura, Glucksberg and Brown’s (1995) “Allusional Pretense Theory”. They offer two new concepts to replace either the concept of pretense or the notion of echoic mention. The first theory proposes the echoic reminder, and the second the allusional pretense. At any rate, I do not consider them to have solved the problems we are dealing with here, although they may have improved Clark and Gerrig’s and Sperber and Wilson’s ideas in some other directions. 6 Nevertheless, both Clark and Gerrig (1984) and Sperber (1984) intended to distinguish their own theories clearly by illustrating the differences they have. I believe, though, that this debate doesn’t make any sense beyond some very specific details.

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a real homo… homo…”; but as he can’t remember the word he’s looking for, he addresses Ekain: Mikel: Ekain, what’s the word for a person who hates gays? Ekain: (scratching his head and half-closing his eyes) (8) Erm… Yes, wait, I know the word you’re looking for… er… yes: a jerk. In this example, it seems quite natural to claim that Ekain is playing the fool, dissembling, showing a purposely affected ignorance. First he pretends he cannot remember the word “homophobe”, and then he pretends he thinks the word they were really looking for was not “homophobe”, but “jerk”. Pretense of the plainest sort can be found in Ekain’s ironic utterance without much trouble. Furthermore, it seems that this pretense is actually what makes the example ironic. The role of pretense seems essential. In fact, Ekain had a more direct way to communicate the same thing; he could have uttered, for example: (8b)

A homophobe. And I really believe that anyone who could hold such opinions is a total jerk.

Once we lose the pretense, we lose the irony too. Hence Ekain’s pretense is necessary for the irony in utterance (8). However, note that there is no echo in this example, at least none in an original, natural sense of the term. Although the four guys may have been friends forever, they may never have uttered anything even close to (8); maybe they have never even discussed this subject before. There is no way of finding a source for the alleged echoing of ironic utterances, and it would seem, no need to start looking.

2.2 Echo essential; no pretense The whole Mujika family, Alaine (22) and her uncle Xalbador (76) included, are having dinner together on their terrace. It’s getting chilly, and Xalbador thinks Alaine isn’t dressed warmly enough, so he says to her, “You should get a coat. It’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold.” Alaine answers that she’s okay, she’s not feeling cold and she doesn’t need a coat. But Xalbador isn’t convinced by her answer, and over the next 20 minutes he repeats several times: “It’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold.” Alaine and her cousins, who know Xalbador’s obsession very well, laugh off his comments. Some time later, as it’s getting really cold, Alaine decides that she does need a coat, and she enters the house to get one. There she meets her cousin Nekane, who asks her, “Are you getting a coat?” Alaine replies:

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Yes; it’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold, you know.

An echo can easily be found in Alaine’s ironic utterance: Xalbador had uttered the exact same sentence beforehand – “It’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold” –, and Alaine has repeated his words verbatim. Xalbador’s previous utterance is thus the source of Alaine’s echo. Moreover, Alaine’s echoing seems to be a necessary condition for her utterance’s being ironic. She could have communicated the same thing in a more direct way, dispensing with the echo: (9b)

Yes, I’m getting a coat. Don’t you think Xalbador was rather insistent – although still quite funny – on that matter?

As soon as we lose the echo, we lose the irony. Hence Alaine’s utterance (9) is ironic because it’s an echo of Xalbador’s words. Yet, in this example no pretense is found. Pretending to be someone who thinks that suffering from the cold is a stupid thing for a pretty girl to do is not a real pretense in its original and natural sense. This last claim may seem controversial; in fact, we may be tempted to hold that Alaine is pretending to be Xalbador when uttering (9). We should resist this temptation, though; otherwise we would risk equating the two concepts, and echoing someone’s words would be the same as pretending to be someone. Further, recall the warning in Section 1.3 that this confusion of the two concepts is an undesirable consequence of their having been artificially inflated. We can imagine, for the sake of argument, that Alaine uttered (9) in a straight tone of voice, without gestures or emphasis (in contrast to Ekain’s scratching his head and half-closing his eyes, which emphasized his pretending). The sobriety in Alaine’s uttering (9) reinforces our ruling out the possibility that she was pretending, making-believe, showing a purposely affected ignorance; however, it wouldn’t affect (9)’s being an echo at all. Thus there is no pretense in Alaine’s uttering (9). Only an echo can be found in this ironic example.

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2.3 The real examples claim… We have looked for echo and pretense, in their more limited senses, within two fully worked-out examples of irony. Two results have been obtained: (a) Neither echo nor pretense is necessary for an utterance to be ironic. We have seen that a speaker does not have to echo or pretend to make an ironic utterance. Consequently, the theories based on these two concepts have a misleading point of departure: not all cases of irony can be explained in terms of either echo or pretense. (b) Sometimes either pretense or echo seems crucial for taking an utterance to be ironic. In the examples considered so far, getting rid of the pretense or the echo would mean losing the irony. Therefore, although they are not necessary to ironic utterances in general, these two concepts do indeed play an essential role in some cases of irony.

3 A realistic proposal Some examples of irony can be explained successfully in terms of an echo, others in terms of pretense. However, I maintain that a more general theory can be offered to explain both kinds of examples (and others as well). I propose the Asif-Theory for explaining irony. This theory is based on Korta and Perry’s Critical Pragmatics (Korta and Perry 2006, 2007) and, more distantly, grounded in Grice’s brief claims about irony (Grice 1967/89). I shall show that statements (a) and (b) above can both be explained naturally within my account, and also a third one: (c) Pretense and echo are typical of irony. I shall introduce the basic ideas of this approach by putting them into practice. Let us see how the Asif-Theory explains the two examples of irony from above, as well as a third one.

3.1 Ekain and his pretended confusion According to the Asif-Theory, the homophobe example would be explained in the following way. Ekain uttered: (8)

Erm… Yes, wait, I know the word you’re looking for… er… yes: a jerk.

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And the locutionary content⁷ of this utterance is: (PR8)

That Ekain knows that the word Mikel is looking for is “jerk”.

Nevertheless, Ekain does not believe that the word Mikel is looking for is “jerk”, and this mismatching between Ekain’s beliefs and the locutionary content of the utterance is overt for his hearers. That is, they can recognize both the mismatching and Ekain’s intention to make it recognizable (Garmendia 2011). Given this overtness, Ekain cannot be held responsible for believing in the truth of (PR8) – he has not committed himself to it by uttering (8). Thus, Ekain has not said this content because saying implies committing (Korta and Perry 2007: 171). Instead, he has made as if to say it: Asif-content8: (PR8) That Ekain knows that the word Mikel is looking for is “jerk”. Ekain, by uttering (8), and via asif-content (PR8), has communicated another content: Ironic content8:

That anybody who thinks gay people are ill – that is, any homophobe such as Iñaki seems to be  – should be considered a jerk.

This is the content that Ekain has committed himself to by uttering (8), and he can indeed be held responsible for believing in its truth. The preceding is a simplified explanation of the example in terms of the AsifTheory. Thus, we can explain the irony without relying on either pretense or echo. The steps marked out by the Asif-Theory for explaining ironic utterances are sufficient for understanding exactly what happened in Ekain’s utterance: he made as if to say something but did not commit himself to it. Further, he made it clear in an overt manner that there was a mismatch between his beliefs and what he was making as if to say, thereby implicating an ironic content. In this example, the speaker’s pretending seemed to play an essential role. This role can indeed easily be explained in terms of our theory.

7 “Locutionary content” is a term introduced by Critical Pragmatics (Korta and Perry 2006, 2007). It is broadly comparable to what has typically been called “THE content of an utterance”; that is, Perry’s (2001) “referential content”, “contentC” or “official content” – basically, the content obtained after disambiguations and the fixing of the references of context-sensitive expressions.

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Ekain had many possible ways of being ironic while still communicating the exact content he intended to commit to. For example, he could have uttered: (8c)

[Dryly, deadpanning] A jerk.

Hearing (8c), and relying on their shared context, Ekain’s hearers can probably recognize that Ekain doesn’t believe that the answer to Mikel’s question is “a jerk”. They might also recognize that Ekain intended to make this mismatching between his beliefs and his utterance recognizable. That is to say, the hearers may be able to recognize that the mismatching was intentionally overt, and so Ekain has not committed himself to the locutionary content of his utterance: he has not said what he made as if to say. By uttering (8c), Ekain could have communicated ironic content8, and that would have been ironic too. What, then, is the difference between (8) and (8c)? The difference lies in the degree of overtness. In the original version of the example, Ekain emphasized his ironic words. He exaggerated his mock seriousness by feigning that he was making an effort to remember the word. In so doing, Ekain emphasized the discrepancy between the locutionary content of his utterance and his actual beliefs, and he made his lack of commitment more easily recognizable. He made the discrepancy more overt, so to speak. And that is exactly how pretense could be understood in terms of the AsifTheory. Pretending is comparable to an accentuated version of our “making as if to say”; that is, pretending is overtly showing the discrepancy between the speaker’s beliefs and the contents of the utterance while the speaker exaggeratedly demonstrates that she is doing so. This relationship between the two notions – pretending and making as if to say – may lead us to think that they are basically the same and that our concept of making as if to say is no more than an offshoot of Clark and Gerrig’s notion of pretense. The concept I have proposed could certainly be called “pretending” instead of “making as if to say”. But beyond the incidental importance of the name chosen, I would like to give a twofold explanation of the differences. First, I consider my approach to be a refinement or development of Grice’s claim that the ironic speaker makes as if to say, and that is why I have used his term to name my approach. Quite simply, my theory tallies much more closely with Grice’s brief claims about irony. Both the fact that the ironic content is implicated and the importance of a negative attitude fit into my approach in the same sense in which they were proposed in Grice’s (although the Gricean approach has some difficulties and limitations that mine has not inherited; see Garmendia 2011).

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Second, I deny that pretending and making as if to say are one and the same concept. It is true that when Clark and Gerrig explain irony in terms of pretense, they often seem to have in mind no more than what I have characterized as the speaker’s lack of commitment (executed via an overt mismatching between her beliefs and the locutionary content of the utterance). However, I hold that pretending (in its more intuitive and basic sense) is something more than a lack of commitment. Rather, it is an intentional display of this lack of commitment, an exaggeration, an accent on the mismatching, an emphasis. This distinction, as tenuous as it may seem, is well-founded: it allows us to distinguish what every speaker does (i.e., making as if to say) when uttering an ironic utterance from some ironic speakers’ strategy for helping the hearer recognize her ironic intention (i.e., pretense). Thus pretending is a strategy, but it is not the only one an ironic speaker can use. Many other means of expression have been widely discussed (see for example: Haiman 1998; Muecke 1973; Gibbs and Colston 2001), and later I claim that echoing is a further strategy. In fact, being ironic carries with it quite a risk: if misunderstood, the speaker will probably be taken to have committed herself to a content she doesn’t hold. Hence the importance of all these maneuvers when being ironic. Thus, when the speaker’s lack of commitment is exaggerated, as is the case in the homophobe example, it is easier to recognize that the speaker is making as if to say, that she is being ironic. Ekain has indeed used this maneuver to “safely” be ironic, to make himself properly understood. The importance of this strategy to the example is what made it seem so essential.

3.2 Alaine echoes Xalbador’s advice Let us analyze the pretty girl example using the tools of Asif-Theory. Alaine has uttered: (9)

Yes, it’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold, you know.

The locutionary content is: (PR9)

That it’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold.

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Alaine may actually believe that it’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold, but that is not the belief she intends to communicate by uttering (9); that is not her motivating belief.⁸ This mismatching between Alaine’s motivating belief and the locutionary content of the utterance is overt for Nekane: she can recognize not only the mismatching, but also Alaine’s intention to make it recognizable. Thus Nekane understands that Alaine has not committed herself to that content. She has not said it; instead, she has made as if to say it: Asif-content9: (PR9) That it’s a stupid thing for a pretty girl to suffer from the cold. By making as if to say that content, Alaine has communicated another one: Ironic content9:

That Xalbador is too insistent; that it wasn’t necessary to repeat the same advice over and over.

The tools of the Asif-Theory are again sufficient to explain the irony, without bringing in the concept of echoing. But the explanation allows us to see the role echoing plays. Asif-content9 is a repetition of the locutionary content of Xalbador’s previous utterances. This repetition does play a role within Alaine’s being ironic. Nekane, when realizing that Alaine is repeating Xalbador’s utterance, recognizes more easily that Alaine is actually making as if to say (PR9), instead of saying it. Moreover, when Nekane identifies the source of the repetition as Xalbador’s utterance, she will also understand that Alaine’s criticism is directed at him, and criticism is indeed a necessary characteristic of ironic utterances (Garmendia 2010). These two roles in the understanding of the utterance make the echo seem fairly essential: the echo in this example is again a useful maneuver that the speaker used to be ironic safely.

8 I call the speaker’s belief, which in paradigmatic cases matches the locutionary content of the utterance, the “motivating belief”: Our practice of saying, and our concepts for classifying what we do in speaking, have the feature that, when things go right, a great number of different aspects of the act will be classifiable by the same proposition: the conditions under which the belief that motivates the utterance is true, the conditions under which the intended locutionary content is true, the conditions under which the locutionary content is true, the conditions under which what is said is true, and the conditions under which the beliefs that the utterance leads the audience to adopt or consider are true (Korta and Perry 2007:178).

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In sum, echoing Xalbador allows Alaine to utter an utterance whose content she does not hold (that is, which she makes as if to say) and thus allows her to only implicate the criticism. Subtlety is one of irony’s strong points.

3.3 The Painter goes to prison By analyzing two examples in terms of the Asif-Theory, we have learned that they can be explained without needing to rely on either echo or pretense. Both making as if to say one content while implicating another, and a critical attitude on the part of the speaker have been shown to be the basic tools for explaining these examples. What I claim, though, is that making as if to say and criticizing are not only useful, but are actually necessary in irony. Let us consider a new example: Obaba is a very small town; everybody knows everybody else there. It’s Saturday morning, and Michael and “the Painter” (so called because he’s the only one in town) are having a drink in the town’s only watering place, sitting at opposite ends of the bar, each surrounded by his own friends. Michael is a radical left-wing activist, committed to every social challenge, and hence persecuted under the local laws, whereas the Painter is an openly right-wing grouch, old-fashioned and closed-minded. Suddenly the sound of a car engine is heard and they all look out the window. A police car is pulling up right outside the bar. The Painter: (10) They must be coming to get me. Michael hears this utterance, and exclaims to his mates, “What a clown!” (i). He knows the Painter is talking about him (ii), and he is deeply offended by his utterance (iii). He really thinks the Painter is making fun of him to his (the Painter’s) friends (iv). That is to say, Michael interprets the Painter’s utterance as being ironic (v). All these feelings that Michael’s perception of the Painter’s remark as irony give rise to are explained within the Asif-Theory as follows. The Painter does not believe that the police are coming to get him; indeed, he is not trying to communicate that, although he has uttered an utterance with that very locutionary content: (PR10) that the police must be coming to get the Painter. Moreover, everybody knows that it’s improbable that the police would be coming to get him, and the Painter is taking advantage of this common knowledge to make overt the mismatch between his beliefs and the locutionary content

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of the utterance. Thus, he is not committing himself to that content. In sum, he is making as if to say that content, and that is why Michael felt that he was pretending, that he was being a real clown (i). Making as if to say that content, the Painter is communicating something different. First, that the police are obviously not coming to catch him, but someone else, probably Michael. In fact, “Who knows what kind of a scrape Michael’s gotten himself into? Everybody in town knows he’s a liberal activist, a quarrelsome troublemaker, a radical. He sure deserves it”. And the Painter is not going to feel sorry for him. He will enjoy that moment. None of these contents have been communicated explicitly by the Painter – they are implicatures of the utterance. Some of them are communicated more strongly, others rather weakly. There is one that acts as a pathway toward the rest: That the police are not coming to get the Painter. This is the bridge-content, the content that leads us to further implicatures within the total ironic content (Garmendia 2011). Such bridge-content, I claim, cannot be cancelled, although it is an implicature, and implicatures are usually cancelable. But this one is a special implicature: it is the first one, it is the bridge. And the bridge cannot be cancelled because if we lost the bridge, we would lose the only pathway to the ironic content. Michael inferred all these implicatures from the Painter’s remark. He was answering them when he remarked on the Painter’s utterance, and he certainly knew the Painter was talking about him (ii). With all these implicatures within the ironic content, the Painter has indicated someone who did not even appear in his utterance: Michael is the subject of the ironic content. The Painter has shown a critical attitude toward him: he has criticized him. Thus Michael is the victim, the target of the Painter’s criticism. This is why Michael felt that the utterance alluded to him. Further, he understood the criticism and felt deeply offended (iii). The Painter knows that everybody in the bar will understand that he was intending to communicate all these implicatures, and thus, they will understand perfectly well his real intention and the strong criticism of Michael. They will jump from something he merely made as if to say to some (more or less strongly) implicated contents, and they will enjoy that apparent incongruity when interpreting his remark. Michael is correct, then, in judging that the Painter’s friends, at any rate, would find his utterance funny (iv). In short, the Painter has made as if to say one content so as to implicate another, and in so doing, he has criticized Michael, while fully intending that incongruity between contents to be funny. The Painter was being ironic (v). The steps of the Asif-Theory can again be easily identified in this new example, but are they necessary, as I have claimed? Let us see what happened in Obaba.

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Imagine Michael’s surprise when he finds out the real reason why the police have come to Obaba: the Painter had been caught DUI some days before, and so they are coming to escort him to the police station to take away his license. Now, Michael understands that the Painter really did believe that they were coming to get him (the Painter). The Painter’s beliefs easily match the locutionary content of his utterance: he was committing to that content when uttering (10). He has not made as if to say (PR10) – he has actually said it. So the bridge-content disappears, and no further implicatures are inferred along those lines. Michael has also disappeared from every content of the utterance. He has lost his prominence, no criticism is leveled at him and there’s nothing funny about this utterance. All the pieces have fallen away, one after the other, and consequently, the irony has inevitably disappeared.

4 Conclusions The Asif-Theory allows us to explain both sorts of ironic examples: those based on an echo, and those where the speaker pretends. Thus, it is more general and hence more desirable than the Echoic Mention Theory and the Pretense Theory. With the Asif-Theory, we can explain why: a) Neither echo nor pretense is always found in ironic utterances: they are not necessary for being ironic; the only necessary steps are the following: making as if to say, implicating a different content, and criticizing. b) Sometimes either one or the other seems essential: sometimes the only pathway to the ironic content is signaled by one of these two means of expression. c) Pretense and echo are common in ironic utterances: irony utilizes several means of expression, but pretending and echoing are closely linked to two very fundamental characteristics of irony. Making as if to say in an exaggerated way is like pretending, and by echoing someone’s words, we direct the hearer to the target of the critical attitude, which is essential in irony. The Asif-Theory offers a suitable answer to what irony is. The Echoic Mention Theory and the Pretense Theory are without question simply accurate accounts for explaining how irony is communicated.

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References Carston, Robyn. 1981. Irony and parody and the use-mention distinction. Nottingham Linguistic Circular 10. 24–35. Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert H. and Richard J. Gerrig. 1984. On the pretense theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(1). 121–126. Garmendia, Joana. 2007. A critical pragmatic theory for irony: What an ironic utterance means, and how it does so. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of the Basque Country. Garmendia, Joana. 2010. Irony is critical. Pragmatics & Cognition (18)2. 397–421. Garmendia, Joana. 2011. She’s (not) a fine friend: “saying” and criticism in irony. Intercultural Pragmatics 8(1). 41–65. Gibbs, Raymond W. and Herbert L. Colston. 2001. The risks and rewards of ironic communication. In L. Anolli, R. Ciceri and G. Riva (eds.), Say not to Say: New perspectives on miscommunication, 187–200. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Grice, Paul. 1967. Further notes on logic and conversation. In P. Grice (ed.), Studies in the way of words, 41–57. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Haiman, John. 1998. Talk is cheap: sarcasm, alienation, and the evolution of language. New York: Oxford University Press. Jorgensen, Julia, George A. Miller, and Dan Sperber. 1984. Test of the mention theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(1). 112–120. Korta, Kepa and John Perry. 2006. Varieties of minimalist semantics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXIII(2). 451–459. Korta, Kepa and John Perry. 2007. How to say things with words. In Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), John Searle’s Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning, and Thought, 169–189. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kreuz, Roger J. and Sam Glucksberg. 1989. How to be sarcastic: The echoic reminder theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 118(4). 374–386. Kumon-Nakamura, Sachi, Sam Glucksberg, and Mary Brown. 1995. How about another piece of pie: The allusional pretense theory of discourse irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124(1). 3–21. Muecke, Douglas. 1973. The communication of verbal irony. Journal of Literary Semantics 2. 35–42. Perry, John. 2001. Reference and Reflexivity. Stanford: CSLI. Sperber, Dan. 1984. Verbal irony: pretense or echoic mention? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(1). 130–436. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1981. Irony and the use-mention distinction. In P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 295–318. New York: Academic Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1986/95. Relevance. Communication & Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-believe. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber (1992). On verbal irony. Lingua 87. 53–76.

Elly Ifantidou

Pragmatic awareness: An index of linguistic competence* 1 Introduction The aim of this study is twofold: first, to provide the theoretical framework for a pragmatic genre-driven instruction and evaluation tool targeted at academic learners’ pragmatic and linguistic competence. Secondly, to provide the experimental evidence for its effects when put to practice. To do so, the paper will draw on two main types of findings: (a) mechanistic, form-focused language tasks manifest abilities which may misleadingly indicate linguistic competence, (b) creative, unfocused pragmatic tasks can be used to more reliably indicate pragmatic competence in parallel with linguistic competence. The data will draw on 91 exam scripts of a sample group of undergraduate students of English Language and Literature, University of Athens, taught and assessed while attending a 1st semester course, Academic Discourse, in the fall semester 2009–2010. In an attempt to clarify the key terms informing this empirical study, namely, pragmatic competence, pragmatic awareness and metapragmatic awareness, I will first address the concepts involved by providing an overview of working definitions, point out inadequacies, and offer an alternative construal of the term pragmatic competence. I will finally show how the data assessed reinforces the re-defined concepts.

* I am grateful to the editors, Professors Istvan Kecskes and Jesús Romero Trillo for their valuable feedback, to Professor Sophia Marmaridou for insightful comments and discussion, and to the audience of the 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication, 15–17  November 2010, Madrid, for constructive remarks. Special thanks to Ioanna Athanasopoulou and Evangelia Palogou for the statistical analyses. An earlier version of the theoretical argument presented in this study appears in Ifantidou 2011c.

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2 Pragmatic competence The assumption underscoring most studies on how pragmatic competence can be taught is that pragmatic competence is the users’ ability to communicate appropriately in different sociocultural contexts. According to a number of scholars, pragmatic competence is described as (the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and to understand language in context). … refer[ring] to one of several levels of knowledge which might also include grammatical, psycholinguistic, and …‘social’ competences: (Thomas 1983: 92) …‘illocutionary competence’ and ‘sociolinguistic competence’. ‘Illocutionary competence’ can be glossed as ‘knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out’. … ‘Sociolinguistic competence’ comprises the ability to use language appropriately according to context. (Kasper 1997: 2) knowledge of the linguistic resources available in a given language for realising particular illocutions, knowledge of the sequential aspects of speech acts and finally, knowledge of the appropriate contextual use of the particular languages’ linguistic resources. (Barron 2003: 10)

The above definitions are quite general so that, in principle, any pragmatic phenomenon may be considered as an indication of pragmatic competence. Nevertheless, knowledge of speech acts and sociolinguistically-oriented competences in the form of pragmatic norms governing speech act routines, cultural and ethnic stereotypes, or social values, is frequently taught and evaluated in L2 contexts. A close examination of the literature shows that studies to date have largely focused on speech acts, and on spoken language, specifically on production rather than comprehension, and on pragmatic norms on how to perform in speech act situations – give suggestions (Martínez-Flor and Alcón Soler 2007), make requests, apologies, refusals, suggestions (Bardovi-Harlig and Griffin 2005), accept or give compliments (Grossi 2009), to mention a few examples of pragmatic competence in ESL/EFL contexts. Table 1 below (adapted from Kasper 1997: 4–5) is indicative of a tendency, which is still very influential in ESL/EFL studies, to enhance pragmatic competence by addressing (1)

focused, i.e. isolated, pragmatic skills, using

(2)

routinized assessment tools, e.g. DCTasks, roleplays, multiple choice questionnaires.

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Table 1: Data-based research on the effects of pragmatic instruction.

study

teaching goal

House and Kasper 1981 Wildner-Bassett 1984, 1986 Billmyer 1990

discourse markers advanced & strategies pragmatic routines intermediate

Olshtain and Cohen 1990 Wildner-Bassett 1994 Bouton 1994 Kubota 1995

House 1996

proficiency

languages

L1 German FL English L1 German FL English compliment high intermediate L1 Japanese SL English apology advanced L1 Hebrew FL English pragmatic routines beginning L1 English & strategies SL German implicature advanced L1 mixed SL English implicature intermediate L1 Japanese FL English

L1 German FL English Tateyama et al. pragmatic routines beginning L1 English 1997 FL Japanese Matsumura 2003 offer advice varying levels L1 Japanese FL English Kinginger and address forms high intermediate L1 English Farrell 2004 (tu/vous) SL French Bardovi-Harlig and Griffin 2005

Martínez-Flor and Alcón Soler 2007 Roever 2006

Takimoto 2009

pragmatic fluency advanced

assessment/procedure/instrument roleplay roleplay elicited conversation discourse completion question questionnaires roleplay multiple choice question multiple choice & sentence combining question roleplay multi-method multiple-choice

close-ended choice (T/V) and justification speech acts high intermediate L1 mixed (Asian, roleplay (requests, suggesEuropean, South tions, apologies, American) refusals) suggestions intermediate L1 Spanish FL English close-ended rating scale speech acts, rou- high intermediL1 German, multiple-choice tines, implicature ate, advanced Japanese SL English downgraders intermediate L1 Japanese acceptability FL English judgement test, discourse completion test, role play, evaluation questionnaire

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The studies above typically examine respondents’ rating of short exchanges as appropriate-inappropriate on a 1–5 ranking scale, or their awareness of social factors affecting their judgement, e.g. age, status, familiarity, political ideology, group solidarity, context, in beginning to advanced L2 learners. The tested items are recurrent communicative situations – mainly conversational routines – used as prompts towards acting roleplays, answering discourse completion and multiple choice questions, or closed rating scales. Worth mentioning is the fact that in cases, albeit scarce, where ‘implicature’ is the teaching goal (see Bouton 1994; Kubota 1995; Roever 2006 in Table 1 above), assessment is mechanistic too, i.e. close-ended multiple choice questions, as in example (1) below: (1)

Jack: Do you know where Frank is, Sarah? Sarah: Well, I heard music from his room earlier. What does Sarah probably mean? 1. Frank forgot to turn the music off. 2. Frank’s loud music bothers Sarah. 3. Frank is probably in his room. 4. Sarah doesn’t know where Frank is. (from Roever 2006: 238, adapted from Bouton 1999)

Clearly, in contexts where close-ended Discourse Completion Tasks (henceforth, DCTs), multiple-choice, scaled-response questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, draw on artificial mini-scenarios similar to example (1) above, the range of pragmatically inferred meanings which may be communicated in real-life situations is restricted, and vastly underrepresented. Consider example (2) below: (2)

Your classmate cannot get his money back from a broken vending machine. What do you think would be more appropriate to say? a. You should complain about it. The office is downstairs. b. Maybe it’s better to complain about it. The office is downstairs. c. The office is downstairs. d. Nothing. (Matsumura 2003: 469)

The rating of the four options by the subjects from most to least preferable would be a misleading indication of their ability to process a specific speech act, namely, giving advice to a peer. This is so because the four options may be appropriate,

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depending on the intention of the speaker (to offer advice in (a), (b), (c); or not to in (d)), on her degree of commitment (stronger in (a), as encoded by should; weaker in (b), as encoded by may be it’s better to; no commitment in (c)), and on the degree of explicitness preferred by the communicator (more explicit in (a), (b); less explicit in (c)). In the few studies where the interpretation of implicit meaning is tested, artificial and fragmented, or underspecified contexts raise the processing effort for the multiple-choice respondent with questionable results, as illustrated in example (3) below: (3)

Susan and Mei-ling are roommates and are getting ready to go to class together. Mei-ling: Is it very cold out this morning? Susan: It’s August. What is Susan saying? a. It’ll be nice and warm today. Don’t worry. b. Yes, even though it’s August, it’s very cold out. c. It’s so warm for this time of year that it seems like August. d. Yes, we’re sure having crazy weather, aren’t we? (Bouton 1988: 194)

As in example (2) above, the four interpretations are possible depending on what the time of the year is, what the weather actually is, and on whether the speaker is being sincere as in (a), or ironical as in (b) (‘It is very much unlike August’), whether she is understood as using a metonymy (‘August’= ‘Warm weather’) or a simile (‘This time of year is like August’) as in (c), or a metaphor as in (d) (‘August is crazy’). ‘Forcing’ a choice on the reader’s part in such cases seems an unnatural way to test pragmatic comprehension, since interpretations cannot be ruled out on the basis of fragmented ad hoc contexts, and hence underdetermined ad hoc concepts.¹ Similarly, ‘preferred’ interpretations cannot be assessed disregarding individual preferences of discourse style – e.g. literal vs. figurative speech, explicitness vs. implicitness, degrees of explicitness/implicitness, humour/wit. This line of research seems to have ignored the fact that on-going communication rests on vastly underdetermined linguistic meaning (see Carston 2002: 15–93), and on spontaneous interpretation of pragmatically inferred meaning retrieved from extended stretches of discourse, and shared background assumptions.

1 On ad hoc concepts, see Wilson and Carston 2007.

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A related problem is that mechanistic test items (see studies in Table 1 above) may provide useful insights into focused aspects of learner’s pragmatic competence but may misleadingly indicate level of pragmatic competence for testing isolated phenomena by routinized forms. Speech-act recognition or multiple-choice selection of implicatures may be a valid assessment tool for beginning or intermediate L2 learners’ spoken discourse, not necessarily for advanced learners’ pragmatic competence in academic contexts. This is so because speech-act identification (or production) cannot provide insights into subjects’ meta-pragmatic and meta-cognitive abilities. The ‘noticing’/‘understanding’ distinction paved the way to awareness-raising techniques by pointing to the fact that pragmatic competence comes in stages of cognitive complexity (see Kasper and Rose 2002: 27, 29). Strictly speaking, however, the two stages: (1) learner is aware of what someone says on a particular occasion (‘noticing’), and (2) learner is aware of social distance, context, sociolinguistic patterns or individual differences in utterance interpretation (and is able to provide relevant metalinguistic comments) (‘understanding’) are the conditions, not the means to pragmatic learning (Schmidt 1995: 30, in Kasper and Rose 2002: 27, 29; Ishihara 2007: 22). Moreover, this distinction left the possibility of specifying levels of achievement depending unexplored, for example, on whether the L2 learner simply interprets pragmatic meaning (‘noticing’), or comments on her/his interpretation too (‘understanding’). That meta-cognitive / meta-pragmatic abilities affect the development of pragmatic competence is shown by the scarce evidence on implicature recognition (see Bouton 1994; Kubota 1995; Garcia 2004). In a longitudinal study of non-native speakers of English, Bouton (1994) revealed significant differences in interpreting specific types of implicature. It was shown that subjects who lived in the US for 17 months encountered communication difficulties due to four types of implicature (e.g. indirect criticism, irony)² rather than cultural discrepancy

2  Further examples of implicature tested by Bouton (1994) are: (1) Understated criticism: Two teachers are talking about a student’s paper. Mr Ranger: Have you finished with Mark’s term paper yet? Mr Ryan: Yes, I have. I read it last night. Mr Ranger: What did you think of it? Mr Ryan: Well, I thought it was well typed. (implicated answer: he did not like it) (2) Sequence: Maria: Hey, I hear Sandy went to Philadelphia and stole a car after he left us last night. Tony: Not exactly. He stole a car and went to Philadelphia. Maria: Are you sure? That’s not the way I heard it. (fact: Sandy stole the car in Philadelphia implicated answer: Maria has the right story) (3) POPE Q implicature: Two roommates are talking about their plans for the summer. Fran: My mother wants me to stay home for a while, so I can be there when our relatives come to visit us at the beach.

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(Bouton 1994: 166). Kubota (1995) provided explicit explanations of the Gricean rules of conversational implicatures (to Group A), and engaged learners in ‘consciousness-raising’ group-discussions (in Group B) where subjects discussed the rules of conversational implicatures and the answers among themselves. He showed that the two experimental groups exhibited short-term improved performance in identifying the intended implicature from a closed-ended group of choices (Test A), and in generating the intended implicature themselves (Test B). Significant findings indicate improved performance of subjects in consciousnessraising tasks (Group B), but failure to infer pragmatic implicatures by applying the instruction to new items (vs. the feedback items). In a correlational study of interpreting speech acts vs. implicatures, Garcia (2004) showed that the two types of task are unrelated since a minimal overlap of ability to understand speech acts vs. conversational implicatures was exhibited by both high-level learners (2%) and low-level learners (6%). Lack of correlation between speech-act performance and implicature retrieval³ may suggest that speech-act recognition and pragmatic inference of implicatures may rely on different interpretive mechanisms, or different levels of cognitive sophistication. Different processing demands may also explain Bouton’s (1994, 1996) findings on subjects’ prolonged difficulty to interpret the four types of implicature illustrated above, as well as Roever’s (2006) findings on positive effects of L2 proficiency on implicature retrieval but not on speech act routines. Surprisingly, the latter can be learned even by low-level L2 learners simply by exposure. If different types of pragmatic implicature require different interpretive mechanisms in terms of complexity and sophistication (and presumably different levels of linguistic competence too, see Roever 2006; for correlational results, Joan: Do you have a lot of relatives? Fran: Are there flies in the summertime? (implicated answer: yes) (Bouton 1994: 161–163) 3 The classification in the CCSARP (Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project) (see BlumKulka, House and Kasper 1989) went as far as stereotyped speech acts at the level of utterance as the most indirect and nonconventional in form, e.g. requests which are partly linguistically encoded, partly inferred, e.g. The kitchen is in a mess (≈request to clean up the kitchen); Do you have a car? (≈request for a ride) (see Weizman 1989: 74 on requestive hints). Garcia (2004) and Bouton (1994, 1996) examined of purely inferentially retrieved attitudes and feelings of the speaker’s - e.g. irony, dislike, excitement, and uncertainty. These may be, moreover, retrieved on purely inferential grounds, e.g. A: Does Dr Walker always give a test the day before vacation? B: Does the sun come up in the east? On the assumption that implicitness (like explicitness) is a matter of degree (see Sperber and Wilson 1995[1986]: 182), I assume that the latter types of implicature require extra amounts of inferencing compared to the former, therefore, the two strands of research are not comparable, and, moreover, may incur different repercussions on speech-act vs. implicature comprehension by L2 learners.

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see Ifantidou 2011a, Ifantidou and Tzanne 2012), focused pragmatic tasks may contribute to developing L2 learners’ inferential ability to retrieve implicatures. That language is essentially a thinking tool also used by humans as a medium of verbal communication (Sperber and Wilson 1995[1986]: 172–174) indicates the significance of examining pragmatic competence primarily as an ‘information processing’ ability, and subsequently as a pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic ability (for a discussion of the pragmalinguistics-sociopragmatics distinction, see Marmaridou 2011). On this assumption, pragmatic competence in L2 is redefined in Section 2.1 as an essentially ‘meta-pragmatic awareness’ construct, i.e. as subsuming both meta/linguistic competence and meta/pragmatic awareness. Under this construal of pragmatic competence, the notions of ‘pragmatic awareness’ and ‘meta-pragmatic awareness’ have been explored by Ifantidou (2011a) towards assessing pragmatic competence and linguistic competence at the same time. This study focuses on how pragmatic awareness and a pragmatic, genre-based task may be used as a testing measure. Before doing so, however, I will show how the vagueness around the three key notions of ‘pragmatic competence’, ‘pragmatic awareness’, ‘meta-pragmatic awareness’ can be resolved under a single overarching category for theoretical and explanatory purposes in L2 contexts.

2.1 Pragmatic competence re-defined Related pragmatic constructs in EFL/ESL research have often been indiscriminately used, as in the cases of ‘pragmatic awareness’ ≈ ‘pragmatic competence’ (Bardovi-Harlig et al. 1991: 4; see also Grossi 2009: 53), and of ‘pragmatic ability’ ≈ ‘pragmatic use and awareness’ (Ishihara 2007: 21): Pragmatic proficiency Language learners interacting with speakers of a target language must be exposed to language samples which observe social, cultural, and discourse conventions  – or in other words, which are pragmatically appropriate. … This is particularly true of advanced learners whose high linguistic proficiency leads other speakers to expect concomitantly high pragmatic competence. This is not to say, however, that classroom activities designed to increase pragmatic awareness are appropriate only for advanced learners; (Bardovi-Harlig et al. 1991: 4)

Pragmatic constructs have also been interchangeably used to account for the same dataset, as in the case of ‘pragmatic awareness’ ≈ ‘meta-pragmatic awareness’ (Safont Jordà 2003: 48–49; see also Martínez-Flor and Alcón Soler 2007:

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64).⁴ As stated by Safont Jordà “…we understand metapragmatic awareness as the acknowledgement of those contextual features that determine the extent to which a given linguistic routine may be appropriate for a particular situation. … The above quoted description of pragmatic awareness … served as the basis of our analysis… ” (Safont Jordà 2003: 47–48). I believe that three (at least) of the above pragmatic constructs can be fruitfully distinguished on both theoretical and practical grounds. Moreover, instead of looking at ‘pragmatic’, ‘linguistic’ and ‘grammatical’ competences as pairs of dichotomous variables,⁵ the theoretical model proposed in this study treats them as processes which develop in parallel and are assessed by means of a single testing tool (for a detailed account of its application, see Ifantidou and Tzanne 2012). On this approach, ‘pragmalinguistic’ and ‘sociocultural’ competences are seen as naturally ensuing from L2 users’ advanced mind-reading ability to process natural language. Central here are the notions of identification of linguistic indexes, pragmatic awareness, and meta-pragmatic awareness. The three abilities are subsumed under pragmatic competence as stated below: Pragmatic competence: the ability to (a) identify relevant linguistic indexes (Linguistic Awareness) (b) retrieve relevant pragmatic effects (Pragmatic Awareness) (c) meta-represent, and explicate the link between lexical indexes and pragmatic effects retrieved (Meta-pragmatic Awareness) (see also Ifantidou 2011a, 2011c) EFL/ESL learners who successfully perform in written (or oral) production tasks in competences (a), (b) and (c) above are, on this account, considered pragmatically competent users of L2. In this sense, the above assessment tool provides the criteria for evaluating learners’ production; it does not make a claim as to the order these cognitive processes evolve developmentally,⁶ or may occur in thinkaloud protocols – but it does make a claim as to an on-going dialogue between 4 The terms ‘pragmatic awareness’ and ‘meta-pragmatic awareness’ are discussed in Section 2.2. 5 Grammatical and pragmatic competences are seen as distinct components contributing to linguistic competence, and to overall communicative competence (see Kasper and Rose 2002: 19, 163). On this perspective, level of L2 competence has been examined as an indicator of pragmatic competence (as in Matsumura 2003; Takahashi 2005), and pragmatic competence has been examined as an indicator of linguistic proficiency (as in Ifantidou 2010, 2011a; Ifantidou and Tzanne 2012). Alternatively, grammatical and linguistic development have been discussed as near-equivalent constructs (i.e. as syntax and lexis respectively), and as distinct from, but prerequisite for, acquisition of pragmatics (see Bardovi-Harlig 2003: 25, 27). 6 In this sense, the order of the proposed criteria (a), (b), (c) is not normative but expository.

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linguistic encoding and pragmatic meaning until an overall relevant interpretation⁷ has been retrieved. In this framework, pragmatic competence can be fostered in learning environments by processing full-length texts in order to retrieve local explicit and implicit meanings (e.g. at the level of noun phrase or utterance) and the overall relevance, e.g. communicator’s intention (to genuinely inform, to mislead) and communicator’s epistemic stance (acceptance, rejection). The interpretation process may occur in a variety of genres and sociolinguistic contexts where learners engage in multiple pragmatic readings in realistic environments. Central in this framework are two processes by means of which pragmatic awareness and meta-pragmatic awareness are evaluated, namely genre conversion of a newspaper report into an academic extract (or the inverse conversion ‘academic → newspaper’), and meta-pragmatic analysis of a news report or editorial.⁸ The two processes are illustrated next by means of examples (4) and (5) (see Appendix). As already stated, the experimental evidence offered in this study will draw on the former. In the case of genre conversion (example 4, Appendix), lexical markers (passives, evidentials, indirect speech, complex noun phrases) are employed and pragmatic meanings (scientific authority, dissociative commitment) are conveyed by the learner in the new target genre (academic text) drawing relevant information from the source text (newspaper article). Because learners engage in a number of pragmalinguistic processes, i.e. select relevant information, paraphrase, employ a different discourse (linguistic structures), assume a different readership (academic experts) and implicated meaning (scientific objectivity, research validity), their linguistic competence is assessed in parallel with their pragmatic awareness (for correlational evidence, see Ifantidou 2011a; Ifantidou and Tzanne 2012; on pragmatic awareness, see Section 2.2).

7 This is a short-cut to the relevance-theoretic account of how the hearer (here, the reader) guided by his expectations of relevance, uses contextual assumptions made accessible by encyclopaedic entries of linguistically encoded concepts, to start deriving cognitive effects. When he has enough cognitive effects to satisfy his expectations of relevance, he stops (see Sperber and Wilson 1995[1986], 2005; Wilson and Sperber 2004). 8 News reports and editorials, compared to, say, weather reports, science reports, recipes, horoscopes, sports news, lend themselves as test-beds for examining how epistemic vigilance towards the source may be exercised against the risk run by humans to be ‘accidentally or intentionally misinformed’ (see Sperber et  al. 2010; Wilson 2010). Epistemic vigilance may be directed (by readers) at informants (here, journalist writers) in order to assess epistemic attitudes (acceptance, doubt, rejection), and their intentions (e.g. to inform, to deceive). As such, news reports and editorials best serve the purpose of meta-pragmatic analysis relying on higherorder mind-reading abilities activated in exercising epistemic vigilance. This assumption awaits elaboration in forthcoming work.

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In the case of meta-pragmatic analysis (example 5, Appendix), indicative linguistic features are identified in the source text as guiding the reader to an overall relevant interpretation (e.g. the author’s intention or epistemic stance). Moreover, a meta-pragmatic analysis of how lexical markers guide the reader into an open-ended range of plausible pragmatic implicatures (instead of a ‘correct’/‘appropriate’ one) is provided, as illustrated by the sample student answer (example 5, Appendix) (on meta-pragmatic awareness, see Section 2.2). In this study, I will focus on genre conversion and show by means of experimental evidence how pragmatic awareness can provide useful insights into pragmatic competence and linguistic competence in L2. Before doing so, however, I will clarify the notion of pragmatic awareness against its near-equivalent term ‘metapragmatic awareness’.

2.2 Pragmatic or Meta-pragmatic Awareness? Pragmatic awareness is defined as the learners’ ability to “notice how the target language realizes pragmatic features”, notice “pragmatically infelicitous utterances” and repair them (Bardovi-Harlig and Griffin 2005: 402; see also BardoviHarlig et  al. 1991; Martínez-Flor and Alcón Soler 2007), or as “the conscious, reflective, explicit knowledge about pragmatics” (Alcón Soler and Safont Jordà 2008: 193). Μeta-pragmatic awareness is defined as “the acknowledgement of those contextual features that determine the extent to which a given linguistic routine may be appropriate for a particular situation.” (Safont Jordà 2003: 48), or as “knowledge of the social meaning of variable second language forms and awareness of the ways in which these forms mark different aspects of social contexts…” (Kinginger and Farrell 2004: 20). These definitions suggest that pragmatic and meta-pragmatic awareness are overlapping categories because both refer to the ability to identify (‘notice’) and comment (‘acknowledgement’, ‘reflective’) on how public communication is handled (is it appropriate or not? and why so). As already stated (Section 2.1), the two terms are not only interchangeably used but are also assessed by the same types of activity (role plays, DCTs, video-taped mini-scenarios, elicited conversations) prompting learners to identify and repair pragmatic failures (see BardoviHarlig and Griffin 2005; Byon 2006) and provide sociolinguistic criteria to justify preferred answers. More specifically, in pragmatic awareness studies, video-and-questionnaires may be followed up by interviews where participants comment on or provide explanations on their perception of errors and inappropriate answers or reflect on the content and language of the interaction (Schauer 2006; see also Martínez-

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Flor and Alcón Soler 2007: 53; Ishida 2009: 41, 51, 67 on ‘awareness’ manifested in conversation sessions and reflection sheets). Similarly, meta-pragmatic awareness is assessed in formal sociolinguistic interviews where learners are asked to evaluate mini-scenarios, choose an appropriate address form (e.g. tu/vous) for different interlocutors, and reflect aloud to provide a justification for their choice (based on context, age, familiarity) (Kinginger and Farrell 2004). In L1 developmental meta-pragmatic studies too, meta-pragmatic awareness is assessed while children observe video-taped interactions, and answer questions on pragmatic errors in an attempt to elicit comments on the appropriateness of generic pragmatic factors such as adequacy of reply, topic of conversation, conversation routine, identity/intention of participants (Collins et al. 2009; see also Kaufman et al. 1994). Strictly speaking, however, in all these cases, pragmatically retrieved meaning itself is not assessed but social factors affecting its interpretation are (such as context, age, status, ADD: interlocutor familiarity). The real problem with the above definitions of pragmatic and meta-pragmatic awareness is that they are too vague to delimit the range of ‘features’ or ‘ways’ by which language may be appropriate or not, and that they are not specific enough to draw the line between pragmatic and meta-pragmatic awareness. In this sense, it is not clear what ‘acknowledgement’ means, or what ‘awareness’ means under these definitions: to be able to identify inappropriate language? To be able to provide appropriate answers? To be able to intuitively explain, or to explain by using the sociolinguistic metalanguage (concerning age, status, culturally-specific routines, ethnic stereotypes), or to explain by using the linguistic metalanguage (e.g. metaphor, humour, irony, presupposition, implicature) why certain instances are inappropriate uses of language? Are all these ‘criteria’ relevant? And which of these hold for pragmatic awareness, which hold for metapragmatic awareness, or pragmatic competence? I believe that on a closer scrutiny, pragmatic awareness may be seen as a first step in developing pragmatic competence, and as a distinct type of ability from either pragmatic competence, or meta-pragmatic awareness. In this direction, this study uses a definition of pragmatic competence that distinguishes between pragmatic awareness and meta-pragmatic awareness on theoretical and explanatory grounds. The definition proposed in Ifantidou 2011a, 2011c includes two types of pragmatic ability, namely: Pragmatic awareness the ability to retrieve (or produce) pragmatically inferred effects in the form of implicated conclusions.

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Meta-pragmatic awareness the ability to meta-represent the link between pragmatic effects retrieved and relevant linguistic markers used as a guide into pragmatic meaning by means of appropriate metalinguistic terms, e.g. identify a metaphor and explain how it contributes to the favourable or unfavourable attitude of the author’s.

In the above definition, pragmatic awareness is seen as a pre-requisite for developing pragmatic competence, and as such, it is proposed as an indication of a pre-mature level of pragmatic competence in L2. Meta-pragmatic awareness is seen as a sophisticated mind-reading ability which, granting meta-linguistic competence, is proposed as an indication of higher-level pragmatic competence and linguistic competence in the L2. In this study, I will focus on pragmatic awareness as a means to evaluate pragmatic competence and linguistic competence at the same time. The findings are discussed in the light of a pragmatic task (genre conversion) compared to two language tasks (outline-summary, data description) which cannot offer reliable insights neither into linguistic nor into pragmatic competence, and in the light of a correlation of linguistic with pragmatic tasks.

3 Methodology and research procedures This section introduces the rationale of the course framing the empirical part of this study (Section 3.1), the participants’ profile (Section 3.2), and the methodology employed (Sections 3.3, 3.4).

3.1 Coursework Academic Discourse follows a genre-based approach to developing linguistic competence. Emphasis lies on the socio-cultural effects of specific uses of language, on the functions and pragmatic effects (presuppositions, implicatures) of specific lexico-grammatical choices of the author, rather than on a taxonomy of category types used (e.g. tense, person, number, voice) as defined within traditional descriptive and prescriptive frameworks of grammar. For example, if passive constructions prevail in an academic excerpt, it is important to also provide a justification why such a grammatical pattern is preferable: is the passive form used in order to mask the agent, reduce her to anonymity, and hence invalidate her contribution to the topic presented by weakening the force and reliability of her views (as in media discourse)? Or is the passive used in order to create a non-transparent author blurred with research instrument(s) and scientific

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methodology(ies), and hence, validate her contribution to the issue researched as objective scientific knowledge situated within the realm of fact (as in academic discourse)? Academic Discourse follows a discourse-based approach, whereby coherent and cohesive pieces of discourse are examined and produced, instead of single paragraphs, or separate modes of development (in the form of argumentative, descriptive, classification, comparison/contrast types of essay). It is an essentially holistic perspective to writing/reading whereby students are encouraged to evaluate and develop fully-fledged texts where different modes of development are creatively combined. For example, if students are asked to produce a newspaper article on the current state and importance of compulsory education, they will be asked to do so by defining compulsory education, drawing on comparative data (years of compulsory education in different countries), classifying more or less ‘privileged’ educational systems, arguing for or against possible effects while illustrating with concrete examples. More specifically, Academic Discourse aims at familiarizing students with academic texts and enabling them to understand and produce academic discourse. To this end, course sessions involve a detailed presentation of academic style as manifested in different genres such as the Abstract, Research paper, Monograph, Review, Essay outline, while engaging students in describing and interpreting data, synthesizing from sources, outlining, paraphrasing and summarizing academic texts. For example, upon describing and interpreting data (in the form of tables or graphs), they are provided with the context of the study, the field of research (e.g. sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, nutrition) and a list of possible explanations (see example 6, Appendix). The findings are described and interpreted by using the explanations provided. A key criterion in assessing student answers is their appropriate use of cautious and qualifying/frequency lexical markers (example 6, Appendix, sample student answer), which is the genre-specific convention assessed in this case. The formal outline is the genre-specific convention assessed in summarizing academic extracts. The course involves a comparison with popular discourse in the form of science news reports found in British and US broadsheet newspapers (see Ifantidou 2011c).

3.2 Participants A total of 91 native Greek students of English Language and Literature, University of Athens, informed the results of this study. They were full-time undergraduate students forming one section (out of four) of the obligatory course Academic Discourse taught by the author. The 91/1st semester students took the Academic

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Discourse final exam (29th January 2010), and 36 of them took the Academic Discourse mock exam (11th January 2010).⁹ The learners’ level of linguistic competence is assessed twice during their four-year (eight semesters) undergraduate studies in the Faculty of English Language and Literature. It is first assessed upon entrance to the University by means of a diagnostic language test especially designed to address prospective learners of academic English. Their level of linguistic competence is reassessed for improvement towards the desired C2 level by means of a progress test at the beginning of the 4th semester. The validity of the tests is cross-checked by the Dialang entrance test for European languages. Results are estimated by reducing score results obtained by each student to the levels designated by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), namely A1, A2 (Basic speaker), B1, B2 (Independent speaker), C1, C2 (Proficient speaker) for each student. The level of linguistic competence of the students assessed in this study¹⁰ (Academic Discourse 2009/1 section) is indicated¹¹ in Table 2. Table 2: Academic Discourse diagnostic test results (October 2009) section 1 (A–Zαχ).

Percentages

2009/section 1

A1 –

A2 10,5%

B1 10,5%

B2 43,8%

C1 33,3%

C2 1,7%

TOTAL 100%

A1 –

A2 6

B1 6

B2 25

C1 19

C2 1

TOTAL 57

Frequencies (n)

2009/section 1

9 The subjects, aged 17–21, were predominantly female (N=82) and marginally male (N=9). However, age and sex are not variables assessed in this study  – as standardly observed in interlanguage studies (see for example Matsumura 2003: 468; Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008: 118) – and hence do not affect the results discussed. It remains to be seen if, in a sociolinguistic study, age and sex have a role to play in the effects of explicit instruction on pragmatic awareness. 10 Students of the section assessed in this work were taught and examined by the author. Remaining sections were taught and examined by Drs Bessie Mitsikopoulou and Angeliki Tzanne. 11 The diagnostic language test is ‘indicative’ of the students’ level of linguistic competence because, as a result of the fact that it is optional, approximately 2/3 (N=208) of the students registered in the 1st semester took the diagnostic test in October 2009. These students took the progress test the progress test in the spring semester 2011.

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3.3 Rationale The question addressed in this study is whether a pragmatic task (genre conversion), or whether language tasks based on genre conventions, i.e. structural, grammatical, lexical features recurring in multiple instances of a genre, can be used as reliable indexes of linguistic competence. To do so, the study employs form-focused, mechanistic language tasks and creative pragmatic tasks. Form-focused (focused) tasks are specifically designed to assess specific linguistic features (e.g. grammatical forms), and are mechanistic in the sense that control over language can be achieved – i.e. ‘habit-formed’ – if learners practice specific language patterns (Ellis 2003: 112). Focused tasks can be ‘consciousnessraising’ tasks in the sense that they tap on learners’ meta-cognitive ability to identify particular features in longer stretches of discourse (Willis 2004: 25), e.g. identify in a spoken transcript phrases containing the preposition ‘in’, and categorize them under ‘time’, ‘place’, ‘other’. The insights gained into these language features by classifying them and discussing them using the target language is considered as the ‘consciousness-raising’ aspect of such tasks. Meaning-focused (or unfocused) tasks aim at stimulating ‘communicative language use’ by drawing on an open-ended range of features and by “encourage[ing] the learner to use freely any language he or she can muster, without concentrating on just one or two specific forms …” (Willis 2004: 25). Any ‘replication’ activity where real-life communication is simulated with no predetermined language forms requested is an unfocused task (Willis 2004: 17) – e.g. “tell your partner something about yourself” and “write about a day in the outdoors” (Alosh 2004: 106) (on the distinction between form-focused/focused vs. meaning-focused/unfocused tasks, see Ellis 2003: 16–17). The present study draws on language tasks combining structural features, e.g. the formal outline (in outline-summary tasks) and cautious/qualifying/ frequency lexical markers (in description of data tasks), with creative language use. In these cases, outlines may be seen as conventional structural features of academic texts, passive constructions may be seen as conventional grammatical features of abstracts, and cautious/frequency/qualification lexical terms may be seen as conventional features of descriptions/interpretations of data. Specifically, the formal outline involves numerical indentation and hierarchy of main-minor ideas (see Figure  1 below) whereas description and interpretation of data involves a fixed set of cautious/qualifying/frequency lexicalized expressions (see Figure 2 below) and a given list of explanations for learners to use in interpreting the data presented in tables or graphs (see example 6, Appendix, sample student answer).

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A. main idea

1. supporting idea

2. supporting idea

3. supporting idea

Figure 1: Outline-Summary draws on a mechanistic, form-focused hierarchy of ideas.

Frequency hardly ever, usually, normally

Quantity a majority, several, a number of

Caution it seems, apparently, presumably Figure 2: Data description draws on a close-ended, form-focused list of lexical items.

These language tasks allow for a creative re-synthesis of source extracts by open resource to specific forms (see Figures 1 and 2) and any language the learner has acquired so far. In this way, language tasks combine ‘focused’ and ‘unfocused’ elements and tap into different levels of linguistic competence (see also Ifantidou 2011c: 53–55). The meaning-focused pragmatic task, i.e. genre conversion, is used as a pragmatic awareness task in that it draws on learner’s awareness of (at least) (a) genre variation (e.g. newspaper vs. academic), (b) communicator’s intention (e.g.

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to inform vs. to mislead) and epistemic stance (e.g. acceptance, rejection), and (c) readers’ background knowledge, expectations, needs, preferences (e.g. academic expert vs. the general public). In this respect, genre conversion addresses pragmatic meaning as a whole, rather than fragmented meanings identified in stipulated mini-scenarios. Authentic discourse offers the natural language input for realistic interpretations and the means to attest linguistic competence at an advanced level of university studies.

3.4 Methodology The data draws on final exam scripts of a 1st semester course taught in the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Athens. 91 non-native Greek students of 17–21 years of age attended a 12-week course involving weekly homework, classwork, assignments, a mock exam (11th January 2010), and a final exam (29th January 2010). The mock exam was administered 3 weeks before the final exam, and was returned to students with feedback in the form of written comments and corrections. Comparison with the results from the final exam could reinforce observations made on the consistency of strengths and weaknesses in learners’ performance, predictability of performance per task, consistency of correlation or divergence between language and pragmatic tasks, and correlation or divergence between the two language tasks. The exam consists of 3 tasks, as shown in Table 3 below. The tasks in Table 3 were implemented by explicit instruction, practiced in homework, class-work, written assignments, and piloted in the mock exam. Students received the corrected mock exam answer sheets with feedback in the form of written suggestions for improvement. Table 3: Academic Discourse final and mock exam structure January 2010.

3 TASKS

Total Marks Text size (input)

Expected language Duration production

Task 1 Outline-Summary

25

500 words

outline & short paragraph (150 words)

40 minutes

Task 2 Genre Conversion (newspaper→academic)

30

400 words

1 text (200 words)

50 minutes

Task 3 25 Description- Interpretation of Data

200 words

1 text (200 words)

30 minutes

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In Task 2 on genre conversion (see example 4, Appendix) the learner is expected to create the target genre (academic text) from the source text (newspaper article). Because learners have to engage in a number of pragmatic and linguistic processes, i.e. select relevant information, paraphrase, employ a new discourse (linguistic structures), assume a new purpose and readership to ensure the intended implicated meaning, their linguistic competence is assessed in parallel with their pragmatic competence (for correlation results, see Ifantidou 2011a). In Task 3 on data description (see Appendix, example 6), the learner has to verbalize the findings in the given table or chart using a fixed set of frequency, quantity, cautious lexical markers as shown in Figure 2 above and explain them using the explanations provided (see example 6, Appendix, sample student answer). In Task 1 on outline-summary, the academic excerpt is reinvented by means of a formal outline from which a selective summary is expected to ensue.

4 Results and Discussion Descriptive statistics was run in order to compare the performance of 36 learners in the three tasks of the Academic Discourse mock exam (11th January 2010). As shown in Table 4 below, the lowest mean and the highest standard deviation from the mean are observed in the pragmatic task of genre conversion (task 2) Table 4: Descriptive statistics of 36 Academic Discourse mock exam 11/01/2010 scripts by task.

Statistics

Std. Error

Task 1 Outline-Summary

Mean Median Std. Deviation Minimum Maximum

10.69 10.00 4.87 4.00 24.00

.82

Task 2 Genre conversion

Mean Median Std. Deviation Minimum Maximum

3.53 .00 7.10 .00 25.00

1.18

Task 3 Data description

Mean Median Std. Deviation Minimum Maximum

15.24 15.00 4.87 5.00 25.00

.83

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(3.53 and 7.10 respectively). In the opposite direction, the standard deviations of language task 1 (outline-summary) and language task 3 (data description) yielded by paired samples t-test (t = −8.051, df = 33, p =.000) did not differ (4.87), despite the difference in means and medians (10.69 and 15.24 means; medians 10.00 and 15.00 for tasks 1 and 3 respectively). Significant differences were also yielded by paired samples t-tests in the cases of task 1 (outline-summary)  – task  2 (Genre conversion) (t = 7.086, df = 34, p =.000), and task 2 (Genre conversion) – task 3 (Data description) (t = −9.336, df = 33, p =.000).

25

extreme (25.00)

27

28

max. (25.00)

27

outlier (24.00) 8 28

8

20

31

interquartile range

Scores

15

10

interquartile range

median (15.00)

35 15 median (10.00)

min. (5.00)

5 min. (4.00) interquartile range 0 Task1 Task 1: Outline - Summary

min. (0.00) Task2 Task 2: Genre conversion

Task3 Task 3: Data description

Figure 3: Performance classification of tasks 1, 2, 3 in 36 Academic Discourse mock exam 11/01/2010 scripts. Τhe interquartile range represents homogeneous scores which appear to be the majority in my sample of exam scripts, whereas any scores outside the upright rectangle refer to less frequent, very low or very high cases of non-homogeneous scores. More specifically, the interquartile range exhibits the 25%–75% median scores in the exam scripts assessed, excluding the minority of outliers, therefore excluding the less frequent, and hence, less reliable cases.

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As observed in the box plot (Figure  3 above), the learners’ performance in the pragmatic task 2 on genre conversion was strikingly low, with one top score (=25) considered as extreme¹² case. The interquartile range¹³ for task 2 shows that the majority of performances received the lowest scores, with a small dispersion across the marking scheme range (0–25). In other words, not only low scores were obtained, but the majority were not considerably higher or lower than the (very low) mean value (3.53). An improved performance is observed in language task 3 on data description by virtue of the highest mean (15.24) obtained in this exam, albeit with a greater dispersion (wider distribution), indicating that score values were considerably higher and lower than the mean value. Language task 1 on outline-summary, on the other hand, yields a lower mean (10.64) but a smaller dispersion, which indicates that score values were not considerably higher or lower than the mean value. In both language tasks, a low standard deviation (4.87) indicates a greater central tendency, i.e. a smaller variance, with the dataset concentrated around the mean (i.e. smaller spread), suggesting a less volatile and more repeatable data. The higher value of standard deviation in the pragmatic task 2 implies a greater spread and a more volatile data, i.e. greater difference from performance to performance, and hence, a more risky performance in terms of stability and prediction. Nevertheless, positive correlations were observed in the three cases of performance comparisons (see Table 5 below). Turning to the final exam (29th January 2010) of Academic Discourse, the same descriptive statistics was run in order to compare the performance of 91 learners (including the 36 who took the mock exam) in the three types of task. Three significant findings can be observed in Table 6 below: (a) the students’ performance in the pragmatic task 2 on genre conversion has the lowest mean (7.63) compared to language task 1 (14.04) and language task 3 (14.61), (b) the students’ performance in the pragmatic task yields the highest standard deviation from the mean (10.67), and extreme scores (0–20, as shown in the box plot, Figure 4 below), and (c) means and standard deviations in the two language tasks 1 and 3 did not considerably differ (means 14.04 and 14.61; SD 6.35–6.29 respectively).

12 Extreme outliers are any data values which lie more than 3.0 times the interquartile range below the first quartile or above the third quartile. (Mild) outliers are any data values which lie between 1.5 times and 3.0 times the interquartile range below the first quartile or above the third quartile. 13 The interquartile range and the standard deviation both measure spread, but the IQR is more resistant to outliers. The standard deviation is sensitive to outliers or extreme observations. Their relation is similar to that between the mean and the median  – the mean is sensitive and the median is resistant to extreme observations.

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Table 5: Mock exam performance correlations in task-pairs.

Pair 1: Task 1 Outline-Summary–Task 2 Genre conversion Pearson statistics showed a positive correlation of the two variables (r =.704, df = 33, p =.000), and as a consequence, improved/declining performance in one of the two tasks is correlated with an increased probability of improved/declining performance in the other task too. Pair 2: Task 1 Outline-Summary–Task 3 Data description Pearson statistics showed a positive correlation of the two variables (r =.761, df = 33, p =.000), and as a consequence, improved/declining performance in one of the two tasks is correlated with an increased probability of improved/declining performance in the other task too. Pair 3: Task 2 Genre conversion–Task 3 Data description Pearson statistics showed a positive correlation of the two variables (r =.351, df = 33, p =.042) and as a consequence, improved/declining performance in one of the two tasks is correlated with an increased probability of improved/declining performance in the other task too.

Table 6: Descriptive statistics of 91 Academic Discourse final exam scripts 29/01/2010 by task.

Statistics

Std. Error

Task 1 Outline-Summary

Mean Median Std. Deviation Minimum Maximum

14.04 13.00 6.35 .00 25.00

.66

Task 2 Genre conversion

Mean Median Std. Deviation Minimum Maximum

7.63 .00 10.67 .00 30.00

1.12

Task 3 Data description

Mean Median Std. Deviation Minimum Maximum

14.61 15.00 6.29 .00 25.00

.66

In order to assess the performance classification shown in the box plot of Figure 4 above with greater detail and precision, the difference between task performances was examined in pairs using the Kolmogorov-Smirnof index of statistical analysis (because the sample is greater than 50) (Table 7 below).

Pragmatic awareness: An index of linguistic competence   

max. (30.00)

30

25

   127

max. (25.00)

max. (25.00)

Scores

20

15

interquartile range

interquartile range

median (15.00)

median (13.00) interquartile range

10

5

0

min. (0,00)

min. (0.00)

Task1 Task 1: Outline - Summary

Task2 Task 2: Genre conversion

min. (0.00)

Task3 Task 3: Data description

Figure 4: Performance classification of tasks 1, 2, 3 in 91 Academic Discourse final exam scripts 29/01/2010. Τhe interquartile range represents homogeneous scores which appear to be the majority in my sample of exam scripts, whereas any scores outside the upright rectangle refer to less frequent, very low or very high cases of non-homogeneous scores. More specifically, the interquartile range exhibits the 25%–75% median scores in the exam scripts assessed, excluding the minority of outliers, therefore excluding the less frequent, and hence, less reliable cases.

Table 7: Difference in pairs of task in Academic Discourse final exam 29/01/2010.

DifTask1_2: Statistic =.13 DifTask1_3: Statistic =.20 DifTask2_3: Statistic =.11

df = 91 df = 90 df = 90

p < 0.05 p < 0.05 p < 0.05

In this way, I checked whether the three medians differed significantly. The findings in Table 8 revealed a significant difference between genre conversion and outline-summary, and between genre conversion and data description, i.e. between the pragmatic task (genre conversion), on the one hand, and each of the language tasks (outline-summary and data description) on the other (Table 8, pairs 1 and 2). No significant difference was observed between the two language tasks (Table 8, pair 3).

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Table 8: Difference in pairs of task performance in Academic Discourse final exam 29/01/2010.

Pair 1: Score Task 2: Genre conversion – Score Task 1: Outline-Summary. Significant difference between the medians of performances (Wilcoxon, N = 91, z = - 6.22, two – tailed p < 0.05). Pair 2: Score Task 2: Genre conversion – Score Task 3: Data description Significant difference between the medians of performances (Wilcoxon, N = 90, z = - 5.97, two – tailed p < 0.05) Pair 3: Score Task 3: Data description – Score Task 1: Outline-Summary. Non-significant difference between the medians of performances (Wilcoxon, N = 90, z = -.668, two – tailed p > 0.05).

Observing the findings in Table 8, three questions arise: (a) what makes the scores observed in outline-summary and data description not significantly different? (b) What makes outline-summary and data description easier tasks for students to perform? And (c) why is genre conversion a harder task to perform as shown by the significantly different (lower) score compared to both outline-summary and data description? I believe that an answer to the above questions draws on the type of competence the two tasks tap into, mechanistic and form-focused in the case of outline-summary and data description, where learners are expected to re-produce information focusing on structure (of main ideas) (Figure 1 above), or focusing on a fixed set of lexical expressions (Figure 2 above). In this case, explicit instruction during coursework (class-work, homework, assignments, mock exam, feedback) seems to have had significant effects on learners’ performance. An answer to why learners perform poorly in genre conversion would have to draw on the complexity of the task which taps on learner’s pragmatic awareness of (a) genre variation (shift from newspaper to academic, for example, by means of genrespecific conventions),¹⁴ (b) communicator’s epistemic stance and intention, and (c) reader’s background knowledge, expectations, needs, preferences (academic expert vs. the general public). The empirical question this study set out to answer is whether the pragmatic awareness task can be used as an index of linguistic competence. In the direction of seeking an answer to this question, I next examined whether the (task) score variables can be correlated.

14 For example, reporting ‘say’ vs. ‘claim’, direct vs. reported speech, current-state-of-affairs vs. prior scientific research, ±in-text citations, where the former (in the juxtaposed pairs) refer to newspaper and the latter to academic discourse conventions.

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Table 9: Performance correlations in task-pairs in Academic Discourse final exam 29/01/2010.

Pair 1: Task 1 Outline-Summary–Task 2 Genre conversion Spearman’s rho analysis showed a positive correlation of the two variables (Spearman =.615, df = 91, sig. (2-tailed)