A sketch of pragmatics III. Discourse

Communication is first and foremost a kind of constrained mind-reading with linguistic … codes just providing evidence (often rich and detailed evidence, but never a complete encoding, never a proof) of the thoughts being communicated.

Utterance modifiers

Utterance modifiers (UMs) are words and phrases that comment on the act of uttering a sentence, such as ‘frankly, confidentially, in case you’re interested’. They typically occur at the beginning of the sentence in question, being followed by a comma: Frankly, I like tortoises. means ‘Speaking frankly, I like tortoises’ or ‘I am saying frankly that I like tortoises’. A more elaborate UM is As you like tortoises, there are some on the shore. which conveys that I am saying this because you like tortoises (and therefore you might be interested in this piece of information).

They differ from sentence adverbs such as ‘luckily, unfortunately, naturally, ironically, possibly’, which comment on the content of an utterance: Luckily, Zarathustra will speak with us. cannot be paraphrased as ‘Speaking luckily / I am saying luckily that Zarathustra will speak with us’, but rather means ‘It is / We are lucky that Zarathustra will speak with us’.

Here are some examples. More can be found in Bach (1999), pages 356–358, from where most of the categorisation is taken:

Many UMs comment on a relation to previous utterances, such as ‘furthermore’, or sometimes to following ones, such as ‘first of all’. These are called discourse connectives. Again, some examples:

* (U4) and (D4) overlap: both refer to the utterance’s phrasing; the former (so to speak) in isolation, the latter in relation to what has been said previously.
† On the question of whether these are UMs at all see below.

Discourse connectives in Bach (1999) are listed in types 1–7; numbers 8, 9, 13 and 14 also contain some examples. However, we won’t analyse every single one of them.

Words and phrases used as UMs often have other, non-pragmatic, functions as well. In such uses, they are not necessarily sentence-initial. Thus, the highlighted portions of He spoke frankly about tortoises. As you like tortoises, I’ll show you some. There are no tortoises on the shore, but let’s go there anyway. are parts of the explicatures as opposed to commenting on what is said.

Properties

UMs bear some similarity to CIs (and have sometimes been classified as such) because they convey information additional to the basic explicature, are encoded and therefore not defeasible, and are detachable by omission. However, they fall inside the scope of subordinate clauses, and so neither project nor are speaker-oriented: I’ll be able to read Jacopo’s texts if, in a nutshell, I find the password. She dances so gracefully because, first of all, she practices several hours a day. Achilles told me frankly that he liked tortoises. Example (9) attributes the frankness to Achilles, not the speaker. However, it does not say that Achilles characterised his utterance as frank himself. This is yet another difference to CIs: UMs cannot comfortably be reported in indirect speech.

In Lemizh

Pronoun referring to the parole (U1–U8, D1–D4)

A comment on the act of uttering a sentence is, in Lemizh terms, a comment on the parole. We achieve this by referring to the parole with the relative pronoun wà. as the main predicate. This works for ordinary UMs as well as for some discourse connectives (which sometimes use the pronoun fà. to refer to the previous parole).

Many UMs are phrased as factive brackets parallel to ‘frankly’, such as:

• ‘indeed, believe it or not’ (U1) with pÌt. ‘correct’ – or, with less emphasis, by simply topicalising the affirmative: ràlh fkrÌjy. like-aff¹ tortoise-acc-acc².
• emphatics along the lines of ‘mark my words’ (U2) with kfrÌc. ‘important’, dÌxt. ‘necessary’ or prÌ jnÌe. ‘above [lit. in front of] all’
• mitigatives like ‘needless to say’ (U3) with lÌgz. ‘little’, or with emphatics compounded with the nonexistence or opposition negator
• ‘metaphorically speaking’ and ‘in a nutshell’ (U4, D4) with wrOnÌ. ‘metaphor(ical)’ and — cÌwbyR. ‘for a very short time’ (the latter being a durative object, not a bracket), respectively
• ‘confidentially, between you and me’ (U5) with anÌ. ‘secret’
• ‘botanically speaking’ (U6) with zvyfmÌxt. ‘botanical (the content of an act of doing botany)’
• ‘first [of all]’ and ‘finally’ (D1) with the ordinal numerals rìR [jnÌyn]. and jnìR., respectively
• ‘to sum up’ (D3) with rendÌ. ‘summary’

The discourse connectives ‘metaphorically’ and ‘to sum up’ have an implicit pronoun referring to the previous parole: wà wrOnÌa {saí} —. ‘This parole-acc is a metaphor for the previous one-dat; the previous parole is expressed metaphorically with this one’. It hardy ever needs to be overt, though.

As this approach marks UMs explicitly as such, we have to distinguish them carefully from ordinary subordinate clauses.

Likewise, ‘If I may interrupt, I’ll tell you something important’ is an ordinary conditional clause, while ‘If I may interrupt, Achilles and the tortoise have just been kidnapped’ is a mitigative utterance modifier (and probably a discourse modifier). The same distinction has to be made between ‘Have you seen the tortoise again?’ and ‘Again, have you seen the tortoise?’.

Verbs of communication (D5)

Lemizh uses specialised verbs of communication to comment on subject changes and the like. They take the actual utterance as their accusative object. Common words are:

For the sake of consistency with other UMs, these verbs can be interpreted as having been absorbed by the pronoun wà..

Non–utterance modifiers (D6–D8)

At least from a Lemizh view, illustratives (‘for example’), contrastives (‘however’) and concessives (‘nevertheless’) aren’t utterance modifiers as they comment on previous information, i.e. the content of a previous parole (the main predicate and its objects) as opposed to that parole itself. I won’t judge about their status in English.

In the last example, we could move the Lemizh equivalent of ‘nevertheless’ to the front by a desorption.

There is a large number of constructions that connect utterances in a discourse but aren’t utterance modifiers; see for example ‘actually’ and ‘after all’ in the dictionary.

Indirect speech

In contrast to English, UMs can be effortlessly included in indirect speech; the pronoun, if present, will automatically point to the inquit.

Note that, in the second example, ‘speak’ (Achilles’s parole) cannot absorb ‘digress/incidentally’ because the latter has an outer accusative, not a factive.

Use utterance modifiers sparingly: recall that everything clear from context should be omitted.

Conversation structure in a nutshell

Conversation among two or more people is structured by a system of turn-taking: each turn consists of one or more pragmatically self-contained elements, the turn construction units (TCUs), which may be single words (‘Yes’), phrases (‘Above the moon’), sentences, or possibly whole stories. The end of a TCU, called a transition relevance place (TRP), can usually be prediced very reliably by listeners by a variety of verbal and nonverbal cues, allowing for a minimum amount of pauses, overlaps and unintended interruptions. Cues include interjections, intonation, eye contact, gestures and posture.

Reaching a TRP, the speaker may

• select another participant for the next turn
• if she doesn’t select another participant, someone may self-select for the next turn
• if no one else self-selects, the original speaker may continue with her turn.

Further cues communicate details of the turn-taking process. We will only mention three types: hesitation markers (‘er, uh, um’) indicate that the speaker is pausing to think and the pause is not a transition relevance place. Backchannels (‘uh-huh, yeah, right, oh’, various facial expressions) are reactions by the listener that do not interrupt the current TCU but signify attention, understanding, and often agreement, surprise, amusement, anger, or other emotions. A turn request (‘um, wait’) is an attempt to gain the floor at a non-TRP.

Much could be said on adjacency pairs (co-occurring pairs of turns such as greeting+greeting, question+answer, request+fulfillment/refusal), but nothing that is specific to Lemizh; so we will refer our readers to Levinson’s Pragmatics.

While details such as employed cues and their meaning, average pause length and amount of overlap vary to some extent across languages and cultures, the basic principles have been found to be essentialy universal. Umberto Eco, however, has pointed out that this theory never caught on among Italian linguists, who find it natural that everybody is talking at the same time, and this works just fine.

In Lemizh

The Lemizh, like most other cultures, take turns in conversation: the Italian model would make it impossible to use type II pronouns to refer to the previous parole.

The most common hesitation marker is the pronoun wà., lit. ‘this parole’, more informally translated as ‘I’m saying …’. It also serves as a low-key turn request. The Lemizh are restrained at backchannelling: as we know, everything clear from context should be omitted. The pronoun fÌ. ‘yes’ signals agreement, nà. ‘no’ dissent. Emotional reactions are typically facial expressions and non-grammatical vocalisations, as they cause less interference with the (grammatical) sentences the speaker is producing.

Residual issues

Speech act theory is not treated on these pages. Its concept of illocutionary acts more or less corresponds to propositional attitudes such as believing in the truth of one’s statement, feeling sorry for someone, expressing a (speaker’s or addressee’s) desire, or promising something. Perlocutionary acts are effects of what is said on the addressee, such as convincing, persuading, eliciting an answer, reassuring, scaring, etc.; they are largely language-independent, and to some extent dependent on culture, and at any rate beyond the scope of this website. Indirect speech acts are conveyed by implicatures such as ‘Susan believes that her kiwis were too sour. ⇸ I want you to ring Susan and cheer her up’.
See also the paragraph on speech acts in unit 9 of the tutorial. More on speech act theory can be found in the literature given below.

I am planning to add a chapter on politeness some time in the future. Finally, while some remarks on style and registers can be found in the dictionary, a coherent account will probably remain forever beyond the scope of this website.

Literature

• introductions
  • Stephen Curtis Levinson (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
  • Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986, 1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Wikipedia: Relevance theory.
• on implicatures and explicatures
  • Herbert Paul Grice (1975, 1991). Logic and Conversation in: Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press. Reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press.
  • Robyn Anne Carston (1988). Implicature, Explicature, and Truth-Theoretic Semantics in: Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press.
  • Kent Bach (1994). Conversational Impliciture in: Mind and Language, 9. (Bach’s ‘implicitures’ are more or less what we have called ‘enrichments’.)
  • Robyn Anne Carston (2002). Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Wikipedia: Implicature.
• on metaphors and metonymies
  • George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980, 2003). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.
• on scalar inferences
  • Robyn Anne Carston (1998). Informativeness, Relevance and Scalar Implicature in: Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications. John Benjamins.
• on presuppositions
  • Peter Frederick Strawson (1950). On Referring in: Mind, 59 (235). Oxford University Press.
  • Robyn Anne Carston (2002). op. cit.
  • Mandy Simons (2002). Presupposition and Relevance in: Semantics versus Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
  • Allan Hazlett (2010). The Myth of Factive Verbs in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXXX (3). Wiley-Blackwell. (This is not exactly the same text, but freely accessible.)
  • Lauri Karttunen (2016). Presupposition: What went wrong? in: Proceedings of SALT, 26.
• on CIs and non-restrictive constructions
  • Kent Bach (1999). The Myth of Conventional Implicature in: Linguistics and Philosophy, 22 (4). Springer.
  • Christopher Potts (2005). Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings in: The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford University Press.
• on utterance modifiers
  • Kent Bach (1999). op. cit.
• on conversation structure
  • Stephen Curtis Levinson (1983). op. cit.
• on speech acts
  • John Langshaw Austin (1955, 1962). How to Do Things With Words. Clarendon Press.
  • John Rogers Searle (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press.
  • Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986, 1995). op. cit.

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