You're wet/bleeding

[Gabriella Modan]

Well, I don't know what Grice would necessarily say about these
utterances, but Doug Adams has a whole riff on it in The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy (Universe?)

Galey Modan



On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Greg Matheson wrote:

> I teach English in Taiwan. I have collected here two utterances
> from Chinese speakers of English which seem inconsistent with
> Gricean ideas of language as communication and I wanted advice
> about what to do with them.
> 
> One was when I walked through a typhoon to the airport and the
> woman at the check-in counter greeted me with the statement, "You're
> wet!" or "You're all wet!" I can't remember the exact words. I can
> remember this made me feel warm inside, but I also remember thinking
> about it later perhaps and wondering how you would explain it in
> terms of the Gricean maxim to be as informative as required, but no
>  more informative than required.
> 
> Being told I was wet did not tell me anything I didn't know at all, but
> I did not feel it was odd, or  that I could respond with something like,
> "Don't you know there's a typhoon outside?" or "Am I? I didn't notice."
> or "No. This is the new look." But I couldn't put my finger on why it
> wasn't odd.
> 
> The other example was in a textbook where one of the characters comes
> home after a motorcycle accident to get some money before going to
> the hospital and the other character greets him with the words, "You're
> bleeding!" This also is not informative. Why does the other character say it?
> 
> I don't have any examples from native speakers, but it seems to me this
> kind of thing is that it is something they say too. I searched some on-line
> corpuses but couldn't find any examples.
> 
> Reading Chao-Chih Liao's Intercultural emailing. Taipei: Crane, 2000, I see
> she cites Tannen's You just don't understand, NY: Ballantine, 1990, as
> saying one's topics of conversation are limited to 1. the same as one's
> interlocutor's, 2. answering questions, or 3. asking questions based on
> what the interlocutor has said.
> 
> This suggests greeting someone with a problem with something that
> shows you recognize they have a problem is a form of politeness. The
> person with the problem doesn't have to impose as much.
> 
> Brown and Levinson in Politeness on page 38 talk about preference
> organization and say offers by A are preferred to requests by B to A.
> The reason why someone would say something obvious about a
> problem is that it offers to make the topic of the conversation the
> problem rather than forcing the person with the problem to have
> to broach the issue.
> 
> So, what do I do with this. Is there ammunition here for an attack
> on Gricean theory of conversational implicature?
> 
> --
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