You're wet/bleeding

[Thomas Bloor]

I think you are right (below) - not that this diminishes in any way the
lucid Gricean explanations already given on the List. Your observation
brings the discussion round to  politeness factors. Brown & Levinson list
as one of the strategies of positive politeness the act of drawing
attention to the Face Threatening Act: 'Notice, attend to H(earer), his
interests, wants, needs, goods'  (Brown & Levinson 1987:103). Their
examples  primarily involve attention to desirable things (new clothes,
haircut, etc) but can also apply to any 'faux pas' - breakdown of bodily
function, etc. Walking into a room wet or bleeding is hardly on a par with
B&L's example of public flatulence, but as you say (below) it is a breach
of normality and, unacknowledged, can make for some mild embarrassment.

Congratulations to the list on a nice discussion overall with some
excellent explanations of how the wet/bleeding scenario illustrates the
operation of Grice's co-operative principle rather than providing
counter-evidence. I am surprised, though, that in all this talk about Grice
no one has mentioned Sperber & Wilson's strong (=extreme) claims that
Relevance is all that is needed. Has it dropped from view?

Tom


On 27/07/00 Dena Atar emailed:
>I have no idea how this relates to rules or maxims, but surely a very
>important point about the two particular situations you describe - being
>soaking wet indoors, bleeding noticeably - is
>their abnormality. That means that the speaker who comments on them is
>responding to a choice - ignore the strangeness, which would make them
>feel weird themselves because they would be in a
>false position, or acknowledge it, which would restore a sense of a
>normality and make everyone feel comfortable again. All that is needed to
>make things comfortable is the briefest
>acknowledgement. It puts things right. Nobody is then pretending.
>
>If you've ever been in a situation where there was something noticeably
>strange about you or another person but nobody mentioned it, it will be
>obvious how uncomfortable it  feels if the
>observer says nothing and in effect  pretends they haven't noticed. This
>doesn't apply of course when a person's odd appearance is assumed to be a
>permanent state, in which case the rule is not
>to mention it but act as if things are already normal.


Thomas Bloor
Language Studies Unit
Aston University
Birmingham, UK
B4 7ET

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