You're wet/bleeding

[Thomas Bloor]

Greg Matheson emailed:
>One of Brown and Levinson's examples of noticing is:
>"Goodness, you cut your hair!(...) By the way, I came
>to borrow some flour." This takes the same form,
>a statement of fact that the hearer already knows, as
>"You're wet/bleeding."

Yes, the noticing here is mitigation for the FTA to follow: the request for
flour.

>This is probably off on a tangent, but positive
>politeness is for FTA that are on record. There are at
>least two FTA involved, the faux pas, and the noticing
>of the faux pas. If they're off-record (=ambiguous?),
>positive face and negative face, don't count, or do
>they?
>
>I want to relate something that happened at the
>breakfast table yesterday and that concerns Brown and Levinson's
>account of politeness, although I'm not too sure
>how it fits in to the discussion of "You're
>wet/bleeding."  Yoko had just started to brush her
>teeth, and I asked, "No mango? No pineapple?" This was
>off-record, I think.  There was no reason for her to
>see this as more than a hint. It could have been an
>offer, but was probably more of a request on my part,
>as there had been a lot of pineapple cut up and in the
>refrigerator that she hadn't been eating whenever we
>(I) had been eating fruit. Then a little later, she
>said, "Kore (=this)," pointing to some leftover
>grapefruit on the table. I thought this is off-record,
>too. I could take it as an offer, or a request to
>finish it off. On the way to school, I asked her and
>she said, that it was not an off-record FTA, but an
>indication of the reason why she did not want to eat
>any pineapple, ie she was full from eating the
>grapefruit. This I found hard to believe, because it
>seemed to me there was quite a gap between my saying,
>"No mango? No pineapple?" and her saying, "Kore." But
>that is what she said.
>
>I'm not too sure what the point is. I guess I'm worried
>about off-record FTAs' role. Perhaps they are the
>windmill I can, like Don Quixote, start attacking, now
>I have seen that Grice's maxims are not the enemy.


I don't see your point here, either. Your example doesn't strike me as
off-record. If it is an FTA at all, it is on-record. Off-record FTAs are
almost the last resort, the threat is weighty enough to frighten the
speaker from performing the act openly and s/he achieves her/his ends by
some more devious/secretive/covert means. Since it is not apparent that the
act is being performed, mitigation is not necessary. I think an example
might be somehow ensuring that a person knows that you need money but
saying nothng that could be construed as a request, even an indirect one
involving implicature. Or say, taking another sandwich from the tray, but
only when no one is looking. The last resort is not to perform the act at
all, to say nothing and give up on the money/sandwich. Obviously both these
rule out mitigation.


>Is "You're wet/bleeding," on- or off-record? As I said,
>I felt warm when I heard it, but that doesn't mean
>anything, I think. I guess I want to oppose an analysis
>in terms of Brown and Levinson, but this may be even
>more difficult.

I think that the FTA in this instance is your breach of normality by
appearing wet,  which as Dena Attar observed, can cause some embarrassment
-possibly only mild. By its very nature, it is on record since you can't
disguise the fact that you are wet. The noticing of it is the interactant's
strategy for mitigating the threat - something like,  'Look, I'm not
uncomfortable about this; I'm just sympathetic to your plight.' An
alternative positive politeness strategy to  similar ends  would be to make
a mild joke: 'Don't tell me it's raining out there!' or 'This is no time to
go for a swim.' Negative politeness would be to pretend there was nothing
odd at all, but that would be unlikely to work in this instance.

>> 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?
>
>I have read a lot about Grice in the langauge learning
>literature, but I've never read the original articles,
>and I've never read Sperber and Wilson. Larry LaFond
>suggested, "You're wet/bleeding," flouted the maxim of
>relevance, but I thought it flouted that of quantity.
>It is relevant the fact that I'm wet/bleeding, but
>anomalous that I'm told something I already know. Then
>again, the maxim of quantity assumes a positive amount
>of information is being conveyed, not no information at
>all, so perhaps it is an issue of relevance rather than
>quantity. Can agreement be reached on what maxims are
>being flouted? If not, this would strengthen the hand
>of Sperber and Wilson.
>
Yes, I think for Grice it is quantity that is flouted here. As I recall,
Grice has quite  a lot to say about about the function of stating the
obvious, especially the extreme case of blatant tautologies: Boys will be
boys, War is war,etc., which trigger the kind of implicatures that previous
correspondents have so lucidly outlined. But I assume that Sperber & Wilson
would say (unless their position has changed) that relevance is the issue
here as everywhere else, since (very roughly) we always assume that any
contribution is relevant and when it is not immediately obvious we make
sense of it by making contexual assumptions and attributing some implicated
meaning to it appropriate to this context. In order to be relevant,
tautologies (or situationally self-evident propositions like you're
wet/bleeding) must mean something more than they 'say' and so we infer the
intended meaning.
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Thomas Bloor
Language Studies Unit
Aston University
Birmingham, UK
B4 7ET

Phone:0121 359 3611 xt 4212/4236
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