You're wet/bleeding

[Greg Matheson]

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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