You're wet/bleeding

[Greg Matheson]

Larry LaFond <lllafond at MINDSPRING.COM> wrote in reply
to my questions about the significance of "You're
wet/bleeding" for Grice's maxims.

> Although both instances flaunt the maxim of
> relation, forcing a marked inference, that is
> precisely what the speaker intends.  For example,
> in the first instance the hearer hears the
> utterance 'You're wet!' and reasons thus...
> "Although the speaker has said something that is
> true (conforming to the quality maxim) this comment
> hardly appears relevant because it is so blatantly
> obvious. But assuming the speaker is rational and
> 'cooperative', the relevance must rest in something
> other than the traditional interpretation.

I hadn't realized flouting the maxims was no sin. :-)
It's kind of like, Be Good, but if you can't be good,
Flaunt It.  ;-)

Coincidentally, I just came across in R(?) Trask's
Language: The Basics, 2nd edition, Routledge, 1999,
an example of flouting the maxims. A professor is
being asked over the phone for his opinion of a
graduating student but damns the student with faint
praise, saying he is a pleasant fellow.  Trask says
on the face of it, the professor was violating the
maxims of relevance and quantity by not commenting on his ability, but at a deeper level he was ooperating, allowing the caller to conclude the person in question was not a good researcher.

Larry Lafond continues:

> You're wet could be a polite way of telling me not
> to stand on this airport's carpet in my condition,
> an economical way of telling me both to move and
> why I should move in the same utterance. But in
> this case the woman's tone of voice and facial
> expressions do not support such a meaning. I am
> left to conclude that woman that has made a marked
> choice that intentionally violates this maxim to
> emphasize her sympathy or concern.  She has done
> this with an economy of words, also satisfying the
> quantity and manner maxims."

I don't remember feeling at the time uncertain about
whether she was concerned or not. I do remember
feeling glad that she said what she said. Now though,
this discussion leads me to agree that this may have
been a marked choice that allowed her to avoid
implying I needed help. But this is getting away from
Gricean maxims. One question I have is whether the
maxims apply to speech acts as well as to the
conveying of information.

A joke I forgot to include in my first post that
illustrates a possible anomalousness in this way of
recognizing problems and that I saw a long time ago
in a comic strip:

A worker in a department store has just fallen off a
ladder and a customer walks past and says: "Have a
mishap?" The worker says: "No thanks. I already had
one."

So, I think that this is a way of offering to make a
person's problem the topic of conversation following
Tannen's idea that conversation topic choice is
limited, and that it is used more widely than just by
Chinese speakers of English.

Chao-Chih Liao suggested to me that in greetings
people will sometimes make statements about the other
person, like, "[You've] Finished for the day," said
to a neighbor returning home at 5 o'clock. I can
remember doing this myself, but in this case, they
are suppositions, I think, and thus open to dispute.
A possible response could be, "No, I just came back
for a book."

randall henry eggert <rheggert at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>
agreed we could get at least a partial explanation
from Grice's maxims and stated:

> I believe there are some valid theoretical problems
> with Grice's theory, but it is rather hard to find
> data that serve as counter-examples. This is mostly
> because of the nature of the theory, which is not
> particularly predictive. It is also because Grice's
> program as he states it is mostly a sketch. To my
> mind, Grice never intended the 4 maxims as written
> to be taken too seriously. They were provisory, a
> first stab at describing the process. Most
> important to the theory is his distinction between
> 'what is said' and 'what is conveyed'. Any
> successful attack on Grice's theory will ultimately
> have to show that there is a problem with the way
> Grice makes that distinction.

This suggests only a theoretical attack (as distinct
from one from data) on the maxims will work.

I guess what I want is a theory which allows
communication to take place without agreement on
rules or maxims, which allows people to think they
understand each other when they don't really, and
which allows them to get along most of the time
without this being a problem, as if they are speakers
of foreign languages to each other. :-)

[This is just a throwaway thought. I didn't mean to
write it when I started, and I don't really want to
defend it, so please ignore it.]

We got by without realizing 'what is said' was
problematic. Perhaps we have to draw a distinction
between 'what is conveyed' and 'what is meant,' too.


Is this what Gabriella Modan
<modang at GUSUN.GEORGETOWN.EDU> meant by:

> 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?

Which I haven't read, but which seems to be about the
surreal in the real, or a parody of science fiction,
or the ordinariness of the unnormal, perhaps.

-- Greg Matheson Chinmin College, Taiwan
lang at ms.chinmin.edu.tw  gregyoko at pcmail.com.tw

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