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The characters in a drama sometimes say implicitly so that what are said are different from what are meant. This study investigates conversational implicature in a drama script entitled “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Aquilla” by Sid River. The aim of the study was to find out what conversational maxims flouted to generate conversational implicature in the Sid River’s drama script entitled “Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Aquilla” were. The research design employed in this study was a descriptive qualitative research using Grice’s theory. The results of the study showed that from 35 excerpts, 11 excerpts belonged to observing the maxims, and the other 24 excerpts belonged to non-observance of the maxims, especially flouting the maxims. The number of flouting the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner respectively were 6, 20, 3, 3. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that the conversational maxims flouted in this drama script are maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Moreover, flouting the maxim of Quality mostly occurs while the least occurance is flouting the maxims of Relation and Manner. In other words, the characters in this drama script often say untruthful utterances.

This essay ties together some main strands of the author's research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning (Section 1), the author considers (Section 2) such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms 'organic meaning', and places it in the context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression (3), of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close (5) with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical study of discourse represented in conversational form will reveal many lexical elements which play the role of implicatures and do not convey the exact meaning which the speaker wants to mean directly. It depends on the hearer's/ addressee's capacity to extract the exact semantic value of such elements which the speakers want them to be interpreted. Interpretative failures lead to communication gaps and irrelevant or wrong derivation of meaning. This study will look into the conversational dramatic discourse of William Shakespeare's tragic play Macbeth. The aim is to understand and look at how the speakers with their references to clothes and images of clothing in their conversation throughout the play convey messages that are important to the course of the dialogue exchanges that take place. The garbs in the play, apart from their own inherent semantic value of being pieces of clothes meant to cover one's body, have added connotations in tune with the contextual circumstances and speaker's wish to transfer implicated ideas and thoughts to the hearer/ addressee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a common intuition that the antecedent of an indicative conditional should have something to do with its consequent, that they should be somehow connected. In fact, many conditionals sound unacceptable precisely because they seem to suggest a connection which is not there. Although the majority of semantic theories of conditionals treat this phenomenon as something pragmatic, for instance, something that is conversationally implicated, no one has offered a full-fledged pragmatic explanation of why missing-link, and, in particular, false-link conditionals strike us as odd. The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility that the link is an example of a conversational implicature. We discuss possible tests one can employ to identify conversational implicatures, and, ultimately, we show that the connection between a conditional's antecedent and consequent fails them all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a step by step approach of unpacking humour in joke stories from Udurawana in Sir-Lanka. The analysis has employed two theoretical models: Grice's (1975) theory of Conversational Implicature, and Juckel, Bellman and Varan's (2016) Taxonomy of Humour Techniques. The study has demonstrated that understanding humour involves going through different layers of language given that humour itself does not reside at the surface; but rather inside meanings of words and phrases. The paper appeals to language teachers to utilise humour as a teaching tool owing to the enormous joys it brings in facilitating the teaching and learning of the second language. We conclude that helping learners take baby-steps to decipher humour can lead them into better understanding and fluency of second language learning; an indication of advancement in language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Adams and his colleagues, fictional sentences, i.e. sentences featuring fictional names, lack any truth value. To explain intuitions to the contrary, they refer to the pragmatics of fictional assertions and claim that sincere utterances of those sentences generate some conversational implicatures. They argue that all who take fictional sentences to have a truth value tend to mistake implicatures of assertions of such sentences with their literal content. The aim of the paper is to show that this argument is not convincing. The challenge being that it doesn't provide any satisfactory explanation as to what is negated in seemingly genuine disagreement cases in which fictional sentences are asserted. Sentential negation usually doesn't affect (i.e. negate) a proposition which is conversationally implied, especially when it comes to the manner implicature. And, as I argue, an advocate of the pragmatic defence should maintain that this is the kind of conversational implicature that the assertion of fictional sentences generates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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To date, pragmatic theory and practice have largely drawn on theories and models based on observations of communicative practices in the West and tacitly treated as culturally neutral, while patterns of language use in non-Western communities have been used as testing grounds for Western usage rules and their assumed motivations. We see this practice as contrary to calls for cognitive justice and as hampering progress toward the development of inclusive and truly universally valid theories of pragmatics. We illustrate these points by discussing four themes which have been tested in non-Western languages: speech acts, conversational implicatures, (im)politeness, and Conversation Analysis. We then move on to the domain of research ethics and find that, here too, practices tend to reflect Western values, prioritizing Western notions of ethics and what is important to people and ultimately falling short of serving the needs both of the communities where the data are collected, and of the researchers themselves. We conclude with recommending three steps we can all take to make pragmatics a more inclusive discipline, respecting and reflecting patterns of language-in-use irrespective of where they are located geographically. • Pragmatic theory and practice to date overwhelmingly rely on observations of communicative practices in the West. • Patterns of language use in non-Western communities serve primarily as testing grounds for these theories. • Western-inspired theoretical frameworks are not culturally neutral but situated in Western modes of thinking. • Ethics practices in pragmatics also reflect Western perspectives and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do participants commit the conjunction fallacy, for instance by judging it more probable that Linda is a feminist bank teller than a bank teller? The conversational-implicature hypothesis (CIH) suggests that "bank teller" is interpreted as "non-feminist bank teller". The nested-sets hypothesis (NSH) suggests that participants overlook that the set of bank tellers includes all feminist bank tellers. Both hypotheses were tested in an experiment with 157 participants. The results, analyzed using Bayes factors, indicated that the CIH manipulation does not robustly decrease the fallacy rate (BH(0, 1.52) = 0.14, OR = 0.84). Furthermore, the effect of the NSH manipulation was substantially smaller than predicted (BN(3.04, 1.52) = 0.1, OR = 1.47), suggesting that NSH does not explain the fallacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Some but not all varieties of scalar inferences are cognitively demanding. • The presence of a processing cost depends on the scalarity of the scalar word. • Results for 'some' and 'or' cannot be generalised to all scalar words. • Processing data are compatible with the automatic computation of scalar inferences. Abstract The scalar word 'some' may be interpreted with an upper bound, i.e., as excluding 'all'. Several studies have found that the computation of this scalar inference may be associated with a processing cost (e.g., Bott & Noveck, 2004; De Neys & Schaeken, 2007), which seems to argue in favour of theories according to which pragmatic inferencing is cognitively demanding (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This argument holds on the premise that findings for 'some' can be generalised across the entire family of scalar words, which has been called into question by recent work highlighting the diversity within the class of scalar words (e.g., van Tiel, van Miltenburg, Zevakhina, & Geurts, 2016). In order to determine how generalisable the findings for 'some' are, we conducted three experiments in which we investigated the cognitive processing of seven scalar words that differ, inter alia, in their scalarity , i.e., whether they impose a lower ('some', 'or', 'might', 'most', 'try') or upper ('low', 'scarce') bound on their dimension. We find that the scalar inferences of the negatively scalar words 'low' and 'scarce' are not associated with a processing cost, unlike the scalar inferences of positively scalar words. We argue that the reported processing cost for scalar inferencing reflects increased cognitive demands associated with the processing of negative information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, I focus on deviations of intent, from that expressed by the standard or ordinary use of language, in instances where abductive reasoning plays a necessary role. In such cases, speakers usually utter some "mysterious" words based on the assumed abductive capability of their interlocutors. In order to cause the desired effect in the audience, the speaker relies on the hearer's knowledge of the relevant common dialogue framework and thus uses the utterance as an abductive trigger. For purposes of explanation, I present a curious kind of (pseudo)fallacy: ironic (pseudo)fallacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the semantic and pragmatics characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese sentences with contrastive topic phrases (BÜRING, 1999, 2003). These phrases are dislocated to the left periphery. More specifically, this research inquires if the following characteristics influence or not in the acceptability or the grammaticality of the sentences with dislocation in BP. The characteristics are: i) the original syntactic position of the dislocated phrase; ii) the kind of question in the context yes/no question or WH question; iii) filling or not of pronoun; iv) the kind of contrast relation - explicit or implicit, opposition or correction. After analyzing the contexts of contrastive dislocation in PB, we could conclude that the prosodic marking of the contrastive topic indicates contrast and the dislocation directs the attention of the hearer to an element available in the context. Only then, a property is assigned to this element. Moreover, this structure indicates that the speaker is using a strategy to answering partially to a broader question than that given in the discourse. Lastly, the sentences with contrastive topic dislocation occur only in oppositional contrast relation contexts, in which two alternatives are opposite, but both are true. No correction contrast relation, through which when one alternative is true, the other necessarily is false, was found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to examine the translator's solutions to the translation of conversational implicatures from English into Persian. To do so, 120 conversational implicatures were extracted from the novel the Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954) and classified based on Grice's (1975) categorization of Maxims, including quality, quantity, relevance, and manner. Mur Duenas's (2003) taxonomy of translation strategies was used as a valid framework to find out the translation strategies the translator employed to transfer the 120 conversational implicatures. Furthermore, the most /least frequent translation strategies applied by the translator were investigated. At the end, the effectiveness of the source text (ST)-and target text (TT)-oriented strategies in transferring the same meaning of implicatures to the target text was determined. As the results indicate, the translator employed five out of six of Mur Duenas's translation strategies, namely TL cultural cognate, SL cultural and linguistic borrowing, replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation, TL cultural reference suppression, and TL cultural reference literal translation, of which SL cultural and linguistic borrowing and replacement of the SL cultural reference by explanation were the most/least frequently-used strategies. Moreover, the translator preferred to employ the ST-oriented strategies rather than the TT-oriented ones that referred to the employment of the ST-oriented strategy for the whole text. Based on Grice's theory, the researcher concluded that the SToriented strategies were more effective than the TT-oriented ones and helped the translator to produce comprehensible translations and convey the meaning of implicatures to the target readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies is the property of Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite the widely-held belief that second/foreign language acquisition takes place more effortlessly in the early age, this paper aims to research the impact of the age factor in this process and to find out what adjustments need to be made in the teaching environment in order to optimize the second/foreign language acquisition for adult learners of English. The paper will address the topic of teaching particularized conversational implicature through the activity attached, because it gives a real example of what it means to know all the words of what one hears, but not to be prepared to respond in a socially acceptable manner. The aim of this paper is to equip adult learners with the linguistic formula “Not + very + positive adjective” that will help them overcome awkward situations that inhibit their engagement in communication, on the one hand, and, on the other, to prompt teachers to consider factors such as motivation, self-confidence and fixed-mindset that may considerably change the desired outcomes.