Speaker activity and Grice's maxims of conversation at the interface of Pragmatics and Cognitive...

Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3345–3366

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Journal of Pragmatics

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Speaker activity and Grice’s maxims of conversation at the interface ofPragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics

Sonja Kleinke

English Department of Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Received 27 January 2006

Received in revised form 12 May 2010

Accepted 28 May 2010

Keywords:

Gricean maxims

Flouting

Particularized conversational implicature

Cognitive principles

Pragmatic marking

Cognitive marking

A B S T R A C T

This paper attempts to show that a cognitive perspective of the Gricean concept on the

conversational maxims opens new perspectives on two problems which have not been

dealt with in detail in the original model and in most successive work on conversational

implicature: speaker activity and a cognitive underpinning of the maxims of conversation.

As pinpointed in section 1, the first problem is the need for a shift in focus towards the

actual production of linguistic utterances fulfilling or flouting themaxims in particularized

conversational implicature. The second problem is explaining how the adherence or non-

adherence to the maxims can be conceptually accounted for on the basis of some general

cognitive principles. While section 2 is devoted to a cognitive re-evaluation of the

speaker’s perspective, section 3 will discuss some recent pragmatic developments, such as

Levinson’s notion of pragmatic marking in generalized implicature, which can be applied

to particularized conversational implicature and fruitfully underpinned by more general

cognitive principles. Section 4 will present an outline of some basic cognitive principles

involved when speakers fulfill or flout the maxims. In the course of the paper it becomes

clear that both current pragmatic research and cognitive analysis contribute to a new

understanding of Grice’s ideas.

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1. Two desiderata emerging from the Gricean system—speaker activity as a shift in focus towards the productive sideof flouting and a cognitive underpinning of the maxims

When the Cooperative Principle (CP)1 — ‘‘. . .make your contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs, bythe accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange inwhich you are engaged’’ (Grice, 1989:26) —was developed by Griceas one of the guiding principles of human communication, an important step had been made towards the systematicinterpretation of the actualmeaning of utterances in natural conversation. The CP and themaxims of conversation (Quantity,Quality, Relevance and Manner) are part of a broader theory of conversational implicature, which bridges the gap betweenwhat is said and what is meant, conventional and non-conventional meaning (Davies, 2007:2328).

Grice (1989) distinguishes between two types of conversational implicature, which are further developed and discussedin Levinson (1983, 2000) and Horn (2004): generalized conversational implicature and particularized conversational

implicature. Generalized conversational implicature is context independent and is rooted in the conventionalized defaultmeaning of linguistic structures as in she varnished her nails, normally understood as she varnished her own finger nails

E-mail address: [email protected] Following the Gricean tradition, I will be using the CP here in a technical sense as a principle which explains a particular set of regularities governing the

generation and interpretation of conversational implicature (see, e.g., Thomas, 1998; Chapman, 2005; Davies, 2007; and more generally Levinson, 2006).

0378-2166/$ – see front matter � 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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S. Kleinke / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3345–33663346

without any additional context cancelling this default meaning (cf. also section 3). By contrast, particularized conversationalimplicature is context dependent and rests in the obvious flouting of a maxim by the speaker (Grice, 1989). Assuming thateven in a flout the speaker is behaving according to the CP and is following the principles of rationality in an interaction, theapparent non-adherence to a maxim starts the hearer thinking and triggers his2 search for a context bound particularizedconversational implicature, i.e. speaker intended conclusions the hearer can draw from different sources, the meaning of theactual words, the speech situation, encyclopedic background knowledge, shared cultural models, etc.

Much linguistic work related to the CP and the conversational maxims has been embedded in and focused on the broadertheory of implicature (see Rolf, 1994; Davies, 2007; Chapman, 2005 for an extended overview and critical reviews). In thissense, the CP and the maxims have largely been described as a set of rationales promoting the hearer’s generating,understanding, and interpretation of intended speaker meaning in natural conversation.3 Thus the traditional view of theGricean concept has been mainly interested in possible mechanisms of the recognition of speakers’ meanings going beyondthe literal, conventionalized meanings of linguistic utterances and their reception and comprehension by addressees on thebasis of very general pragmatic principles. Especially for particularized conversational implicatures, apart from somerandom hints at implicature indicating devices (including the use of figurative language (cf., e.g., Levinson, 1983; Harnish,1991; Rolf, 1994; or Bublitz, 2001)), little attention has been paid to a systematic account of the actual concrete linguisticactivities speakers perform in this process.

This does not mean, however, that Grice was not interested in the speaker or that his model was not speaker-oriented inits fundamental claims. The CP and the maxims are even linguistically dressed up as a piece of advice addressed to thespeaker. As a leading representative of the cognitive-philosophical approaches to pragmatics,4 Grice is concerned withintendedmeaning as an ‘‘a priorimental state of speakers’’ (Haugh, 2008:104). He is concerned with the ‘‘distinction betweensaying andmeaning’’ and is interested in ‘‘the way in which speakers know how to generate . . . implicit meanings, and in theproblem of how they can assume that their addressees will reliably understand their intended meaning’’, as Davies puts it(2007:2309). The CP and the maxims of conversation illuminate Grice’s understanding of the rationale behind this process.

Despite a general focus on speakers’ intended meaning in Grice’s work, we only know very little about the complexity andthe details of the speakers’ perspective on the maxims. Linguists are only beginning to understand the different ‘‘competingneeds, politeness, efficiency, humor, group identification, and so forth’’ speakers must be juggling when handling themaxims (Davies, 2007:2329) or ‘‘how an utterance came to be produced’’, as Haberland and Mey (2002:1677) put it.Empirical studies on flouting the Gricean maxims often discuss the type of maxims exploited in natural conversation andtheir distribution among different groups of speakers (e.g. Rundquist, 1992; Brumark, 2005), with the latter including adiscussion of the use of irony and non-conventional hints in the qualitative part of the analysis, the role of implicature in thecomprehension of texts in EFL-contexts (Bouton, 1994), or the use of the maxims in the construction of meaning in literarytexts (e.g. Gilbert, 1995 or Gautam and Sharma, 1986).

When we leave the interactional and sociocultural level and turn to the individual level of communicative interaction –the third level of analysis Levinson (2006) suggests, which includes grammatical and cognitive interactional principles theindividual speaker follows – our knowledge is just as incomplete. Mooney (2004:900–901) points out the importance ofwhat is ‘in the text’ vs. what a speaker may have intended or not intended with her utterance without, however, going intoany linguistic detail regarding themaxims of conversation. Systematic work to date on the speaker’s linguistic strategies hasconcentratedmainly on generalized conversational implicature. In his further development of the Gricean system, Levinson(1983, 2000) thoroughly describes the specific morphological, syntactic and lexical structures that speakers provide asprompts when they trigger generalized conversational implicatures (cf. section 3). No such account has been given thus farfor particularized conversational implicature, the type of implicature this paper focuses on.

Cognitive Linguistics can meet the interests of pragmatic accounts of the conversational maxims by offering a cognitiveinterpretation of ‘speaker orientation’ at the level of the structural architecture of individual linguistic utterances triggeringparticularized conversational implicatures (see section 2). This is desirable becausewe have not learned verymuch yet aboutthe linguistic and conceptual substance of the conversational maxims for this type of implicature. Therefore, the questionsthis paper tries to answer are what linguistic and other principles do people followwhen they obey or seemingly disobey theCP in utterances triggering particularized conversational implicatures? What do speakers precisely do when they fulfill orflout Grice’s maxims of conversation on the micro-pragmatic level? What does it linguistically mean for the speaker to giveenough but not too much information, to provide information considered to be true, to contribute relevant information, andto be clear, non-ambiguous, brief and orderly?

Cognitive Linguistics has of course also become more and more interested in the mechanisms of conversationalinteraction—for a brief survey of cognitive research on general pragmatic principles cf. Fauconnier (2004) and for a selectionof more specific problems see Thornburg and Panther (1997), Panther and Thornburg (1998, 2003), Gibbs (1999), Ruiz DeMendoza and Díez Velasco (2003), and Baicchi (2003). Coulson (2001) and Coulson and Oakley (2003) focus on differenttypes of conceptual blending in handling the Maxim of Manner and, more generally, on the interpersonal construction of

2 Throughout the article reference to speakers will be made as females and reference to hearers as males.3 But compare Sperber and Wilson (1995:36), who criticize the Gricean model for not shedding enough light on the actual detailed mechanisms of

utterance comprehension, on "how the maxims are to be used in inference".4 Cf. Haugh (2008) for a thorough discussion of contrasting views on the relevance and refinements of the role of intended meaning for Cognitive-

Philosophical Pragmatics on the one hand and Socio-Cultural Interactional Pragmatics on the other hand.

S. Kleinke / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3345–3366 3347

meaning inmoral discourse. Butmost importantly, Cognitive Linguistics has illuminated some basic cognitive principles thathelp us structure and process cognitive content in the production and interpretation of utterances. Providing a cognitiveinterpretation of flouting the maxims along the lines of such principles (in the sense of a framework against which they canbe linguistically interpreted) is thus a second point where Cognitive Linguistics can contribute to a better understanding ofthe mechanisms of particularized conversational implicature and more generally, pragmatic thinking. Therefore this paperaims to link the productive side of adhering to or exploiting themaxims of conversation systematically to a selection of basiccognitive principles such as the levels of categorization, metaphor and metonymy, frames and event types, the windowing of

attention, and the selection of domains5 (see section 4).

2. A cognitive interpretation of speaker orientation

The prominence of the speaker is also firmly grounded in the cognitive approach to linguistic utterances. The mainreason is that the production and reception of linguistic utterances is seen against the background of more generalcognitive abilities and psychological phenomena which determine our general conceptual interaction with the world.Among them Langacker (2000:2) mentions ‘‘the inborn capacity for certain kinds of experience,’’ such as ranges of colors,pitches, tastes, a notion of spatial extensionality, a sense of the passage of time, emotions, the cognitive ability to comparetwo experiences, the capacity to use one structure as the basis for categorizing another, the capacity for abstraction, and thecapacity to ‘‘direct and focus our attention, and to structure scenes in terms of figure/ground organization.’’ Due to thesecognitive abilities and psychological phenomena speakers are able to construe a (mentally or physically) perceivedsituation inmany differentways—cf. Langacker’s examples the lamp on a table vs. the tablewith a lamp on it vs. The lamp is on

the table (1987:116).In Cognitive Linguistics the construction ofmeaning is closely linked to the subjective notion of ‘construal’ underlying the

production of utterances (Langacker, 1987:128ff., 1988:63f., 1990:130ff.; Talmy, 1996; Sinha, 2005; Fauconnier, 2004; Evansand Green, 2006). Every linguistic expression is seen as representing a specific construal relation between the speaker and ascene or situation. The speaker structures the situational content with respect to a number of parameters such as the‘selection of facets of a scene the speaker wants to deal with’, the ‘position from which a scene is viewed’ (including therelative prominence of its participants), and the ‘level of abstraction or specificity’ the speaker uses to describe the scene.Langacker explicitly points at the dominant role of the speaker vis-à-vis the hearer in this process in the production oflinguistic utterances:

In conceptualizing a scene for expressive purposes, the speaker (and secondarily the hearer, in reconstructing thespeaker’s intent) is obliged to make choices with respect to the various parameters discussed here . . . I will say that thespeaker (or hearer), by choosing appropriate focal ‘settings’ [or parameters, S.K.] and structuring a scene in a specificmanner, establishes a construal relationship between himself and a scene so structured. (1987:128)

Speaker orientation in Cognitive Linguistics is firmly grounded in how human cognitive abilities are used as explanatorytools. Such general cognitive abilities include the speaker’s capacity to construe a scene at different levels of abstraction, tostructure scenes in terms of figure/ground organization, to direct and focus her attention at selected aspects of a situation(including frame shifting and semantic leaps as described in Coulson, 2001), as well as the subjective cognitive abilities ofcomparison and association, which are indispensable for metaphorical and metonymic thinking. These cognitive capacitiescan be seen as elaborations of cognitive principles possibly underlying a broader and structurally less specified concept ofspeaker intention as outlined by Grice from a philosophical pragmatic perspective.6 They shed light on important subjectiveaspects of the construction of meaning that other linguistic models have not focused on systematically. This paper attemptsto show that these cognitive and psychological capacities are also involved in adhering to or deviating from the maxims ofconversation.

Speaker orientation is also firmly grounded in Cognitive Linguistics on a second level—via the role it attributes toencyclopedic knowledge in the production and interpretation of utterances (Langacker, 1987; Lakoff and Johnson, 2003;Fauconnier, 2004; Evans and Green, 2006; Ungerer and Schmid, 2006). This not only concerns the encyclopedic backgroundknowledge of a single speaker, but also the broader cultural models of whole speech communities. Complementing Grice’snotion of the CP as a principle of rationality (Grice, 1989; Davies, 2007; Chapman, 2005), the CP and the conversationalmaxims can be interpreted as a cultural model from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. According to Coulson (2001:224),cultural models are ‘‘. . . taken for granted, intersubjective models shared by members of a given social group’’ and they areavailable to speakers and addressees, regardless whether we follow them or not (Coulson, 2001:264). The fact that speakersuse meta-pragmatic opting out signals as the ones listed in (1) to show that they are about to disobey a conversationalmaxim indicates the importance speakers implicitly assign to these maxims in verbal interaction.

5 Processes of conceptual blending in the processing of metaphor andmetonymy and as a general principle of the interactive construction ofmeaning are

extensively discussed in Coulson (2001), Fauconnier and Turner (2002), and Coulson and Oakley (2003, 2005) and will not be dealt with in this paper.6 Cf., e.g., Grice (1989:31) exemplifying such a general notion of speaker intention when he refers to the speaker having done nothing to stop the hearer

from assuming X, or her intending of or at least being willing to allow the hearer to think X and make reference to the use of indefinite articles and related

generalized implicatures (Grice, 1989:38), which can be interpreted as one specific instance of construing a scene.


(1)

7 On the

(2007).8 But se9 The au

Quantity:

without wanting to bore you; to cut a long story short; needless to say; . . .

Quality:

this may or may not be true; perhaps; I believe/think; don’t pin me down on this; a bit; kind of; tell me the truth; . . .

Relation/Relevance:

this is beside the point; and how does this tie in with . . .; by the way; . . .

Manner:

to put it simple; then; anyway; however; let me start at the beginning; to begin with; first of all; . . .

All these linguistic structures, and many more (cf., e.g., Grice, 1989 again; but also Levinson, 1983; Bublitz, 2001; Juckeret al., 2003; Greenall, 2009), show how the CP and the maxims are deeply entrenched into language users’ culturalknowledge and their knowledge of how to handle conversation effectively. In this sense, also the CP underlying the use of theconversational maxims can be understood as a cultural model, which ‘‘. . . is used implicitly by speakers to understand thepragmatic implications of each other’s statements’’ (Coulson, 2001:224).7 Already Levinson (1983:109) stresses therobustness of the CP in language use: ‘‘. . . if someone drastically and dramatically deviates frommaxim-type behavior, thenhis utterances are still read as underlyingly cooperative if this is at all possible.’’

Thus a cognitive (re-)interpretation of speaker orientation has two essential advantages in dealing with phenomena ofconversational implicature. On one hand, concerning themicro level of a single concrete utterance, the expression of speakerintentions can be related to some general cognitive principles of language production. On the other hand, interpreting the CPand the conversationalmaxims as a culturalmodel residing on themacro level of the speech community inWestern culturesgives room for the general idea of flouting a maxim in order to trigger implicatures as a common conversational practice. Itcan also account for the fact that, unlike Sperber and Wilson’s Principle of Relevance (see section 3), the CP is not to beinterpreted as a universal principle.8

Section 3 now deals with some pragmatic ideas developed in the refinement and critical discussion of the Griceanmodel,which seem to support a cognitive approach to the CP and the maxims in different ways without being affiliated to this typeof interpretation per se.

3. Approaching the cognitive interpretation of the Gricean concept from the pragmatic side

The importanceof substantiatingourunderstandingof thedistinctionbetween sayingandmeaninghasnot escaped linguistsnotworkingwithin a cognitive framework such as Levinson andHorn or Sperber andWilson,who – although differing in theirbasic assumptions–haveeach tried togivepragmatic thinkingon the relationbetween saying andmeaninga twist that canwellbe linked to a cognitive interpretation.Ononehand, researchers such as Levinson are concernedwith refinements of theCPandthemaxims, but retain the general idea of ‘conversational implicature’ and the possibility of speakers’ exploiting themaxims asthe basis for addressees’ recognizing speakers’ intended meanings (Levinson, 2000). On the other hand, Sperber and Wilson(1995) take a different stand. In theirmodel, hearers’ inferential comprehension rests on the principle of relevance as a generalprinciple of human cognition,9 i.e. one that cannot be deliberately violated by a speaker. It is not seen as a norm speakers mayadhere to or not, but as a principle which ‘‘applies without exception’’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:162). In their view, apresumption of relevance is communicated by any act of ‘‘ostensive communication’’. In this sense, relevance is not subject tothe adherence to communicative norms as in Grice’s theory of the CP and the maxims.

In the following, I will concentrate on three important developments related to Grice’s conversational maxims in thewider sense within the domain of Pragmatics: attempts to include the speaker’s perspective, the description of cognitiveprocesses in the comprehension of utterances, and the development of the notion of pragmatic marking (especially forgeneralized conversational implicature). Only from this perspective will I select some important shifts in focus in dealingwith the conversational maxims and, more generally, in dealing with hearers’ inferential comprehension in Sperber andWilson’s model. Other developments, particularly those dealing with the actual number of maxims and their logicalconsistency, are less important from an experientially oriented and speaker-focused cognitive point of view.

3.1. Including the speaker’s perspective explicitly in an account of the workings of generalized conversational implicature

(Levinson, Horn)

Considering that Stephen Levinson (together with Penelope Brown) developed the pragmatic model of linguisticpoliteness, in which face wants of both speakers and hearers are systematically dealt with, it is only natural that he includedboth speaker and hearer in his revised version of the Gricean maxims (Levinson, 1991, 2000) as an account of how speakersand addressees can handle generalized conversational implicature. The result is a rearrangement of the maxims in three

role of culturalmodels for conversation see also Sweetser (1987), Kay (1987), Langacker (1994), Coulson (2001), Hutchins (2005), and Fauconnier

e Levinson (2006) for its interpretation as part of a universal ‘interaction engine’.thors explicitly state this on several occasions, for instance immediately in the introduction to the second edition (Sperber andWilson, 1995:vii).


principles based on the Maxims of Quantity and Manner, in which each principle is divided into a speaker’s maxim and arecipient’s corollary (cf. Levinson, 1991, 2000:74, 114 and 136–137). Regarding speaker orientation, Levinson’s method is toretain Grice’s linguistic realization of the maxims as imperatives (see section 1 above), making them appear as rules thespeaker has to follow in her selection of specific grammatical constructions. To this set of speaker-oriented imperativesLevinson adds a corresponding hearer’s perspective which, however, is far more elaborate than the speaker’s side. So, on thesurface, the speaker’s perspective is only given in very general terms. On a more subtle level, the speaker’s perspective ispresented as a whole range of structural choices speakers can make on the lexical, syntactic and morphological levels andthereby trigger a broad variety of generalized conversational implicatures which are carefully discussed by Levinson. Thusone can say that the speaker’s perspective in terms of the types of utterances speakers actually produce has, no doubt, explicitlyappeared on the agenda for generalized conversational implicature.10

3.2. Cognitive processes and capacities in the comprehension of utterances (Sperber and Wilson)

Sperber andWilson’s Relevance Theory (1995) can probably be seen as the most impressive undertaking so far to bridgethe gap between pragmatic and cognitive approaches to language. To achieve this goal they have most radically done awaywith Grice’s four independent maxims and the idea of implicatures being triggered by deviating from the conversationalmaxims and the CP as normative principles. Focusing on the cognitive processes and capacities involved in thecomprehension of utterances, they replace the Cooperative Principle and the maxims of conversation by one universal‘Principle of Relevance’, which is essentially a universal psychological principle, independent of principles of rationality ascultural norms and expectations. In their understanding, hearers are guided in the interpretation of utterances by balancingout the relation between the contextual effects of an utterance (learning something new, revising old knowledge, drawingnew conclusions) with the amount of cognitive processing that is necessary in order to implant it into the hearer’s previousknowledge (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:265ff.). There are two interesting links to basic assumptions in Cognitive Linguistics.First, Sperber andWilson implant basic cognitive sub-theories into their model: prototype theory, frames and scripts as wellas domains are seen as part of the speaker’s encyclopedic knowledge and contribute to the inferential system of the hearer(1995:87–93).11 A second important aspect is their understanding of language as a subjectively experienced phenomenon inwhich context is understood as a permanently changing psychological entity residing in the hearer’s mind (1995:38–76),which matches the dynamic understanding of the processor’s cognitive environment in conceptual blending theory.12

However, the role of the speaker and speakers’ intentions is merely confined to producing ‘ostensive inferential behavior’.Cognitive principles underlying this type of behavior, i.e. the productive side of (verbally) triggering an implicature, whichthis paper is dealing with, is not considered in any cognitive detail. In Sperber andWilson’s model the focus is clearly on the(secondary) hearer’s side of this subjective experience.

3.3. Pragmatic marking (Horn, Levinson)

The third development towards the recognition of cognitivemechanisms involved in the functioning of themaxims is theconcept of ‘pragmaticmarking’. As throughout the paper, the term ‘marking’ is used here in the broader sense of ‘non-default’vs. ‘default’, ‘prototypical behavior’ or ‘prototypical utterances’ expected in a certain context in verbal interaction.13 In thissense, the notion of ‘marking’ can be linked to broader cognitive principles easily in that a ‘(pragmatically) marked item’stands out against the background of familiar items as something prominent and this concept of standing out can easily berelated to the more general psychological principle of ‘figure/ground segregation’ in Cognitive Linguistics (see sections 4.3.2and 4.4.2). Like figures on a ground, marked items are experienced as salient and tend to bundle addressees attention andprocessing effort—an observation made also outside the cognitive paradigm in Levinson (2000) and Greenall (2009).

The notion of pragmatic marking is introduced by Horn in his ‘Principle of the Division of Pragmatic Labor’ (Horn, 1984:22,1989:197) and taken up by Levinson in his work on generalized conversational implicature (1991 and 2000). In Levinson’swords, pragmaticmarking refers to the capacity of formal structures to carry important aspects of themeaning of a linguisticutterance, which go beyond the literal meaning of the words used: ‘‘[let] not only the context but also the metalinguisticproperties of the utterance (e.g., its form) carry the message. Or find a way to piggyback meaning on top of the meaning’’(2000:6). Levinson casts this process into three simple general heuristics as listed in Fig. 1, where they are also exemplifiedby the sentence There is a blue pyramid on the red cube and its variants.

If the speaker has uttered a sentence like (2) the hearer can rely on the fact that what has been said is the case and thatother options such as (20) do not occur in the specific speech situation. The second heuristic refers to the speaker’s preferencefor simple expressions when referring to stereotypical entities—cf. (3). Only a more complex expression such as (30) inducesthe hearer to refrain from a stereotypical interpretation of the word pyramid. The third heuristic can be understood as areversal of the second. If something is said in a normal, expectedway as in (4a) a normal interpretation such as the one given in

10 Horn (2004:6) stresses the importance of the speaker in both types of implicature but focuses on mechanisms of generalized and scalar conversational

implicature in his discussion of different types of implicature.11 But in contrast to Cognitive Linguistics, Relevance Theory postulates a specialized inferential device, to which these elements of speaker’s encyclopedic

knowledge are only loosely connected (Wilson and Sperber, 2004:623–625).12 See Ungerer and Schmid (2006:293ff.) for a more detailed discussion of the differences between both approaches.13 The term is not used in a strict cognitive-psycholinguistic sense as, e.g., in Schuster (2003:136ff.).

[(Fig._1)TD$FIG]

Fig. 1. Three simple heuristics for the amplification of content according to Levinson (2000:31–35).


(4a0)will follow. If, however, the speakerdeviates fromthemostnatural expression, something ‘unnormal’ (‘amarked situation’in Levinson’s terms) canbe expected—cf. (4b0) or (5). These three heuristics developedbyLevinson canbeusedbyboth, speakerand hearer, to either transfer or arrive at ‘presumptive meanings’. Choosing another option rather than the normal, expected‘default form’ of an utterance not only changes its conventional semantic meaning, but adds specific new aspects to it—cf. (6),which suggests that the speaker was not just aware, but ‘‘was indeed acutely aware’’ (Levinson, 2000:145).

(5)

14 In con

compared15 Greena

She studie

without, h

The blue pyramid is supported by the red cube. (Levinson, 2000:34)

(6)
I was not unaware of the problem. (Levinson, 2000:145)
The scope of Levinson’s heuristics is, however, limited by a specific range of implicatures, namely generalized

conversational implicatures, and by linguistic structures related to the Maxims of Quantity and Manner. The highly contextbound processes of particularized conversational implicatures as well as the Maxims of Quality and Relevance, which aremore diverse in their linguistic realizations, remain undiscussed. As will be demonstrated in section 4, utterances indicatingparticularized conversational implicaturesmaywell go beyond the choice of one specific grammatical or lexical constructionout of the range of alternatives Levinson (2000) or Horn (2004) focus on in dealing with generalized conversationalimplicature and can more easily be described systematically against the background of broader cognitive principles.

The idea ofmarking is also pursued in Greenall (2009) within amore recent development of the Gricean system involvinga new theory of flouting and implicature, which rests on the notion of imposed thematic relevance developed by Schutz andLuckmann (1973). Unlike in Sperber andWilson’s work,14 this type of relevance ‘‘arises when a given, unusual, unfamiliar orunexpected element occurs in an otherwise familiar context or frame’’. Standing out against ‘‘the ordinariness of the frame’’ isinterpreted as markedness and ‘‘this markedness is what attracts immediate attention’’. Greenall (2009:5) applies theconcept of marking to particularized conversational implicature, making the point that if the maxims are generallyconceived of as something ‘‘that is (or ought to be) observedmore often than not’’ a breach of themaximswill be interpretedas a deviation from an expected standard. Thus a flout of a maxim in a particular not yet conventionalized context is eitherexperienced as ‘‘‘unusual, ‘unfamiliar’, or ‘unexpected’’’ and is seen as the instigating force behind the search for implicatureand as a problem ‘‘requiring explication’’ (Greenall, 2009:6).15 Despite the rather general relation between pragmaticmarking and cognitive principles on the above mentioned level of the psychological principle of the figure/groundsegregation, the idea of marking provides an interesting link to Cognitive Linguistics also at a deeper level and in morespecific ways. It can fruitfully be combined with an accentuated inquiry into the role of cognitive principles as a backgroundagainst which exploitations of the conversational maxims can be judged (for first results cf. section 4) and directly leads tothe question ofwhat itmeans, in cognitive terms, to produce amarked or an unmarked utterance. In fact, this paper attempts

trast to Sperber and Wilson (1995), the most relevant utterances are those that cost the most processing effort because of their unusualness

to expectation according to Greenall (2009). Thus ‘relevance’ does not rest in a minimum of processing effort.ll (2009) also extends the notion of imposed thematic relevance to other types of breaches of the maxims and carefully analyzes such breaches.

s their related implicatures in natural weblog conversation on an interactional level as well as on the level of the content of the utterances,

owever, offering an analysis of the actual linguistic patterns used in these breaches as envisaged in section 4 of the present paper.


to show that all of the cognitive principles discussed in the following section 4 can be interpreted along the lines of a moregeneral notion of ‘cognitive marking’, supporting Greenall’s notion of imposed thematic relevance and working side by sidewith formal and pragmatic marking in generalized conversational implicature in Levinson’s sense.

In addition to the three main pragmatic developments discussed so far, we find several unrelated hints at other cognitiveabilities involved in the interpretation of utterances in the traditional pragmatic literature. Levinson (1983:161, 2006)mentions the ‘capacity to reason analogically’ as a general cognitive ability decisive for the understanding of metaphor. Amore explicit hint at the multitude of cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of utterances stems from Green(1996:121), who points out that mental processes involved in the interpretation of an ordinary utterance are not necessarilyexclusively inferential ones, but that salience and the focusing of attention are intrinsic to the process aswell—without goinginto details. None of these studies, however, tries to give a systematic or coherent account of cognitive principles involved inexploiting the Gricean maxims of conversation.

The following section 4 attempts to show how the general cognitive capacities involved in the speaker’s construal of asituation can be used for a cognitive interpretation of the maxims of conversation on the micro level of a single utterance.

4. Approaching speakers’ adherence to or exploiting the conversational maxims—cognitive strategies as promptsfor particularized implicature

Section 4 discusses the conversational maxims one by one from the perspective of how speakers adhere to them or exploitthem by using linguistic strategies that can be related to different cognitive strategies. In a sense, they can be interpreted as‘‘language prompts for the construction of meaning in particular contexts with particular cultural models and cognitiveresources’’ (Fauconnier, 2004:658). The pragmatic literature (Grice, 1989; Levinson, 1983; Leech, 1983; Brown and Levinson,1987; Rolf, 1994; Bublitz, 2001) often focuses on conventionalized cases, e.g., instances of figurative speech such asmetaphor,hyperbole, litotes, irony, or highly conventionalized indirect speech acts as in (7) and (8).16 However, in natural everydayconversation, suchasexemplified in (9)and(10)wefindmanycasesof trulynon-conventionalizedexploitationsof themaxims.

(7)

16 Such str

Levinson (1917 Material

You are the cream in my coffee. (Grice, 1989:34)

(8)
Every nice girl loves a sailor. (Grice, 1989:34)
(9)
A: What did you think of my presentation?
B: It’s hard to give a good presentation. (Holtgraves, 1998:3)

(10)
Mom: How were your grades this semester?
Jim: I don’t think the teacher grades fairly. (Holtgraves, 1998:3)

In order to explain a selection of cognitive strategies, I will use examples from the pragmatic literature that have not beendiscussed froma cognitiveperspective aswell as examples of natural conversation.Mydata fornatural conversation stem fromforum discussions on the public Internet discussion board BBC-Talk17 and the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New ZealandEnglish.

4.1. The Maxim of Quantity

The Maxim of Quantity (Make your contribution as informative as is required/Do not make your contribution moreinformative than is required) has already been discussed from a pragmatic perspective in terms of iconicity (Bach, 2001).From a cognitive perspective, it involves at least twomore different aspects of quantification, both of which have to do withthe amount of information a speaker provides. The first aspect is closely linked with our ability to categorize entities atdifferent levels of categorization, which are cognitively more or less prominent for the speaker. The second aspect involves abroader concept of abstraction and specificity. Strictly speaking, these two aspects should not be seen in isolation. Theconcept of abstraction and specificity is broader than the concept of the levels of categorization, which, due to the cognitivesalience of the basic level and its widespread acceptance in the linguistic community, shall be treated first.

4.1.1. Levels of categorization

The Maxim of Quantity can easily be tied to basic level categories and the levels of categorization. When we categorizeentities we do this on three different levels, distinguishing basic-level categories, superordinate and subordinate categoriesaccording to communicative needs. The basic level is used in unmarked reference, as the default case for several reasons.According to Kay (1971:878) it corresponds to the ‘most obvious discontinuities in nature’. Basic level categories often alsodiffer distinctly in their gestalt and the motor movements they can characteristically be linked with (Ungerer and Schmid,2006:72; Kay, 1971). The basic level can be directly related to the principle of cognitive economy (Rosch, 1978; Geeraerts,1988), ‘‘because it is the basic level . . .where the largest amount of information about an item can be obtainedwith the least

uctures are often claimed to be processed as complete chunks and pragmaticalized in meaning (see, e.g., Watts, 2003)—but see Grice (1989),

83), or more recently Vega Moreno (2007) for an inferential account.from the Internet discussion board has been anonymized, but otherwise left unchanged.


cognitive effort’’ (Ungerer and Schmid, 2006:71). Corresponding with the general function of basic level categories bird in(11) provides ‘themost natural access to theworld’ (Ungerer and Schmid, 1996:98). Also from a pragmatic point of view, onecan claim that the basic level is the one on which the speaker can best adhere to the Maxim of Quantity giving enough, butnot too much information.

(11)

18 For a dis19 Two oth

since they a20 Langack

A: What pet do you have?

B: A bird.

(12)
A: What pet do you have?
B: A masked lovebird/A blue-crowned hanging parrot/A rainbow lorikeet.

To call something by a name at the subordinate level normally adds little new information regarding the category ofobjects referred to (cf. bird vs. masked lovebird/a blue-crowned hanging parrot in example (12)), but it provides moreinformation than needed to distinguish the entity from other entities at the cognitivelymost economic basic level (i.e. bird vs.cat vs. dog vs. snake). The extra amount of information provided by an item of the subordinate level easily may triggerinferences in the hearer concerning the speaker’s attitude towards the bird, her own expert status, etc. which the speakermay implicate without having to state these facts explicitly.

Terms representing the superordinate level of categorization often have only few attributes shared by all members of thecategory, give a less precise picture of the item referred to and thus provide too little information—cf. (13), taken from Cruse(2000:356) or (14), in which speaker B exploits the Maxim of Quantity indicating her unwillingness to answer A’s question.Speakers in the spoken material I looked at often tend to choose the superordinate level of categorization, resorting tounspecific general terms. This may be due to online-processing limits and thus be closer to an unintended infringing of themaxims.18 But this is probably not the case in (15) and (16) where the speaker seems to have inmind quite specific referentsand obviously remains vague intentionally (a strategy of flouting the maxims also observed by Jucker et al. (2003), but notinterpreted from a cognitive perspective).

(13)
A: What did you have for lunch today?
B: Food.

(14)
A: What are you reading?
B: A book.

(15)
. . . you can hear what he said but it does leave a lot of things unanswered
<WSC#DGB005:0060:HS>

(16)
imagine my surprise when i discovered that i think it had been run over . . . judging by the things that were sticking
out through the SKIN <WSC#DGB004:0600:HS>

TheMaxim of Quantity is also closely connected with another layer of the cognitive structuring of conceptual content, thedegree of specificity, referred to by Langacker (1987:132ff.) as ‘abstraction’.

4.1.2. Degree of specificity or abstraction

Here we move to a slightly broader concept of abstraction,19 which goes beyond the distinction of levels ofcategorization and is covered by the notions of ‘schema’ and ‘instance’ in Cognitive Linguistics (Langacker, 1987, 1990).‘Schema’ and ‘instance’ can best be comparedwith a ‘type and token’ relation, which, however, goes beyond distinguishinga single instance or occurrence of an entity from the same entity in general. According to Langacker the notion of‘schematicity’ ‘‘. . . pertains to . . . i.e. fineness of detail with which something is characterized, . . . to precision ofspecification along one ormore parameters. . .’’ (1987:132). A schema provides less information and offers a broader rangeof options for its instantiations:

If I say that a person is tall, this characterization is schematic–abstract relative to the more precise specification that he isover six feet tall . . . The latter expression is in turn schematic for about six feet five inches tall, and so on . . . Langacker(1987:132).

Thus, if the speaker elaborates a schema like ‘tall’ as in Langacker’s example by an expression such as over six feet tall the‘DEGREE’ parameter (or domain20) is introduced, which is not directly referred to by the schematic expression ‘tall’ per se. Thesame holds true for a ‘QUANTITY’ parameter in (19B1) and (19B2) taken from Cruse (2000:356), who, however, does not discussthem from the cognitive perspective of ‘schema’ and ‘instance’.

cussion of the fuzzy borderlines of floutings and infringements in natural conversation cf. Greenall (2009).er aspects, the windowing of attention andmetonymic reasoning, are relevant for the quantification of more complex sequences of events, but

lso affect other maxims, the Maxim of Relevance and the Maxim of Manner, they will be dealt with in sections 4.3 and 4.4.er calls such parameters ‘domains’. They will be discussed in greater detail in sections 4.2 and 4.3 and referred to as ‘domain2’ later on.


(17)
B: Irish stew.

(18)
A: How many books do we need?
B: We need at least 22 books if everyone is meant to have one.

C: A lot.

(19)
B1: Baked beans on toast.

. . .

B2 87 warmed up baked beans (although eight of them were slightly crushed) served with a slice of toast

12.7 cm. by 10.3 cm., which had been unevenly toasted. (Cruse, 2000:356)

In (17) the schematic reference to the type of food without any specification regarding the QUANTITY parameter seemsperfectly normal. Also the instantiation of the schematic reference to ‘books’ including reference to the parameter of QUANTITY

(22 books) as in B’s turn in (18) is what most hearers would expect after A’s alluding to this specific domain or parameter inthe initial turn. Speaker C’s reply in (18) is under-specified. She does not refer to the parameter of QUANTITY at the level ofprecise quantification already introduced in A’s turn by the quantifying interrogative pronoun ‘how many’, indicating thatshe either doesn’t know the correct answer or is unwilling to bemore precise. On the other hand, a turnmay by far exceed therequired amount of information as in (19). In her instantiations of the schematic expressions baked beans and toast SpeakerB2 in (19) elaborates the schemata of ‘baked beans’ and ‘toast’ introducing the parameters of QUANTITY, TEMPERATURE, SHAPE,MANNER OF ARRANGEMENT, FRACTION, SIZE, and CONSISTENCY—all of which certainly were outside the scope of immediate attentionsuggested by speaker A. The range of parameters with regard to which an entity (or even activity) may be over-specified isnearly boundless, depending solely on the nature of the entity in question (and the parameters or domains against which itmay be conceptualized or profiled—cf. 4.2 and 4.3).

Without making any direct reference to the conversational maxims, Langacker explicitly hints at the communicativeeffects this may have:

. . . [E]laborating a schema in a particularway commonly introduces a domain (or realm of potential value) that would notbe expected without the elaboration and is essentially irrelevant at the more schematic level. (1987:133)

In other words, reference to a schema, or an instantiation of a schema, may in fact more or less well match the specificityexpected in a talk exchange and thus fulfill or exploit theMaxim of Quantity. Judging from examples (17)–(19) it is obviouslynot the absolute degree of specificity that is crucial for the maintenance or flouting of the maxim, but rather the degree ofspecificity relative to an initial turn, or in Grice’s sense, appropriate ‘at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purposeor direction of the talk exchange’ inwhich the speakers are engaged. Adhering to theMaxim of Quantity at the cognitive levelof the degree of specificity involves a symmetrical or ‘expected’ choice of specificity. Flouting the maxim in Grice’s sense isbased on asymmetrical degrees of specificity as in (18C) or (19). Also in natural conversation, speakers often characterizeentities with regard to an unexpected broad range of domains or background concepts, as can be seen in (20) and (21) inwhich the different domains are added in small caps.

(20)
. . .That does not mean people should be stopped from saying, writing or drawing those things. [ORAL
COMUNICATION], [WRITTEN COMMUNICATION], [FINE ARTS] (BBCT-I-74)

(21)
he has it is true a lot of rules [NORMS] and regulations [INSTITUTIONALIZED NORMS] governing people’s lives
[HUMAN EXISTENCE] and whether they should sit in the streets [HUMAN BEHAVIOR] <WSC#DGB004:0325:Z1>

Example (20) shows a list of complementary items further specifying the more abstract schema of EXPRESSING ONE’STHOUGHTS. Example (21) illustrates that such multiple domains are often hierarchically ordered (moving from the moregeneral to the more specific concepts).

4.2. The Maxim of Quality

The Maxim of Quality (Try to make your contribution one that is true) and its sub-maxims can be linked to three areas ofcognitive processing: the organization of our encyclopedic background knowledge in frames or scenarios, metaphoricalprocessing, and metonymic processing. Adherence to the Maxim of Quality directly draws on the speaker’s and the hearer’sbeliefs about the world cast in our encyclopedic background knowledge. Flouting theMaxim of Quality results from a tensionbetween what the speaker says and what both, the speaker and the hearer, believe. Such flouting has traditionally beendiscussed in the pragmatic literature in connection with figures of speech such as irony ormetaphor (cf., e.g., Davidson, 1978;Levinson, 1983:109–110; Leech, 1983:142–149; Grice, 1989:34, 53f.). Especially metaphor has experienced a thoroughreinterpretationas cognitive instruments structuringhuman thought and cognition. Its ubiquity inhuman interactionhasbeenshownconvincingly in the cognitive linguistic literature, fromadomain-mappingperspectiveaswell as fromtheperspectiveof


conceptual blending (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003; Lakoff, 1987; Kovecses, 2002; Barcelona, 2000; Grady et al., 1999; Coulson,2001; CoulsonandOakley, 2003). As far as the exploitationofGrice’sMaximofQuality is concerned, a cognitive viewoffers twomore differentiated observations on the role of metaphor which will be outlined briefly in section 4.2.2.

From a cognitive point of view, another perspective on exploitations of the Maxim of Quality is also possible. Ourencyclopedic background knowledge is assumed to be organized in well-structured and larger chunks of knowledge whichare experientially based. They form the background against which the speaker produces her utterances. Deviations from theMaxim of Quality can thus be treated as systematic phenomena related to such larger chunks of knowledge rather thanunpredictable deviations from isolated items of knowledge, as will be discussed in the following sections.

4.2.1. The organization of our encyclopedic background knowledge in frames and frame violations

The question of ‘how people organize all the knowledge theymust have in order to understand’ was initially at the core ofcognitive theories of ‘Frames and Scripts’. Focusing on the process of understanding utterances Schank and Abelson(1977:37) distinguish two classes of knowledge: ‘general knowledge’ and ‘specific knowledge’. Both terms refer toknowledge normal people acquire in more or less standardized situations in their everyday lives and which theysystematically draw on in the production and understanding of utterances (Schank and Abelson, 1977:38). Fillmore(1985:223) refers to frames as ‘specific unified frameworks of knowledge, or coherent schematizations of experience’ andconsiders them to be ‘‘cognitive structure(s) . . . knowledge of which is presupposed for the concepts encoded by the words(e.g., normal participants in actions, normal causes and results of events, normal quantities of objects, etc.)’’—cf. Fillmore andAtkins (1992). Occasionally the term ‘scenario’ is used alternatively (Panther and Thornburg, 1999). Example (22) perfectlyfits in with what we know about possible purchases of books (or the corresponding buying frame) and fulfills the Maxim ofQuality.

(22)

21 The sam

to refer to t

Daughter (17): Who has bought the book?

Mother: Dad bought it.

(23)
Daughter (17): Who has bought the book?
Mother: Santa Claus.

(24)
A: How many books am I allowed to take out?
B: A million.

In (23), however, the buying frame is violated by choosing an inappropriate agent not corresponding to our encyclopedicknowledge of the possible categories involved in this special frame. Choosing an obviously and blatantly impossible agent,the speaker deviates from the hearer’s frame-based expectations and may indicate that she is not willing to disclose theactual buyer. The same holds true for (24). Here Speaker B uses hyperbole andmakes an obviouslywrong statement probablycontradicting the hearer’s knowledge of one specific sub-frame of the library frame (loan regulations) without, however,actuallymisleading him, but simply indicating that the amount is not limited by any rule. Violations of speakers’ and hearers’frame-based knowledge are one cognitive principle underlying the exploitation of the Maxim of Quality. Metaphor andmetonymy, which are also discussed in the pragmatic literature, can also be interpreted as special cases of frame violationsand will be looked at from a cognitive perspective in sections 4.2.2 and 4.2.3.

4.2.2. Metaphor, semantic incompatibility and clashes of domains

A first more differentiated observation on the role of cognitive metaphors in flouting the Maxim of Quality concerns thetype of metaphor involved. Exploitations of the Maxim of Quality do not normally arise out of conventionalized or everydaymetaphors, which are deeply entrenched and thus cognitively most vital. Such metaphors often even lack a non-metaphorical counterpart and most of the time go unnoticed such as foot of the valley, head of the department. In flouting theMaxim of Quality, where speakers have the intention to trigger the search for implicatures in the hearer, ‘fresh metaphors’are often used, which are easily recognized and are not only used in the language of poetry, but also in everyday language—cf.examples (25)–(27). In all three cases, usingmetaphorical expressions with concrete source domains1 (= domains in Lakoff’ssense, as used in the traditional mapping approach to cognitive metaphor), the speaker says something that is obviously nottrue and in sharp contrast to her frame-based encyclopedic background knowledge (cf. section 4.2.1).

(25)
A: What kind of mood did you find the boss in?
B: The lion roared. (Levinson, 1983:153)21

(26)
Victoria was made of iron. (Levinson, 1983:110)
(27)
A: How are you?
B: I’m dead. (Stilwell Peccei, 1999:31)

e example may of course also be analyzed as a violation of the Maxim of Relevance, as done by Levinson (1983:153) because the domains used

he boss are so distant that an immediate connection between A’s and B’s turn can only be recognized when the metaphor is solved.


Secondly, a cognitive perspective on metaphor shows more clearly how the frame violation implicit in any use ofmetaphor is achieved: What specific structural part of background knowledge is involved in the construction of themetaphor?, i.e. what type of concrete source domain1 is used in the mapping process that can clearly signal to the hearerthe exploitation of the Maxim of Quality? Here we return to Langacker’s more abstract notion of ‘domain2’. Domains in thissense are specific portions of our background knowledge, which can be seen as parameters against which a cognitive entitycan be conceptualized (1987:132 and 147ff.). Each cognitive entity is anchored in a complex system of domains2. Freshmetaphors seem to involve obvious semantic incompatibilities or clashes of domains2 as a specific type of contradiction tothe encyclopedic frame-based background knowledge of speaker and hearer.22 This is where the semantic incompatibilitybetween the referent and what is predicated of her or him is obvious. Thus, source domain1 (Lakoff’s sense of ‘sourcedomain’) may clashwith normal default expectations also in terms of precisely which domains2 are involved in themappingprocess. In (25) the source domain1 referring to a human being as a referent is taken from the animal kingdom, which doesnot normally belong to the domainmatrix of human beings (typical domains2 cover the contexts in which human beings arenormally thought and talked of such as AGE, GENDER, EMOTIONS, PROFESSION, MARITAL STATUS, EDUCATION, REGIONAL AFFILIATION, etc.). Inexample (26), with MATERIAL a domain2 has been chosen that although marginally belonging into the domain matrix ofhuman beings, is also definitely not one in terms of which human beings are stereotypically conceptualized. In (27) B usesDEAD as an extreme and unexpected point outside the scale of normal ‘personal states of health’ (very likely hinting at the factthat the speaker is in a state of being in which B does not want to be approached, talked to, etc.).

The implicatures triggered by exploitations of theMaxim of Quality usingmetaphoric expressions often seem to be ratherof the interpersonal, expressive/social type, sometimes involving especially strong social bonds and the ‘cultivation ofintimacy’ as discussed in Cohen (1979), Mooney (2004), and Greenall (2009). It is one of the cases in which the CP and theMaxim of Quality seem to work hand in hand with other principles of interaction such as politeness (Leech, 1983:104–127).On the other hand, they set off implicatureswhich can bemost economically drawn from the knowledge system linked to therather concrete concept of the source domain1 via metaphorical entailment (such as I’m dead – don’t talk to me . . ., iron –

something tough and resistant). We can also see that using metaphorical expressions in flouting the Maxim of Quality, thespeaker does not randomly map one concept from a concrete source domain1 to a more abstract target domain1 in order tofacilitate understanding, but that in order to signal possible implicatures and to activate the intended knowledge system inthe hearer effectively, she has to choose an atypical domain which is not normally linked with the referent in question.

4.2.3. Metonymy, parasitic domains and parasitic compatibilities

Strictly speaking, speakers often do not say what they believe to be true also when they use metonymies. Unlikemetaphors, metonymies are cognitively based on mappings within one domain1. This idea is reflected in the notion of‘contiguity’,23 which in Cognitive Linguisticsmay refer to thewhole range of conceptual associations commonly related to anexpression (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003:35ff.) or the representation of encyclopedic knowledge within a domain2 or domain2

matrix (Croft, 1993). The clash of domains observed in section 4.2.2 for metaphors is therefore slightly modified inmetonymic expressions. Langacker (1993) and Radden and Kovecses (1999) viewmetonymic expressions as reference pointphenomena ‘‘. . . affording mental access to the desired target’’ (Langacker, 1993:30). At the surface of it, the metonymy the

orange juice in (28) seems to produce the same clash of domains as Queen Victoriawith iron in (26). Using the orange juice as areferent for the whole range of conceptual associations commonly related to it (in a restaurant frame) swiftly carries us to anew mental space24: a human being as the consumer of the object in question. A human being can easily be viewed againstthe background of a volitional domain2, which is one of the parameters against which human beings as cognitive entities canbe conceptualized. The volitional domain is expressed here by the predicate want. This is why I would prefer to speak of‘second order-’ or ‘parasitic domain’ rather than of a ‘clash of domains’ as with metaphors.25 The speaker selects from herframe-based background knowledge a suitable sub-domain1 acting as the target of the metonymic reference point (such asCONSUMERS OF ORANGE JUICE) expressed by the subject of the sentence. In a second step this reference point can then be linkedwith the syntactic predicate without producing a frame violation. Only then it can be interpreted correctly. The semanticincompatibilities associated with the metonymies in (29) and (30) appear to be working along the same lines.Want, go andparked are incompatible only with the metonymic reference-point constructions orange juice, knee and sister, but not withtheir targets (its consumer, the pain as a physical state of the knee and my sister’s car).

(28)

22 Whethe

relevant from23 The term

Radden and24 On meto

conceptual b25 The term

The orange juice wants his coffee with.

(29)
There goes my knee for ‘there goes the pain in my knee’. (Lakoff, 1987:511).
(30)
My sister is parked around the corner.
r this process is the result of mapping processes in Lakoff’s sense or more complex conceptual processes involved in conceptual blending is not

the perspective of flouting the maxims, but see, e.g., Coulson (2001) for the cognitive details.‘contiguity’ may also be viewed from the perspective of frames or scenarios (Panther and Thornburg, 1999)—for a more detailed discussion cf.

Kovecses (1999:19) and on the problem of delineating domains, Barcelona (2000).nymies as reference-point phenomena see also Langacker (2000). For a discussion of metonymy against the background of mental spaces and

lending see Coulson and Oakley (2003).‘parasitic’ is borrowed from Ungerer’s notion of ‘parasitic categorization’ (Ungerer, 1994).


Similar to metaphors, not all metonymies seem to lend themselves equally well to an exploitation of the maxims ofconversation inGrice’s sense. Radden andKovecses (1999:54) describe default cases ofmetonymy fullymotivatedby cognitiveprinciples such as HUMAN OVER NON-HUMAN as in (31), CONCRETE OVER ABSTRACT as in (32), FUNCTIONAL OVER NON-FUNCTIONAL as in (33),OCCURRENT OVER NON-OCCURRENT as in (34), or WHOLE OVER PART as in (35). Such metonymies are highly conventionalized (heart foremotional being) or have a high ‘‘degree of cognitivemotivation’’ (Radden and Kovecses, 1999:50). They allow the addressee toarrive at the target easily with great cognitive economy (Bush for The United States, saddle for horse, actually fast for potentiallyfast, the lion’s teeth for the lion). With such default metonymies no exploitation of the maxims of conversation in the Griceansense seems to occur.

(31)

26 See also

Bush defeated Iraq. [HUMAN OVER NON-HUMAN; CONTROLLER FOR CONTROLLED]

(32)
She has everything her heart desires. [CONCRETE OVER ABSTRACT; BODILY OVER EMOTIONAL]
(33)
He spent hours in the saddle. [INTERACTIONAL OVER NON-INTERACTIONAL; FUNCTIONAL OVER NON-FUNCTIONAL]
(34)
This is a fast computer. [OCCURRENT OVER NON-OCCURRENT; ACTUAL FOR POTENTIAL]
(35)
The lion bit the rabbit. [GOOD GESTALT OVER POOR GESTALT; WHOLE THING OVER PART OF THE THING]
However, according to Radden and Kovecses, most instances of metonymy are not fully motivated or show conflictingmotivations such as (28),which is inconsistentwith the cognitive principle HUMAN OVER NON-HUMAN in the sameway that (29) isinconsistent with the cognitive principle of EMOTION FOR CAUSE OF EMOTION and (30), which is consistent with HUMAN OVER NON-HUMAN (more precisely POSSESSOR FOR POSSESSED) but inconsistent with WHOLE OVER PART. According to Radden and Kovecses(1999:52), unmotivated, non-conventional metonymies may be used when the speaker wants to achieve a rhetorical orsocial-communicative effect ‘‘as in humor, jargon, literature, persuasion, slang . . . by deliberately violating one ormore of thecognitive principles in his or her use of metonymy’’. This violation of cognitive principles may go hand in hand with theexploitation of one ormore conversationalmaxims. In (28)–(30) the speaker exploits theMaxim of Quality and theMaxim ofManner (referred to as a broader communicative principle CLEAR OVER OBSCURE by Radden and Kovecses, 1999:52).

By violating the cognitive principlesmentioned above, the speaker selects aspects of the referents which are salient in therespective contexts, thereby achieving conversational economy.26 They can easily be conceived of as more closely linked tothe Maxims of Quantity or Manner and often seem to be linked to principles of positive politeness—cf. again (28) and (30)where the use of metonymy creates ‘common ground’. Metonymies arising out of parasitic domain sharing between thepredicate and the subject seem to be equally less liable to intended implicatures in the strict Gricean sense than areconventionalized metaphors. This can be cognitively explained by the fact that metonymies are based on a contiguityrelation normally involving only a small cognitive distance, which often seems to be not striking enough to induce animplicature truly based on the Maxim of Quality.

4.3. The Maxim of Relevance

TheMaxim of Relevance is the onewhich puzzled Gricemost, andwhich Sperber andWilson, from a psychological point ofview, valued as the most important of Grice’s maxims. Grice (1989:35) states that it can hardly be flouted completely (cf. alsoHoltgraves, 1998 and, in their understanding of ‘Relevance’ also Sperber and Wilson, 1995:162). True exploitations of theMaximof Relevance are often achievedby a complete shift in topic,whichmay also be interpreted froma cognitive perspectiveas a complete shift or unexpected distance in domains2 dealt with in the context of metaphor andmetonymy in sections 4.2.1and 4.2.2.

From a cognitive point of view, the Maxim of Relevance can be linked with the cognitive concepts of ‘domains2’, ‘eventframes’, and the ‘windowing of attention’, in which we now turn to a slightly more specific concept of ‘frames’ than theconcept of ‘Frames and Scripts’ dealt with in section 4.2.1.

4.3.1. Unrelated or distant domains2Switching the topic by referring to an entirely different area of our encyclopedic background knowledge (i.e. an unrelated

domain2), as demonstrated in Grice’s example (36), is certainly the exception in normal natural conversation. However, suchinstances do occur and there are also a few examples in the limited set of data I looked at, such as in example (37), where themoderator changes the topic altogether, indicating that she is not inclined to let the caller go onwith her politically sensitivetopic, which also is out of topic in the ongoing discussion.

(36)
A: Mrs. X is an old bag.
B: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn’t it? (Grice, 1989:35)

(37)
A: . . .he (Lee Kuan Yew) has it is true a lot of rules and regulations governing people’s lives and whether they
should sit in the streets er but he also as i say has a huge amount of popular support from the people and approval

of what he’s done and is doing <WSC#DGB004:0325:Z1>

B: tell us something about home mortgages <WSC#DGB004:0330:HS>

Radden and Kovecses (1999:50–51), who relate cognitive economy to Sperber and Wilson’s Principle of Relevance and Langacker (1993:30).

[(Fig._2)TD$FIG]

Fig. 2. Distant domains in A’s and B’s turns in examples (38)–(42).


More often, flouting of the Maxim of Relevance seems to be a matter of degree, and speakers use rather subtle strategies.One of these strategies is using distant domains2 when responding to an initial turn. As has been shown in sections 4.1 and4.2, the organization of encyclopedic knowledge in domains2 allows the speaker to perceive cognitive entities as linkedwithother areas of encyclopedic background knowledge. We often need a whole set of domains2 in order to understand the fullmeaning of a word. Possible domains for the word ‘flower’ would for instance be: flowers as TYPES OF PLANTS, flowers as OBJECTS

OF GARDENING, flowers as ELEMENTS OF DECORATION in public/private space, flowers as GRAPHIC PATTERNS, flowers as PRESENTS, flowers ina FLOWER SHOP, etc. Each of these domains in turn can be profiled against an equally large number of domains2 relatedwith it asin FLOWER SHOP, which is profiled against: SETTINGS of flower shops, SHOP-ASSISTANTS in a flower shop, SHOPS in general, and so on(Langacker, 1987:147ff., 1990:61–63; Taylor, 2002:439ff.). Considering the meaning of words, Taylor points out that not all‘‘facets of domain-based knowledge are equally central to a word’s meaning’’ and that not each facet ‘‘is relevant to each useof a word’’ . . . ‘‘On the contrary, certain contexts can cause a particular domain to be highlighted, while others (even ‘central’ones) might be backgrounded’’ (2002:441) (Fig. 2).

For a speaker to follow Grice’s Maxim of Relevance within the realm of domains2 should mean opting for an unmarkedselection of domains2, i.e. sticking to the domain2 offered in a previous turn as closely as possible, or to choosing oneprototypically linked with a certain referent. The more distant a chosen domain2 is relative to the one in an initial turn, thefurther the speaker moves on the scale from the complete adherence to the blatant violation of the Maxim of Relevance—leading to extreme cases such as those discussed in (36)–(37) or to more frequent cases such as (38), in which there is nolonger an obvious link between any of the domains2 of A’s and B’s turn. Examples (39), (40) and (41) show a rising degree ofdomain2-connectedness and correspondingly a rising degree of adherence to the Gricean Maxim of Relevance at that level.Example (42) illustrates B’s complete adherence to the Maxim of Relevance by symmetrically responding to the centraldomain2 in A’s turn, which focuses on a prototypical type of interaction with movies.

4.3.2. The notion of event frames

Event frames are complex concepts essential for the cognitive processing of events. I use the term here in the broadestsense, including actions, activities, states, etc. They are closely linked to two other basic cognitive principles (figure/groundorganization and profiling), which I will briefly explain first.

Oneof the cognitiveprocessesweare constantly subconsciously involved in is thearrangementof cognitiveentities infigureandgroundalignments. Inavisual scenetheprofiled itemisexperiencedasmoreprominentorsalient thanthebase (e.g., a stackof books lying on the table). The same happens atmore abstract levels with part of our cognitive entities standing out or beingprofiled against other cognitive entities as bases (Langacker, 1987, 1990:9ff.; Taylor, 2002; Ungerer and Schmid, 2006).

The cognitive principle of ‘profile and base organization’ allows the speaker to perceive a cognitive entity as a ‘figure’ or‘profile’ against a cognitive backgroundwhich is indispensable for its conceptualization (e.g., the way ‘finger’ makes sense aspart of the concept of ‘hand’, and ‘hand’ respectively onlymakes sense as part of the concept of ‘arm’— proceeding from thereto the human body and three-dimensional space — cf. Langacker, 1990:8; Taylor, 2002:195ff.). Figure and groundorganization and profiling are in principle rather flexible (Rubin’s face/vase illusion and Necker’s six or seven cubes are well-known visual examples). In general, we can organize a scene in terms of different figure/ground alignments by focusingattention on different aspects of it. This also holds true for complex events.

Event frames are complex chunks of knowledge regarding the stereotypical design and structure of events. Speakerscan structure whole events on at least two different levels. One level concerns the basic type of action or state viewedfrom the most salient participants involved in it. Dirven (1999:285) and Dirven and Verspoor (1998:79–90) describe thistype of structuring as ‘‘Event Schemas’’ and their associated ‘‘Participant Roles’’. These salient participants stand out as‘figure’ against the ‘ground’ of all possible participants in an event frame. At a second level the structure of events may beviewed from a sequential perspective, which is essential for the cognitive principle of the ‘windowing of attention’. Herecertain portions of an event are experienced as salient (or ‘figure’) against the ‘base’ of the complete sequence of thestages of an event. I will deal first with the frame-perspective in section 4.3.3 and turn to the sequential perspective insection 4.3.4.

[(Fig._3)TD$FIG]

Fig. 3. Seven types of Event Schemas with their respective semantic roles according to Dirven and Verspoor (1998:83–90).[(Fig._4)TD$FIG]

Fig. 4. Following and exploiting the Maxim of Relevance in (43)–(46).


4.3.3. Event Schemas, their associated semantic roles and the ‘crossing of Event Schemas’

Dirven (1999:285) and Dirven and Verspoor (1998:79ff.) both develop a system of Event Schemas and their mostcommonly associated semantic roles. For reasons of clarity I follow the slightly more detailed version outlined in Dirven andVerspoor (1998:79ff.). Here the authors distinguish among seven basic types of participant-interaction Event Schemas (cf.Figs. 3 and 4). It can be assumed that the organization of Event Schemas in two successive turns contributes to fulfilling orexploiting Grice’s Maxim of Relevance.

Adhering to theMaxim of Relevance in a talk exchange, a speaker B can take up the Event Schema suggested by speaker Aand construct her own answer in accordance with it (cf. (43)).

In this case the sequence of Event Schemas in two successive turns is structurally and pragmatically unmarked andspeaker B has followed the Maxim of Relevance at this level. However, often speaker B tends to leave the Event Schemaintroduced by speaker A—cf. (44), and slightly more complex (45). I call this level of exploiting the Maxim of Relevance a‘crossing of event schemas’. Speaker B focuses on an aspect of the complex event referred to in A’s utterance, which wasneither salient nor in the focus of attention of A, such as ‘diet-preferences of the participants of a meal’ as in (44) or ‘thetemperature of the food offered’ as in (45B), which could be called ‘incidental’ or ‘peripheral’ in Talmy’s sense (2000:259).Thereby, at first glance, B’s utterance does not seem to fulfill theMaximof Relevance andmay signal an intended implicature.

Sometimes, however, an initial turn A may already be ‘non-cooperative’ by blocking a parallel event schema in B’s turn—cf. example (46). Green (1996:94) points out that answering directly with yes would be distinctly unhelpful and implicatethat B ‘does not want or intend to cooperate’ with A. Grice (1989:273) hints at a similar problem discussing presuppositionand implicature, even contemplating introducing an additional (intentionally vague) sub-maxim of manner: ‘‘‘Framewhatever you say in the formmost suitable for any reply that would be regarded as appropriate’ or, ‘Facilitate in your form ofexpression the appropriate reply’’’.

The different cognitive principles speakers use may actually overlap such as in example (37) discussed in section 4.3.1,where not only is the topic changed completely but in which case the moderator also uses an asymmetrical DOING SCHEMAdeviating from the POSSESSION SCHEMA offered in the caller’s contribution she responds to.27

4.3.4. Event frames and the windowing of attention—marked or dispreferred windowing

Now we move to the sequential perspective on events, which is closer to Schank and Abelson’s (1977:38) concept ofscripts as a ‘standard event sequence’. In contrast to Schank and Abelson’s scripts the term ‘Event Frames’ does not refer toone specific type of action (e.g., going to the restaurant), but subsumes actions showing predictable similar sequentialstructures in more abstract schemas. Talmy defines an event frame as follows:

27 Example (37) also contains an instance of flouting the Maxim of Quantity by using multiple sub-domains for temporal reference (cf. section 4.1.2) in

what he’s done and is doing possibly signalling social implicatures concerning expert status.

[(Fig._5)TD$FIG]

Fig. 5. A Schematic representation of the Windowing of Attention in Talmy’s Path Event-Frame.


[A] set of conceptual elements and interrelationships that . . . are evoked together or co-evoke each other can be said to liewithin or to constitute an event frame,while the elements that are conceived of as incidental —whether evokedweakly ornot at all — lie outside the event frame. (2000:259)

Events often display a very predictable temporal structure of slots or stages, in which one stage is the prerequisite forreaching the next one. The speaker concentrates her attention on selected stages or slots of an event schematicallyrepresented by the squares in Fig. 5. Hearers are able to fill in missing information. Schank and Abelson comment on thecommunicative function of presenting only certain parts of an event in less abstract scripts:

When someone decides to tell a story that references a script, he recognizes that he need not (and because he wouldotherwise be considered rather boring, shouldnot)mention everydetail of his story. Hecan safely assume thathis listener isfamiliar with the referenced script and will understand the story as long as certain crucial items are mentioned. (1977:38)

The full event frame at a more abstract level provides the base against which selected slots are profiled, corresponding toLakoff’s (1987) Idealized Cognitive Models (ICM) (see also Gibbs, 1999:67). Talmy (1996, 2000:258) calls this process ‘thewindowing of attention’, which is illustrated in Fig. 5 for the typical ‘source-path-goal’ (or ‘moving’) schema. Talmydistinguishes five types of event frames (2000:260–261). For illustration, I remain with the ‘Path Event-Frame’ (Talmy’soriginal term is ‘path of motion’) given in Fig. 5. Activities of the motion type show a certain development in space and time.

They start at somepoint (the source or beginning) and end at another point (the goal or end). Source and goal are linked bya path, sometimes only existing in the mind of the speaker. The full event frame provides the base against which selectedslots are profiled. Missing information is easily inferred in (47)–(48), which are adapted from Cruse (2000:378). In each oftheir turns in (47) speakers B and C make ‘relevant choices’ and provide the expected amount of information.

(47)

28 A small

results with

A: Has the postman been?

B: He leant his bicycle against the fence.

C: He pushed the letters through the letterbox.

(48)
B: He pushed the letters through the letterbox and left.

Speaker B’s turn in (47) He leant his bicycle against the fence obviously represents an initial windowing of the entire scene,focusing on its preparatory stages, whereas speaker C’s turn He pushed the letters through the letter box obviously is aninstance of medial windowing. More than one window of attention may be opened in an utterance—cf. (49).

(49)
A: How did you get here?
B: I took the tram and got off at King’s Road.

As with profiling in general, there are default or unmarked patterns of windowing we are used to and which weexperience as pragmatically unmarked. For the ‘Motion-’ or ‘Path Event-Frame’ they coincidewith the strong hierarchy in theeveryday experience of goal-directed activities, where we prefer GOAL over SOURCE and PATH as a default option (Ikegami,1987:122; Dirven, 1999:282; Dirven and Verspoor, 1998:89). Dirven and Verspoor (1998:89) point out that in humaninteraction speakers normally, due to our egocentric view of the world, value the result of someone’s activity or the finalstage in a Source-Path-Goal event frame as naturally most important—cf. (50). Ikegami (1987:125f.) observes a generaltendency in Modern English ‘to decidedly prefer the goal-oriented expression’ and refers to the source markers asmorphologically ‘marked terms’ and goal markers as morphologically ‘unmarked terms’.28

(50)
We went to London.
We went through the woods.
?We went from London.
pilot search in the text data base of the OED supports Ikegami’s observation. It brought 135 results for went to between 1970 and 1990, five

a clear source windowing for went out and only seven for went from, all of which were complemented by a goal-denoting to-phrase.

[(Fig._6)TD$FIG]

Fig. 6. The Windowing of attention in example (54).


The windowing of attention within an event frame seems to play an essential role in speakers’ keeping up the Maxim ofRelevance. According to Talmy an entire Event Frame serves as the background for the speaker’s profiling certain aspects of it.If the speaker chooses a default or ‘preferred’ portion of the event and puts it in the focus, hearers can almost effortlessly fill inthemissing information. TheMaxim of Relevance is fulfilled if the unmarked, expectedmood of windowing, i.e. the GOAL or(part of) the PATH + GOAL is chosen—cf. Speaker B and C in (52) as contrasted with the full frame given in (51). Gibbs(1999:68f.) relates this human ability to metonymic processing and discusses a number of psychological experiments onmetonymic reasoning as a ‘natural and fast path’ to text understanding.

(51)

29 For a de

focus on Int


B: He leant his bicycle against the fence, opened the gate, stood briskly down the path, stopped to stroke the cat,

reached into his bag, pulled out a bundle of letters and pushed them through our letter-box. (Cruse, 2000:378)

(52)
B: He pushed the letters through the letterbox.

C: He pulled a bundle of letters and pushed them through our letterbox.

(53)
B: He stopped to stroke the cat.

By contrast, focusing on some slot of the PATH as in (53) would probably count as a dispreferred andmarked windowing inthe given situation, surely inducing an implicature on A’s side (whether he really did what he’s supposed to do, I don’t know . . .). Iwould like to call this type of exploiting the Maxim of Relevance the windowing of marked or dispreferred portions of eventframes.

Marked or dispreferred windowing of attention could also be found frequently in the written data of the Internetdiscussions I looked at when speakers produced rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions deviate in their turn-allocationfrom regular question-answer adjacency pairs. Other than in a prototypical (unmarked) question-answer pair, wherespeaker A produces a question and speaker B responds to this question, speaker Amay only produce the initiating rhetoricalquestion or sometimes, as in (54) she may produce an initiating rhetorical question, leave out the intended answer, whichthe addressee is supposed to infer, but then verbalize, e.g., a causal explanation for the intended answer as a reply herself—cf.Fig. 6. This reply can only be interpreted as relevant if it is related to the intended implicature.

(54)
. . . how can insulting your religion hurt you? [Intended answer: 1] you KNOW they are wrong. YouKNOW they will be punished by allah. So why does it upset you? (BBCT-I-12)
In contrast to all other types of flouting discussed so far, the range of possible intended implicatures in rhetoricalquestions is limited to one implicature intended by speaker A (insulting your religion should not hurt you in example (54)). Thisis the implicature the speaker then further elaborates on in her reply.29

4.3.5. Asymmetrical windowing of attention

Another cognitive strategy used for the exploitation of the Maxim of Relevance can be found in the asymmetricalwindowing of attention between Speaker A’s and Speaker B’s turns as in (55) and (56). Whereas A’s turn is focused on thefinal GOAL slot of the Dishwashing Frame, B windows one of the initial slots in the PATH (preceded, perhaps, by themental decision to do the dishes, getting to the shop, etc.). Speaker B is flouting the Maxim of Relevance by referring tonormal preparatory stages for dish washing. Speaker and hearer focus on different or asymmetrical portions of the sameevent frame.

(55)
A: Have you done the dishes?
B: I’ve bought detergent.

tailed discussion of the use of rhetorical questions and different types of addresser and addressee responses to them cf. Ilie (1994) and, with a

ernet discussions, Kleinke (under review).


(56)

30 Cf., e.g.,

A: Has Sue given up smoking?

B: Well, she’s certainly stopped buying her own.

All four cognitive processes captured in 4.3 also reduce the relevance of the utterance in the sense of Sperber andWilson(1995:265ff.) by forcing the hearer to ‘add to the processing cost’ and thereby reducing the ‘contextual effect’ for the hearer.At the same time, however, they can be interpreted as highly marked linguistic structures and thus ostensive inferential

behavior, inducing the hearer to search for implicatures.

4.4. The Maxim of Manner

For Grice himself and, later on, also for Levinson (2000) in his account of generalized conversational implicatures, theMaxim of Manner (‘be perspicuous’) seems to be playing a special role. Grice (1989:27) points to its exceptional statusarguing that it does not relate to what is said, but (unlike the othermaxims) ‘‘rather to howwhat is said is to be said’’. From acognitive point of view, stylistic variation appears to be only the tip of the iceberg and stylistic choices can often be related tofundamental cognitive principles (such as the metaphorical and metonymic structuring of cognitive content). Adhering tothe Maxim of Manner involves the speaker’s following the rules of cognitive economy. Any deliberate and overt violation ofit, which is also perceived by the hearer as such (Grice, 1989:35–37), is bound to signal conversational implicatures. Eventhough Grice (1989:372) judges the potential of the Maxim of Manner as ‘a generator of implicature’ as ‘open to question’pointing at the fact that there are certainly many violations of the Maxim of Manner that can hardly be estimated asproduced fully intentionally by the speaker with the firm intention to indicate an implicature, often an exploitation of thismaxim is obvious (see also Greenall, 2009).

Most of the cognitive principles tackled so far for the other threemaxims seem to be working for theMaxim ofManner aswell, which from a cognitive perspective confirms Grice’s assumption that the ‘‘. . . suggested maxims do not seem to havethe degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested layout seems to require’’ (Grice, 1989:371). Thisseems especially true for the cognitive principle of metonymy. The prominence of metonymic reasoning is well researched,at least in the interpretation of utterances by the hearer (cf. Gibbs, 1999:67–68). Also ‘iconicity’, another cognitive principle,is comparatively well documented in the pragmatic and cognitive literature (cf. for instance Levinson, 1983:108; Harnish,1991; Green, 1996:91; Cruse, 2000:357; or Bublitz, 2001) and could be observed on many occasions in the spoken andwritten data I studied.30 More recently, another cognitive strategy has been observed that is involved in lexical ambiguity(including metaphor) and many jokes and puns as in example (57) taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

(57)
Hamlet: Upon what ground?
First Clown: Why, here in Denmark. I have been sexton here . . . (V, 1:3350–3351)

In example (57), the exploitation of theMaxim ofManner involves a cognitive frame-shift, i.e. using a polysemous item ina way that induces the addressee to open two (contrasting) conceptual frames simultaneously and shift between them (justlike in alternating figure/ground arrangements) in order to arrive at the two intended interpretations. Coulson (2001) andCoulson and Oakley (2005) treat such cases of frame shifting as semantic leaps and discuss their comprehension against thebackground of conceptual blending (Fauconnier, 2007; Fauconnier and Turner, 2002).

In the following, I will concentrate on two cognitive principles underlying the speaker’s dealing with the Maxim ofManner which are less well researched: reference to ‘peripheral domains2’ and ‘unexpected profiling’.

4.4.1. Peripheral domains2The use of unexpected domains2 already discussed in sections 4.2 and 4.3.3 also has an impact on cognitive economy at

the level of theMaxim ofManner. In the preceding sections it referred to unexpected domains2 inmetaphorical mappings orbetween two domains2 in two related turns of a talk exchange between two speakers. The term ‘peripheral domains2’ is usedhere in order to refer to unexpected domains2 of one single cognitive entity in a single turn. Aswe have seen in sections 4.2 and4.3, domains2 allow the speaker to perceive cognitive entities as linked with other areas of encyclopedic backgroundknowledge. According to Langacker (1987:154) ‘‘most concepts require specifications in more than one domain for theircharacterization’’. Based on the results of an experiment conducted by Greenspan (1986), Taylor (2002:444) points out ‘‘. . .that certain domains are central to a concept and are liable to be activated irrespective of context, while more peripheraldomains are selectively activated.’’ Referring to piano, Taylor states that ‘‘its status as a musical instrument is central, whileheaviness is more peripheral’’ (2002:444). This principle of the centrality or peripheral character of domains can besystematically exploited not only regarding the Maxim of Relevance, but also in relation with the Maxim of Manner.Peripheral domains are often used in order to state something ‘off record’, less obviously offending than a correspondingclear utterance such as Grice’s own examples (58) and (59). The physical nature of a song described by a sequence of sounds iscertainly less central to the concept ‘song’ than ‘singing’ as the prototypical form of human interaction with songs. Using aperipheral domain is cognitively less helpful in decoding the concept of ‘song’. If a speaker does choose to do so, this is verylikely to indicate implicatures such as What Miss X did only marginally resembled what one would normally call ‘singing’.

Kleinke (2008) on iconic marking in the language of emotion in Internet discussions.


Sometimes peripheral domainsmay even be used in order to prevent bystanders from decoding themessage as in (60). Herethe fact that there is a word to denote the object ‘video’, and that it can be spelled, certainly does not belong to the centraldomains2 of the concept VIDEO. The childrenmay not even know the alphabet yet and are thus completely excluded from theconversation between the parents, for whom exploiting the sub-maxim of clarity in resorting to a distant domain of theconcept VIDEO, namely its spelling, is a perfect way of indicating that they want to transmit ‘information’ betweenthemselves.

(58)
Miss X sang ‘‘Home Sweet Home.’’ (Grice, 1989:37)
(59)
Miss X produced a series of sounds that corresponded closely with the score of ‘‘Home Sweet Home’’(Grice, 1989:37)
(60)
Don’t show the kids any v i d e o s.
(61)
A: <[3>no not all</[3></{3> of them but i’m just saying there’s <,> a quite a few out there <,> that really
are ripping the system off <WSC#DGB005:0920:Z3>

B: have you reported them <WSC#DGB005:0925:HS>

A: . . . you know the thing is too <,> <{><[>um <,> how can you . . . prove it <WSC#DGB005:0950:Z3>

Speaker A in her second turn in example (61), taken from the spoken data I looked at, also uses a distant domain in order toallow her dispreferred negative answer to be deduced as an implicature. To report someone is normally conceptualizedagainst such domains2 as TELLING, A TELLER, OFFICIAL INSTITUTIONS AS ADDRESSEES, maybe BEING ILLEGAL, ACCUSING SOMEONE OF SOMETHING, etc.The actual act of PROVING AN ACCUSATION appears to be less central here and instead of a clear negative answer to B’s question,speaker A uses this peripheral domain as a causal explanation for not having reported people ripping the system off (which initself can be seen as a peripheral domain2 of a negative answer).

4.4.2. Unexpected profiling

The least we can say about prolix constructions is that they all seem to contain linguistic material that would usually notbe considered as a normal ‘default’ option in a linguistic utterance. Using a complex negative form instead of a simplepositive form — cf. the brief (62) vs. its marked and rather lengthy version (63) is one case of unnecessary prolixity.

(62)
The train will probably be late.
(63)
It’s not unlikely that the train will be late.
Considering the negative as the marked member of the grammatical positive vs. negative opposition goes back toGivón (1979) and is discussed also in Langacker (1991:132ff.). In dealing with the scope of negation, Langacker links theuse of unmarked forms to the cognitive principle of ‘profiling’. As briefly outlined in section 4.3 the cognitive principle ofprofiling allows the speaker to perceive a cognitive entity as a figure or profile against a cognitive base which isindispensable for its conceptualization. I use the term ‘unexpected profiling’ here for cases in which an unexpected ordisproportional part of the base is put into profile. As far as negative constructions are concerned, unexpected profilingintuitively results from the fact that ‘‘we are primarily concerned with what is, and we say that something is not only inresponse to some evocation (perhaps implicit) of the positive situation’’ (Langacker, 1991:132). The base against whichthe grammatical form of negation is profiled contains both, a spot for the existence of an entity as well as a spot for itsnon-existence. Using the default positive form, the speaker profiles the space of the base reserved for the ‘existence of anentity’. In using the unusual negative form the speaker ‘‘portrays as actual a situation in which that entity fails to appear’’in her mental space (Langacker, 1991:134). This deviates from one of the cognitive principles that determine the relativeperceptual prominence of an entity: OCCURRENT OVER NON-OCCURRENT outlined by Radden and Kovecses (1999:47). Inchoosing the double negative in (63), the speaker puts a non-occurrent portion of the base into profile (which comesup to explicitly excluding the negative unlikely and thereby promotes a reinforced positive assumption as animplicature) .

Speakers in the Internet discussions I examined use the technique of unexpected profiling quite frequently — again oftenin the context of rhetorical questions as in example (64), where speaker A actually fills all three potential slots of a rhetoricalquestion— the question, an intended answer, and a reply providing reasons for the intended answer— herself (almostmockinga whole dialogue). Again, speakers may flout the Maxim of Manner on more than one level simultaneously. In example (64)the flout is enforced by the fact that speaker A, in addition to filling unexpected slots in a question-answer sequence, violatesthe principle of iconicity (here the expected linear sequencing of events) by producing the intended implicature (There is nosuch thing as free speech) and a sequence of replies to it cast as rhetorical questions again (Can i insult homosexuals? Can i make

fun of blacks? Can i say in public that i love OBL? what about the men on trail for saying what they believe?) in reverse order.

(64)
. . . Do you honestly believe that there is ‘free speech’? Can i insult homosexuals? Can i make fun of blacks? Can i
say in public that i love OBL? what about the men on trail for saying what they believe?

There is no such thing as free speech. DOnt kid yourself. (BBCT-I-34)

[(Fig._7)TD$FIG]

Fig. 7. Cognitive principles working in adhering to and violating Grice’s maxims of conversation—marked and unmarked realizations.


Flouting the Maxim of Manner here does not directly implicate the intended answer to the rhetorical question (whichspeaker A provides herself), but is again likely to signal implicatures on the interpersonal level—again possibly concerningexpert status.31

I hope to have shown in section 4 that the productive aspect of the Gricean Maxims can be substantiated by a cognitiveinterpretation. Rather than randomly producing isolated instances of the linguistic exploitation of the conversationalmaxims, speakers exploit a set of cognitive principles underlying the production of linguistic utterances. Fig. 7 illustrates thetypes of cognitive processing subject to pragmatic marking discussed in section 4. The cognitive default options given incolumn 2 (‘Unmarked Realization’) have been judged as cognitively more economic or efficient (see for instance Langacker,1993; Radden and Kovecses, 1999 on the general function of metonymy; or Rosch, 1978 on the basic level of categorization).They are supported by a number of more general cognitive principles (GOAL OVER SOURCE, OCCURRENT OVER NON-OCCURRENT, HUMAN

OVER NON-HUMAN, CENTRAL OVER PERIPHERAL, WHOLE OVER PART, etc.) recognized in Cognitive Linguistics as underlying preferred,unmarked choices (cf. Radden and Kovecses, 1999:44ff.).

In the data from natural conversation I studied, I focused on exploitations of the Maxims of Quantity, Relevance andManner. In the Internet discussions, speakers most often exploited the Maxim of Quantity (almost exclusively giving toomuch information) followed by Manner and Relevance. In the spoken data from the radio-phone-in program of theWellington Corpus, the distributionwas different. Exploitations of Manner and Quantity were almost distributed evenly andexploitations of Relevance hardly occurred at all. Given the different contextual settings of thematerial, this doesn’t come as

31 Green (1996:104) illustrates the same mechanism in more complex event frames, where a speaker utters unexpected large portions of background

knowledge, which normally acts as a base against which only selected portions of it are profiled.


a surprise. In the written Internet discussions, speakers tend to construct themselves as experts, striving to be perceived asknowledgeable as possible. In the spoken data, speakers were interacting live on a radio program, which may haveinfluenced the quality of their performance or may have induced them to be less explicit andmore ambiguous than in other,less face threatening contexts.

All cognitive processes captured in section 4 as techniques of flouting the maxims or ‘Marked Realizations’ in Fig. 7 alsoreduce the relevance of the utterance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson,1995:265ff.) by forcing the hearer to ‘add to the processing cost’ and thereby reducing the ‘contextual effect’ for the hearer. Inthis sense, they can be interpreted as ostensive, highly marked linguistic structures inducing the hearer to search forimplicatures. The broader cognitive principles outlined in section 4 help to substantiate such ostensive behaviorlinguistically.

5. Summary and conclusions

The aim of this paper was to discuss two problems arising from the Gricean system which have not been dealt with indetail in the original model and most successive work on conversational implicature. The first problem concerns a cognitivereevaluation of the actual linguistic activities of the speaker, who chooses to deviate from the maxims, opting for lesseconomical and marked realizations in order to trigger the search for particularized conversational implicatures in the hearer.The second problem is best captured as a cognitive underpinning of the conversational maxims and with it, a more detaileddescription of the actual verbal activities of the speaker in exploiting themaxims based onmore general cognitive principles.

The role of the speaker has not been marginalized in Grice’s original model but, as shown in section 2, it can be fruitfullyelaborated upon within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. On the one hand the CP and the conversational maxims canbe interpreted as a cultural model and are thus an essential part of the encyclopedic background knowledge of speakers andhearers, which plays an important role in the (interactional) construction of meaning. On the other hand, choosing aCognitive Linguistic framework makes it possible to detail the specific nature of the speaker’s role in making her linguisticchoices also for particularized conversational implicatures on the basis of more general cognitive principles. I hope to haveshown in section 3 that more recent approaches developed in Pragmatics outside a cognitive framework, such as a growinginterest in describing the speaker’s linguistic activities particularly related to the idea of pragmatic marking for generalizedconversational implicature, are important steps also towards a cognitively oriented description of more general cognitiveprinciples involved in speakers’ meaningful choices in particularized conversational implicature, which are the primesubject of the present paper. In the context of section 3, adherence to the maxims has been interpreted as the unmarked ordefault option, without, however, claiming that adherence to the maxims is in fact prototypical, most frequentconversational behavior. As carefully observed by Greenall (2009), such behavior can at best be viewed as encyclopedicbackground knowledge speakers and addressees take into account when judging the degree of markedness of an utterance.

Section 4 attempts to show how the general principle of pragmatic marking outlined in Levinson (2000) and Greenall(2009) can be fruitfully complemented by a systematic account of cognitive principles involved in exploiting theconversational maxims in particularized conversational implicature. Thus, section 4 discusses a selection of broadercognitive principles which seem to be involvedwhen speakers adhere to or breach the conversationalmaxims. The cognitiveprinciples discussed include the structuring of cognitive content at different levels of categorization (basic level, subordinatelevel, superordinate level); the organization of cognitive content at different levels of abstraction or specificity (schema vs.instance distinction); the figure/ground alignment and the profiling of entities against cognitive domains2; the arrangementof cognitive content in event frames (or event schemas); the windowing of attention; as well as metaphorical andmetonymic processing. Thereby, speaker activities in adhering to and exploiting the conversational maxims have beencognitively and linguistically substantiated. As it turns out these cognitive principles can be systematically related to all fourconversationalmaxims and their sub-maxims, some of them are so flexible that they can be related tomore than onemaxim(metonymic processing, profiling against domains, and the windowing of attention). Analyzing and describing thesecognitive principles may provide a better structural insight into how exploitations of the maxims, which may indicateparticularized conversational implicatures, actually ‘come to be produced’. Substantiating the flouting of the conversationalmaxims by broader cognitive principles can also be viewed as substantiating ostensive linguistic behavior,which is not in thefocus in Sperber and Wilson’s model in its linguistic details.

The paper does not claim to give a full and comprehensive account of all cognitive principles involved in adhering to andexploiting the maxims. Further empirical studies with larger amounts of data from natural conversation than the onesincluded here in the discussion for illustration are necessary in order to gain a better insight into how speakers exploit themaxims in different types of discourse, for different types of social goals. At this point, two more words of caution arenecessary. First, throughout the discussion in this paper, it turned out that actual exploitations of the maxims in the strictGricean interpretation of flouting cannot always be strictly distinguished fromother types of violations. Just like Grice (1989)for the Maxim of Manner and Greenall (2009) for all types of maxims, this paper would rather argue for fuzzy borderlines atleast between infringing themaxims and true exploitations, depending on the specific context. Second, thewhole discussionof possibly indicated implicatures is, of course, not meant to imply that any such implicature will necessarily evolve from aspeaker’s turn as an inference drawn by the hearer, and much less that next to one suggested here there are no otherimplicatures possible. Another question that remains unsolved is whether the same general cognitive principles (or whichother cognitive principles) are involved in triggering generalized conversational implicatures. Coulson (2001) suggests


frame shifting as one broader cognitive principle involved in scalar implicature. To what extent the other principlesdiscussed in section 4 are at work in generalized conversational implicature as well must be investigated in future studies.

Despite these unresolved questions, this paper shows that Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics can be fruitfully broughttogether in the discussion of the Gricean Conversational Maxims and that dealing with them at the interface of Pragmaticsand Cognitive Linguistics opens up new perspectives for future empirical research on the interactive construction ofmeaning. After all, as Fauconnier (2004:659) puts it, ‘‘[within] cognitive frameworks for studying meaning construction,many standard issues of pragmatics remain as important as ever –we seek to account for scalar phenomena, speech acts andperformatives, presuppositions, . . ., and implicature – but old problems are framed in novel ways’’.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Friedrich Ungerer and 3 anonymous referees of earlier versions of this article as well as twoanonymous referees of the current version for their most valuable comments. I also thank Renee Flibotte-Liskow for hersupport as a native speaker. All remaining weaknesses are, of course, my own responsibility.

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Sonja Kleinke is Professor of English Linguistics at Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg. She has worked in the fields of Cognitive Linguistics, English VerbComplementation, Linguistic Gender Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis. Her current research interests include Cognitive Semantics, Cognitive Pragmaticsand Internet Communication. She has published on English Verb Complementation, Linguistic Gender Studies and Internet Communication.

CD Rom—Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2). 1992.

CD Rom—Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One. Copyright 1998. School of Linguistics & AppliedLanguage Studies. Victoria University of Wellington. Side two. WSC#DGB005.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/messageboards/newguide/messageboards_a-z.shtml, cut-off date 12 February 2006.

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