LNGN302: Final Exam
Due 4:00pm May 12, 2014
Name
Discuss ONE of the following topics. Write a sufficiently developed and well organized
short essay for the topic that you choose. Limit your writing within four typed doublespaced pages.
Circle the topic number you choose and submit this page with your essay.
Pay close attention to the boldfaced words in your discussion.
1.
The deictic use of language has two properties: (a) it picks out a referent, and
(b) relates this referent to a kind of common ground that exists between speaker and
addressee. 'Indexicality' provides evidence that language is not just an autonomous or
self-contained phenomenon but that aspects of contexts are organized as grammatical
systems. Discuss the statements with relevant and sufficient examples and explain why
deixis, and indexicality generally, is categorized as pragmatic.
2.
Why are presuppositions regarded as shared assumptions? What is the
relationship between shared assumptions and linguistic forms? What is the relationship
between semantic presuppositions and pragmatic presuppositions, and why are they
regarded as kinds of accommodated meaning? Why are presuppositions regarded as
pragmatically conditioned assumptions? Discuss these questions coherently with
necessary and sufficient examples.
3.
Discuss Austin's theory of speech acts in terms of three aspects of meaning of an
utterance: the locution, the illocution, and the perlocution. Accordingly, explain the
relationship between literal meaning and indirect speech acts in terms of language as a
representation of intention and speech act choice with relevant and sufficient examples.
4.
Discuss Grice's theory of conversational implicature in terms of the distinction
and the relationship between 'natural' and 'non-natural' meaning. Accordingly,
explain the Cooperative Principle and its maxims and the relationship between the
Cooperative Principle and flouting & hedging maxims with necessary and sufficient
examples.
5.
What are the major assumptions underlying Sperber and Wilson's Relevance
Theory regarding 'indeterminacy', 'salience' and 'inference' in speech encoding and
decoding? Discuss the distinction and relationship between 'explicature' and
'implicature' in terms of Relevance Theory's accounts of language understanding.
Provide explanatory examples wherever necessary in your discussion.
In being 'polite', a speaker is attempting to create an implicated context that
ches the one assumed by the addressee, and utterances frequently exhibit a trade-off
between economy and the speaker's preference for a more elaborate linguistic strategy
than is strictly needed to communicate the relevant proposition. What does this statement
mean in terms of linguistic politeness strategies? Discuss and explain politeness
phenomena based on Brown and Levinson's account of face-saving strategies.
Zachary Zerby
Dr. Wei
LNGN 302
May 12, 2014
Politeness
In being socially polite, people tend to "mind their manners" and use "proper" English to show
respect to others. In this sense, being polite is a universal system used to show everyone the same
measure of respect. Being linguistically polite, however, is an entirely different situation; one based
heavily on context. It still requires politeness, and in some cases may even be equated to social
politeness, but can also be drastically different. One uses the proper language mechanisms for
appropriate situations, which creates a vast array of environments which all show the same measure of
politeness. In order to understand politeness strategies, one must first be iamiliarized with a few
concepts associated with linguistic politeness.
First is social distance. Social distance refers to the degree of the relationship between two
people. A husband and wife have a very short or close social distance; they are very familiar and
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comfortable with each other. You and the foreign dignitary you sat next to on the subway have a very
long social distance; you are complete strangers. Social distance is also variable. Two people meeting
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for the first time are far apart socially, but as they spend more time together and become friends, the
distance shortens. The change in distance does not have to be mutual. A professor may wish to be
closer to his students, so he uses their first names and behaves casually in class to shorten the social
distance and bring himself closer to them. The students, however, maintain a healthy respect for their
professor and call him Doctor or Professor or Mister. This distances the students from their professor.
The simultaneous shortening and lengthening of the social distance between the two groups keeps a
balance of respect.
Degree of imposition is fairly self explanatory; it is the extent to which one person imposes on
another. Small favors like loaning small amounts of cash or lending papers have a tow degree or weight
of imposition; they don't require much on the half of the imposed upon party. Borrowing a large sum of
money or something important, like a car, carries a much larger degree of impositioa An important thing
to remember is that people do not want to impose and do not want to be imposed upon. So a speaker
will encode his speech property to avoid looking needy, greedy, or bossy, or to avoid putting the
addressee in a pressure situatioa Degree of imposition has a very close relationship with social distance
and the two will override one another to suit the current context, but more of that wifl be discussed and
explained after the rest of the terms.
Power differential refers to the difference in power, or even social standing, between two
people. Power differentials are small between members of the same social strata; the two pizza delivery
boys from Domino's have a small power differential betweea However, between the delivery boys and
the owner of the franchise there is a huge differential Power differentials influence the way speakers
encode language. The boss of a company will have no problems belittling his employees, they are so
much farther beneath him that he doesn't worry about their feelings or reputations. The two employees
who work across from one another will take great care not to offend and to support each other. Th6y
are more sensitive to others' feelings. Which leads us right into our last topic: face.
Face is the social or self image or reputation of a persoa There are two kinds of face, positive
and negative. Positive face refers to a person's outward representation, how they are perceived by
others and how they want to be perceived. Negative face is a person's desire for freedom, to be
unimpeded by others. Face can be threatened by speech acts. They can affect the positive or negative
face of the speaker or the hearer.
All of the above topics affect a speaker in his encoding of a message. In order to be linguistically
polite, the speaker takes note of his current context, including all of the aforementioned concepts, and
chooses the proper linguistic methods to both convey his message and maintain his politeness. Linguistic
convention dictates an economy of speech. Say as much as you can in as few words as possible (ie.
don't "beat around the bush"). Being polite has a tendency to disregard economy, resulting in much
more elaborate speech construction that attempt to maintain politeness. Let's look at some examples to
see how each of the above items affects the encoding of speech, and how they affect each other.
(1) If it's not too much trouble, would you mind picking me up a sandwich?
(1') Go grab me a sandwich, nerd.
These are both requests for a sandwich, a request with a low weight of imposition. The first is a
question, and indirect request, and the other is a command followed by an insult. The two are both
linguistically polite, because their respective contexts dictate as such. The social distance in (1) is long.
Perhaps the speaker has only worked with the addressee for a few weeks, and they are not yet
comfortable with each other. The long social distance means the speaker has to hedge (add content, but
not change the message) his request to be polite. In (1') the social distance is miniscule; the relationship
in which two friends call each other names is a close one indeed. No hedging is needed because of the
closeness. In fact, hedging woukl be considered impolite and would drive the two friends apart. Now
bok at this second request:
(2) Do you mind if I borrow your car for the weekend, as long as you aren't using it?
This is a high inposition request. Such a request would not even be considered in situations with great
social distance. The speaker and hearer are ctose friends, but the degree of inposition is so great that it
requires hedging to be polite. In this case the large weight of imposition overrides the short social
distance. You can see the opposite when looking back at (1). The large social distance overrides the
tow imposition of the request, and thus requires hedging.
The same thing can happen with power differential
(3) Finish the reports by Monday.
The reports are a big deal, and Monday is right around the corner, so the weight of imposition is very
high with this request, and it creates a pressure situation for the addressee. But the boss doesn't care
about the weight of imposition, he cares about the reports, so his higher power status overrides the high
degree of imposition and results in a direct command. The boss is also not sensitive to his employee's
face. (3) is a face-threatening act, that threatens the negative face of the addressee because it imposes
on him; it puts him under pressure. Again, the high degree of power heki by the boss negates this desire
to save face. In contrast, observe this next example:
(3') Could you finish the reports by Monday?
The situation has not changed from (3) but in this case the speaker (the boss) wants to protect the
negative face of the hearer (the employee). His high power means he doesn't have to, which is why the
hedging is minimal when he does consider his employee's face. (3) was a direct command (3') is an
indirect request, conveying the same message and urgency but allowing the hearer to take up
responsibility himself
Having taken all of these factors in, social distance, degree of imposition, power differential, and
face, the speaker encodes his message appropriately, resulting in more or less elaborate speech
constructs that send the same message. The politeness of our speech is influenced by the relationship of
ourselves to those being addressed and two different speech acts with the same request can both be
polite in the right context. Example (1') would be considered absolutely abhorrent in social terms of
being polite, but not speaking that way to your close friends could result in a widening of the social
distance, and a suffering of the friendship.