More on Situational Context
Much discourse is telegraphic. Verb phrase are not specifically mentioned, entire clauses are left out, direct objects vanish, and pronouns roam freely. Yet people still understand one another, and part of the reason is that rules of grammar and rules of discourse combine with contextual knowledge to fill in what’s missing and make the discourse cohere. Much of the contextual knowledge is knowledge of who is speaking, who is listening, what objects are being discussed, and general facts about the world we live in-what we have been calling situational context.
Often what we say is not literally what we mean. When we ask at the dinner table if someone “can pass the salt” we are not querying their ability to do so, we are requesting that do so. “You’re standing on my foot,” I am not making idle conversation; I am asking you to stand elsewhere. We say “It’s cold in here” to convey “Shut the window,” or “Turn up the heat,” or “Let’s leave,” or a dozen other things that depend on the real-world situation at the time of speaking.
In the following sections, we will look at several ways that real-world context influences and interacts with meaning.
Maxim of Conversation
Speakers recognize when a series of sentence “hang together” or when it is disjointed. The following discourse (Hamlet, Act II Scene II), which gave rise to Polonius’s remark, does not seem quite right-it is not coherent.
POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.
POLONIUS: What is the matter, my lord?
HAMLET: Between who?
POLONIUS: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
HAMLET: Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here that old men have gray beards that their faces are wrinkled their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams: all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for yourself, sir, should grow old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.
Hamlet, who is feigning insanity, refuses to answer Polonius’s questions “in good faith.” He has violated certain conversational conversations, or maxims of conversation. These maxims were first discussed by the British philosopher H.Paul Grice and are sometimes called Grecian Maxims. One such maxim, the maxim of quantity, states that a speaker’s contribution to the discourse should be as informative as is neither required-required more nor less. Hamlet has violated this maxim in both directions. In answering “Words, words, words” to the question of what he is reading, he is providing too little information. His final remark goes to the other extreme in providing too much information.
Hamlet also violates the maxim of relevance when he “misinterprets” the question about the reading, matter as a between two individuals.
The run-on nature of Hamlet’s final remark, a violation of the maxim of manner, is another source of incoherence. This effect is increased in the final sentence by the bizarre metaphor that compares growing younger with walking backward, a violation of the maxim of quality, which requires sincerity and truthfulness.
Here is a summary of the four conversational maxims, parts of the broad cooperative principle.
Name of Maxim Description of Maxim
Quantity Say neither more nor less than the discourse requires
Relevance Be relevant
Manner Be brief and orderly; avoid ambiguity and obscurity
Quality Do not lie; do not make unsupported claims.
Unless speakers (like Hamlet) are being deliberately uncooperative, they adhere to these maxims and to other conversational principles, and assume other do too.
Bereft of context, if one man says (truthfully) to another “I have never slept with your wife” that would be provocative because the very topic of conversation should be unnecessary, a violation of the maxim of quantity.
Asking an able-bodied person at the dinner table “Can you pass the salt?”, if answered literally, would force the responder into stating the obvious, also a violation of the maxim of quantity. To avoid this, the person asked seeks a reason for the question, and deduces that asker would like to have the salt shaker.
The maxim of relevance explains how saying “It’s cold in here” to a person standing by an open window might be interpreted as a requires to close it, or else why make the remark to that particular person in the first place?
For sentences like I am sorry that the team lost to be relevant, it must be true that “the team lost.” Else why say it? Situations that must exist for utterances to be appropriate are called presuppositions. Questions like Have you stopped bugging your border collie? Presuppose that you hugged your border collie, and statements like The river Avon runs through Stratford presuppose the existence of the river and the town. The presuppositions prevent violations of the maxim of relevance. When presuppositions are ignored, we get the confusion in this passage from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very ear
Neatly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: It’s very easy to take more than nothing.
Utterances like Take some tea or Have another beer carry the presupposition than one has already had some. The March Hare is oblivious to this aspect of language, of which the annoyed Alice is keenly aware.
Presuppositions are different from entailments in that they are felicity conditions taken for granted by speakers adhering to the cooperative principle. Unlike entailments, they remain when the sentences is negated. I am not sorry that the team lost still presupposes that the team lost. On the other hand, while John killed Bill entails Bill died, no such entailment follow from John did not kill Bill.
Conversational conventions such as these allow the various sentence meaning to be sensibly combined into discourse meaning and integrated with context, much as rules of sentence grammar allow word meanings to be sensibly (and grammatically) combined into sentence meaning.