Gricean pragmatics

The view that human communication is essentially a matter of sharing mental states, especially communicative intentions, has been immensely influential in pragmatics and beyond. Drawing together and elaborating various lines of criticism, I argue that this influence has been mostly harmful; in particular, it has misdirected research on the evolution and development of language and communication.

In this paper I will be examining and evaluating three conversational implicatures from the gospel of Matthew along with their translations in Tok Pisin, a lingua franca of the country of Papua New Guinea. My purpose in the examination is to evaluate whether the implicatures they contain are likely to communicate the same truth conditional meaning in the translation as in the original. After the evaluation I will show my proposed additions to the translations to ensure that the original truth conditional meanings are preserved.
For evaluation of the implicatures I will be utilizing principles from the theory of conversational implicature proposed by Paul Grice. Specifically, I will be referring to his super maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner and his theory of implicature through violation of these maxims. (Grice 1989)

According to Paul Grice, when we address someone, we intend to make ourselves understood, partly by the addressee’s recognition of that intention. Call this set of nested audience-directed intentions an M-intention. The standard Gricean analysis of speaker’s meaning goes as follows: “U meant something by uttering x” is true iff, for some audience A, U uttered x intending: (1) A to produce a particular response r (2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1) (3) A to fulfill (1) on the basis of his fulfillment of (2). (Grice 1969, p. 92) Call this analysis the M-schema, and to fulfill it, to M-intend. In the Gricean tradition there has been a debate as to the exact form of Mintentions (especially whether clause (3) is needed or should be left out of the analysis), but these are details that I will not address here. The phenomenon of talking to infants challenges the Gricean analysis of addressing others. We talk to infants, but such cases cannot be described as M-intending anything, since the speaker must realize that he will not be able to make himself understood in the required manner. The Gricean mechanism lacks an appropriate addressee. Some Griceans have argued that in cases of no appropriate addressee, the speaker is actually addressing himself (Schiffer 1972, p. 80; Avramides 1989, p. 66). This response might be tempting for soliloquy, but I will show that it is unsuited for the phenomenon of talking to infants.