Archive for the ‘Implicature’ Category
March 18, 2024
An old One Big Happy strip that’s been hanging around on my desktop for a couple of years. When you go to explain why it’s so weirdly funny, it turns out to be a complex exercise in what’s known in the linguistics trade as quantity implicature: someone uses a quantity expression, like 6 people or 18 years old, and we understand the speaker’s intentions to be to suggest exactly that quantity, or at least that quantity, or no more than that quantity — in technicalese, we take the speaker’s words to implicate one of these things — depending on the context and our assessments of the speaker’s reasons for mentioning that quantity in the context.
The standard discussions of quantity implicature are about reports of states of affairs. If, for example, a well-intentioned speaker tells you that there were 6 people at their birthday party, you take them to be conveying that there were exactly 6 people. I mean, if there were 8 people at the party, it would be true that there were 6 people; but then it would be uncooperative to say that there were 6 people, because if you knew there were 8 you should and would have said so, therefore saying there were 6 implicates that there were exactly 6. (This would be a good time to take a deep breath and rest for a moment.)
(more…)
Posted in Context, Implicature, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
March 13, 2024
To cope with a day when I’m overwhelmed with e-mail to answer, an old Calvin and Hobbes strip salted away for just such days:
They exchange greeting hellos, and then the caller, detecting that the phone has been answered by a child, shifts to an indirect speech act designed to have the child get an adult — the caller specifically asks about their mother — to come to the phone: instead of (directly) asking Calvin to call his mother to the phone, they ask (politely) if his mother is home, assuming that Calvin will understand that they’re asking this because they assume she’s home and they want to talk to her, so they want him to turn the call over to her
The overall story here doesn’t depend on the phone being answered by a kid. It’s enough that the caller recognizes that the person answering the phone is not the one they want to talk to. In which case they could ask for them indirectly: Is Marcia home / in? (this being one big step of indirection beyond the conventionally indirect question May / Can I talk to Marcia?).
The crucial step in dealing with the yes-no question Is X home? is recognizing that because a literal understanding of it would be bizarre — why would some random caller need to know if X is home? — the caller must have some other motive in asking it. And on from there. But that’s where Calvin runs aground.
Well, that’s a lot for a little kid to work out in less than a second on the phone (and Calvin is not a patient or especially cooperative child). I actually remember being taught, explicitly, that if a phone caller, or someone at the door, asked if my mother was at home, that meant they wanted to talk to her, so I should get her. I imagine I could have worked this out eventually, but it might have taken some misfires for me to get the point.
Posted in Implicature, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts | 2 Comments »
October 27, 2023
A wonderful wordless cartoon by Liana Finck from the 10/30/23 issue of the New Yorker presents a challenge in cartoon understanding: what do you have to know and what do you have to recognize in the cartoon if you’re going to understand what’s going on in it and why that’s funny?
An intense confrontation between a doctor and a vampire: the doctor seeks to repel the vampire. while the vampire, in turn, seeks to repel the doctor; each is shielding their eyes, to avoid seeing the repellent brandished by the other (the crucifix threatening the vampire, the apple threatening the doctor); the confrontation appears to be a standoff
A full appreciation of this comical Mexican standoff requires that you recognize the two characters, one drawn from the real world, the other from a fictive world of popular culture, somehow (absurdly) joined, indeed frozen, in mortal combat — which means recognizing why the crucifix is a threat to the vampire (this requires your knowing some vampire lore) and why the apple is a threat to the doctor (this requires your recognizing the joke’s inspired mainspring, a subtle pun on a proverb in English). Truly awesome.
(more…)
Posted in Books, Fiction, Formulaic language, Implicature, Language and medicine, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Proverbs, Puns, Semantics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
March 6, 2023
From my comics backlog, a One Big Happy strip that turns on the distinction (in the philosophy of language) between descriptive statements (about what is) and normative statements (about what should be) and shows Ruthie and Joe’s mother exploiting normative statements for her own parental ends — using one to convey injunction or prohibition: saying that this should be the case implicating that you should — or must — act to make it so.
Oh yes, there’s also the third-person reference to her addressees, framing an injunction on them specifically as a kind of normative universal — a manipulation of address terms that the kids simply fail to comprehend (in the last two panels of the strip)
Joe and Ruthie are in fact tearing through the grocery story like wild animals. Ellen Lombard, their mother, asserts that her children do not act like that, meaning this statement normatively. Conveying, in fact, that not only should her children not act like that, but that they must stop acting like that.
Posted in Address terms, Implicature, Linguistics in the comics, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »
June 17, 2020
(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook comment of mine a while back. Some coarse sexual language, notably from American newsmakers, but also enough about sexual bodies and mansex from me to make the posting dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)
Every so often, MSNBC commentator Ali Velshi tartly notes — alluding to the Imperator Grabpussy’s smears of President Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya — that he is a Muslim who was born in Kenya (though he grew up in Canada).
There’s a linguistic point here, having to do with relevance and implicature. Why does Velshi say this? Yes, it’s true, but then “The freezing point of water is 32F” is true, but if Velshi had said that it would have been bizarre, because it would have been irrelevant in the context. So Velshi’s religion and nativity are relevant in the context. Cutting through a whole lot of stuff, I would claim that Velshi is implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from Muslims born in Kenya, and I know that Barack Obama is no Muslim born in Kenya”. And THAT brings me to a piece I’ve been wrestling with some time, about Grabpussy Jr. jeering at Mitt Romney, taunting him by calling him a pussy. (I have a Velshian response of my own to that.)
Hang on; this will go in several directions.
(more…)
Posted in Childhood, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Implicature, Insults, Masculinity, Metaphor, Negation, Relevance, Taboo language and slurs, Toys and games, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »
February 18, 2020
(A posting on gay porn for Presidents Day in the US (yesterday, February 17th, this year), so awash in male genitals and mansex, described in raunchy street language — so entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest. The actual male genitals are vividly depicted in my posting yesterday on AZBlogX, “Hail to the chief”, but this posting is scarcely decorous.)
It starts with the main Falcon ad for its 2020 Presidents Day (#1 on AZBlogX), featuring a carefully composed image of pornstar Paddy O’Brian with his dick at full salute, that is, hard (O’Brian, meanwhile has his right hand over his heart, as during playings of the national anthem). A cropped version of this ad:
(#1)
In this case, unusually, the dick is actually important. O’Brian (Irish-born, but now saluting the symbols of America), billed as a versatile top with a PSD (Porn Standard Dick) of 7″, is looking earnest while performing what has gone beyond cock-tease to cock-reveal, with the hard dick neatly following the line of the waistband on his pulled-down briefs. It’s that bit of visual play that makes O’Brian’s dick in the ad not just your ordinary sturdy pornstar object of queer desire.
Ultimately, this posting is about O’Brian himself and two other pornstars, Sebastian Kross and Rex Cameron, and how they project (perhaps fictive) personas through displays of their naked bodies — performances in which their cocks, however impressive, play surprising small roles.
(more…)
Posted in Gay porn, Gesture, Holidays, Homosexuality, Implicature, Language of sex, Metaphor, Music, Pragmatics, Semantics, Slang | 1 Comment »
June 17, 2019
Going the social media rounds, this joke, an ostentatiously playful allusion (OPA) to a bit of popular culture, presented as a texty — a cartoon that’s primarily a printed text, though texties often come with a visual backdrop, which sometimes contributes crucially to an understanding of the joke, as here:
(#1) A texty that lives in two worlds: American political culture of recent years (a reference conveyed visually, through the photo of Paul Ryan); and an ad campaign for an American breakfast cereal marketed to children (a reference conveyed verbally, by the ostentatious play on the ad slogan “Silly rabbit / Trix is for kids!”)
(more…)
Posted in Formulaic language, Implicature, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Puns, Semantics, Snowclones, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2019
(OPAs, for short.) The contrast is to inconspicuously playful allusions, what I’ve called Easter egg quotations on this blog. With three OPAs from the 4/20/19 Economist, illustrating three levels of closeness between the content of the OPA and the topic of the article: no substantive relationship between the two (the Nock, Nock case), tangential relationship (the Sunset brouhaha case), and tight relationship (the defecate in the woods case).
The three cases also illustrate three degrees of paronomasia: the Nock, Nock case involves a (phonologically) perfect pun; the Sunset brouhaha case an imperfect pun; and the defecate in the woods case no pun at all, but whole-word substitutions.
I’ll start in the middle, with Sunset brouhaha. But first, some background. Which will incorporate flaming saganaki; be prepared.
(more…)
Posted in Acronyms, Allusion, Ambiguity, Idioms, Implicature, Jokes, Language and animals, Language and food, Language play, Metaphor, Metonymy, Movies and tv, Names, Pragmatics, Puns, Quotation, Sarcasm and irony, Semantics, Speech acts | 3 Comments »
March 25, 2018
An Instagram site that searches for posted material that can be treated as a haiku (a 3-line poetic form with 5, 7, and 5 syllables in the lines). Recently, the robot took on sex between men (not at all graphically).
An example of a found haiku, based on a posting that went:
I suppose ant-man’s boss could be considered a micromanager
— to which the robot responded with the 5-7-5 version:
i suppose ant-man’s
boss could be considered a
micromanager
(more…)
Posted in Gender and sexuality, Implicature, Jokes, Memes, Movies, Poetic form, Relevance, Semantics, Variation | Leave a Comment »
