Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Ph.D. Candidate of Linguistics, University of Alzahra, Tehran, Iran

2 Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Alzahra, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

The notion of implicature was proposed by Grice (1975) who introduced two kinds of implicatures. Implicature is the level of meaning beyond the semantic meaning of the words uttered by the speaker or written by the writer. Neo-Griceans developed this notion more widely and proposed other types. An implicature is generated intentionally by the speaker and may (or may not) be understood by the hearer. Prosodic elements (pitch accent and its changes, pause, intensity, and duration) influence hearers' inferences in utterances having implicatures, and conveying different meanings. Therefore, we propose another class of implicatures namely “prosodic implicature”. It seems that some structures are grammatically underdetermined, i.e. the syntactic structure and lexical meaning are insufficient for determining their meanings, and the role of prosodic elements cannot be disregarded. Putting aside contextual effects, this paper argues in favor of the influence of prosodic elements. In a three-step experiment (a written test, and two listening tests with two different prosodic elements), 8 utterances having conversational or scalar implicatures were presented to 20 examinees  whose first language  was Persian, and all mastered the standard Persian. Findings show that in scalar implicatures, “duration” affects the hearer’s inferring the upper bounds (upper items in the scales) or the lower bounds (lower items in the scales). In conversational implicatures, “changes in pitch range” and “intensity changes” influence the hearer’s inference. Moreover, this paper shows that in absence of prosodic elements, i.e., in writings, some meanings are default for some structures, and readers base their inferences on those defaults. So, it seems that some meanings might be unmarked for some structures which leads to many misunderstandings in interpretation of written utterances as in text messaging like SMS and online chats.

Keywords

Alinezhad, B., & E. Veysi.2007. Investigating the relationship between applied acoustic features and the expression of emotions in Persian: A case study. In the 7th linguistics Conference, Iran, 143-165.
Atlas, J.D. and S.C. Levinson. 1981. It-cleft, informativeness, and logical form: Radical pragmatics (Revised standard version). In P. Cole (ed), Radical Pragmatics: 1-61. New York: Academic Press.
Beckman, M.E. & J.B. Pierrehumbert. 1986. Intonational Structure in English and Japanese. Phonoligy Yearbook 3, 255-310.
Bruce, G. 1977. Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective. Lund: Gleerup.
Chevalier, C., Noveck, I. A, Bott, L., Lanzetti, L. Nazir, T., Sperber, D. 2008. Making disjunctions exclusive. Quarterly Journal of Experimental psychology.
Dennison, H. Y. 2010. Processing implied meaning through contrastive prosody. PhD dissertation. University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu: HI.
Eslami, Moharram. 1384. Phonology Analysing the Intonation System of Persian. Tehran:Samt. [In Persian]
Fretheim, Thorestein. 1992. The effect of intonation on the type of scalar implicature. Journal of pragmatics. North Holland. Pp 1-30.
Grosz, B. & C. Sidner. 1986. Attention, intentions. And the structure of discourse. Computational linguistics. Vol 12, No3. Pp 175-204
Hirschberg, J., & D. Litman, & J. Pierrehumbert, & G. Ward. 1987. Intonation and the intentional structure of discourse. Natural Language. Pp 636- 639.
Huang, Yan. 2011. Types of inference: entailment, presupposition, and implicature. In foundations of pragmatics. HOP. V1. De Gruyter Mouton.
Ito, K. & Speer, S.R. 2008. Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search. Journal of Memory and Language 58: 376-415.
Ladd, D.R. 1996. Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ladd, D.R. 1983. Phonological Features of Intonational Peaks. Language. 59, 721-759.
Levinson,S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liberman, M. 1975. The Intonational System of English. PhD thesis. MIT, distributed 1978 by Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Pierrehumbert, J.B. 1980. The Phonology and Phonetics of English Intonation. PhD thesis. MIT, published 1988 by Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Price, P.J., M. Ostendorf, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, and C.Fong. 1991. The use of prosody in syntactic Disambiguation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in interaction: an introduction to pragmatics. Routledge. London & New York.
Tomlinson, Jr., John M. & Lewis Bott. 2013. How intonation constrains pragmatic inference. UC Merced. Proceeding of annual meeting of the cognitive science society.
Veysi, Elkhas & Farangis, Abbaszadeh. 2015. The communicative Function of Intonation Processing in English and Persian Perception of Implicit Directive Messages. International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies. Pp 73-85.
Wightman, C., S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, M. Ostendorf, and P. Price. 1992. Segmental Duration in the Vicinity of Prosodic Phrase Boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.