Unit 8

Question 1

Assertion

Answer 1

the act of asserting or something that is asserted: such as insistent and positive
affirming, maintaining, or defending (as of a right or attribute). It is not the only kind of function
which language may be used to perform.

Question 2

• Speech act

Answer 2

it is an act that a speaker performs when making an utterance; the action performed
in saying something

Question 3

Indirect speech act

Answer 3

speakers often perform speech acts whose communicative purpose does
not correspond to their obvious sentence meaning.

Question 4

Locutionary act

Answer 4

the act of saying something, the words that you actually produce. What is said,
the act of saying.

Question 5

Illocutionary act

Answer 5

the act performed in saying something; what the speaker intends to
communicate to the addressee/hearer. They are also referred to as speech acts

Question 6

explicit performative

Answer 6

(you say something explicitly

Question 7

implicit

performative

Answer 7

(you say the same thing but implicitly)

Question 8

Perlocutionary act

Answer 8

the act performed by saying something, that is, what you get out of that;
the effect of what is said.

Question 9

• Request

Answer 9

: the act or an instance of asking for something. For a request to be a request, must
follow some felicity conditions. For example:
i. Act must be in the future, not in the past.
ii. Hearer must be capable of Act
iii. It must be obvious to Speaker and Hearer that Hearer will not do
Act anyway, in the normal course of events.
iv. Speaker must want Hearer to do Act, etc.

Question 10

Felicity conditions

Answer 10

certain conditions that, for example a request, must follow to be a request.
If this ‘request’ doesn’t follow any of this felicity conditions, it is not a request. Felicity condition
is referred to the effectiveness of speech acts use of the speaker. In definition, felicity condition
is a state when the utterances made has met the appropriate conditions such as, appropriate
context, conventional existence, authority, and also speaker’s sincerity.

Question 11

Implicature/implying

Answer 11

to imply is to hint (dar a entender), suggest (sugerir) or convey (expresar)
some meaning indirectly by means of language. An implicature is generated intentionally by the
speaker and may or may not be understood by the hearer. [Todo lo que decimos sin decirlo].

Question 12

Inference/inferring:

Answer 12

to infer is to deduce something form evidence (this evidence may be
linguistic, paralinguistic or non-linguistic). An inference (inferencia, deducción) is produced by
the hearer.

Question 13

Presuppositions

Answer 13

presuppositional information adds facts/beliefs to what is explicitly said.
Presuppositional information is that which is taken for granted, for example: “My wife will go to
London tomorrow” → the speaker has a wife. Test: if you make the statement a question or a
negation and it implies the same thing, is a presupposition → “Diana’s children are nice”;
“Diana’s children aren’t nice”; “Are Diana’s children nice?” → Diana’s got some children. (It
doesn’t matter if the children are nice or not, they are Diana’s children)

Question 14

Sentence meaning

Answer 14

: what an expression means.

Question 15

• Utterance meaning

Answer 15

the use that is given o a sentence in a particular context

Question 16

Truth conditional view of meaning

Answer 16

: it can be described as the view that knowing the meaning

of an expression consists in knowing the conditions under which it is true.

Question 17

Conventional implicatures

Answer 17

they are part of the typical force of the word. They are what we
might otherwise refer to as the standard or typical meaning of linguistic expressions.
Conventional implicatures are not based on cooperative principle or maxims, are encoded in the
lexicon or grammar and are not dependent on context for their interpretations, for example:
- George is short but brave (contrast)
- Sue and Bill are divorced (conjunction)
- He jumped on his horse and rode away (sequence)
- I dropped the camera and it broke (consequence)

Question 18

Conversational implicatures:

Answer 18

they are those that arise in particular contexts of use, without
forming part of the word’s characteristics or conventional force:
A: Have you read Sebald?
B: I haven’t even read the back of the cereal packet.
They are inferred via the cooperative principle or maxims (observed, violated orflouted), for example:
A: I am out of petrol / B: there is a garage around the corner.

Question 19

The Cooperative Principle

Answer 19

it is essentially the principle that the participants in a conversation
work together in order to ‘manage’ their speech exchange in the most efficient way possible

Question 20

• Maxim of Quality

Answer 20

try to make your contribution one that is true, that is, do to say what you
believe to be false and do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. For example: “I
couldn’t do my homework because my computer has a virus and also do all my pencils and pens.”

Question 21

• Maxim of Quantity

Answer 21

make your contribution as informative as is required for the current
purposes of the exchange, and do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
For example: “tell me about school, every detail”- “well, it’s a big building…”

Question 22

Maxim of Relevance:

Answer 22

to make your contributions relevant. To provide relevant information to
the discussion, avoiding things that are not pertinent to the discussion. For example:
A: Where is my Halloween candy?
B: Mine is missing too

Question 23

Maxim of Manner

Answer 23

be perspicuous, and specifically: avoid obscurity and ambiguity, be brief and
orderly.
A: How is Kate today?
B: She’s the usual. (ambiguous answer)

Question 24

Violate a maxim

Answer 24

when one (deliberately) wants to mislead, confuse or bore (maxim of Quality).
[infringes la maxim pero no quieres generar ninguna implicatura].

Question 25

Flout a maxim

Answer 25

the speaker exploits an obvious infringement of one of the maxims in order to generate an implicature (irony).

Question 26

Opt out a maxim:

Answer 26

1. Opting out of Quantity. E.g. My lips are sealed; I cannot say more. 2. Opting out of Quality. E.g. I’m not sure, but I think... 3. Opting out of Manner. E.g. I don’t know how to say this more simply... 4. Opting out of Relevance. E.g. I don’t know if this answers your question, but ... Such hedges are ways of marking that you are opting out of the CP

Question 27

Ostensive-inferential approach

Answer 27

the speaker ostensively provides the hearer with evidence of meaning in the form of words and, combined with the context, this linguistic evidence enables the hearer to infer the speaker’s meaning.

Question 28

Communicative principle of relevance:

Answer 28

every utterance communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. In saying something to a hearer, a speaker implies that the utterance is the most relevant that they could have produced under the circumstances, and that it is at least relevant enough to warrant the hearer’s attention.

Question 29

“Face” within politeness:

Answer 29

it is best understood as every individual’s feeling of self-worth or selfimage; this image can be damaged, maintained or enhanced through interaction with others. Face has two aspects: “positive” and “negative”.

Question 30

Positive “face”

Answer 30

it is reflected in his or her desire to be liked, approved of, respected and appreciated by others.

Question 31

Negative “face”:

Answer 31

it is reflected in the desire not to be impeded or put upon, to have freedom to act as one chooses.

Question 32

Face-threatening acts:

Answer 32

certain illocutionary acts (i.e.: to ask, to state, to command/request, to exclaim) can damage or threaten another person’s face; such acts are known as FTAs

Question 33

• Performing the FTA on-record without redressive action (bald-onrecord)

Answer 33

There are occasions when external factors constrain an individual to speak very directly, for example, if there is an emergency of some sort. In emergencies or in highly task-oriented situations, such as teaching someone to drive, we find that the speaker is likely to focus on the propositional content of the message, and pay little attention to the interpersonal aspect of what is said. If the speaker decides that the overall “weightiness” of the FTA is very small (e.g. you are making a trivial request of someone you know well and who has no power over you) the request may be made “bald-on- record”. For example, a mother saying to her child: “Shut the window”. The same is true when the FTA is perceived as being in the hearer’s interest: “Have a chocolate”.

Question 34

Performing the FTA on-record using positive politeness

Answer 34

when you speak to someone, you may | orient yourself towards that individual’s positive face and employ positive politeness.

Question 35

• Performing the FTA on-record using negative politeness:

Answer 35

negative politeness is oriented towards a hearer’s negative face, which appeals to the hearer’s desire not to be impeded or put upon, to be left free to act as s/he chooses

Question 36

Performing an FTA on-record using off-record politeness:

Answer 36

a communicative act is done off record if it is done in such a way that it is not possible to attribute only one clear communicative intention to the act. Thus, if a speaker wants to do and FTA, but wants to avoid the responsibility for doing it, he can do it off record and leave it up to the addressee to decide how to interpret it. Such off-record utterances are essentially indirect uses of language: to construct an off-record utterance one says something that is either more general or actually different from what one means

Question 37

Politeness across cultures

Answer 37

some researchers have attempted to characterize cultures according to positive or negative politeness tendencies with results often portraying a different image. For example: British are thought to have a “deference politeness society”, that is, negative politeness; whereas Americans have a “solidarity politeness society”, that is, positive politeness.