Pragmatics: Crash Course Linguistics #6
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Date: 2022-04-04
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Comments and reviews: 10
Mr.
Grice's maxims are so intuitively obvious that unless you're about to take a _deep dive_ into academic analysis, you learn absolutely nothing from a quick peek into them. Like, it's so obvious that I think an ancient Greek scholar wouldn't have even bothered to write it down, hence why it took until the 20th century; it reflects back-filling stuff for the sake of completeness, not a deeper insight. A random person can usually explain why you're being uncooperative when you break a maxim; but they're often hard-pressed to explain _why_ an error in grammar or even phonetic pronunciation is wrong without education.
The purposes of communication are a lot more intuitive than the means by which we accomplish them, so it feels like a waste of class time to pore over the Maxims. I wouldn't study acoustics expecting 1 lecture about why people like music; similarly I don't understand why all this psycholinguistic-theory-of-mind stuff is always front and center in _intro_ linguistics. -
Furthermore, maxims seem to me, intuitively, a lot less rigorous than other principles of linguistics. I've never heard a description of Grice's maxims that make them sound _probably complete. _ There could easily be more maxims because in this video, as basically everywhere, there's no effort to suggest how these maxims might totally encompass all efforts to accomplish communication (given a manner of signaling. - And that's only in first-order use of the maxims, which doesn't resemble human conversation at all, as the video illustrates. -Here's the cooperative principle, and here's why real human conversation doesn't resemble it at all and therefore it's not a very good way to understand language, so please discard this entire lecture, - every explanation seems to go.
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Grice's maxims are so intuitively obvious that unless you're about to take a _deep dive_ into academic analysis, you learn absolutely nothing from a quick peek into them. Like, it's so obvious that I think an ancient Greek scholar wouldn't have even bothered to write it down, hence why it took until the 20th century; it reflects back-filling stuff for the sake of completeness, not a deeper insight. A random person can usually explain why you're being uncooperative when you break a maxim; but they're often hard-pressed to explain _why_ an error in grammar or even phonetic pronunciation is wrong without education.
The purposes of communication are a lot more intuitive than the means by which we accomplish them, so it feels like a waste of class time to pore over the Maxims. I wouldn't study acoustics expecting 1 lecture about why people like music; similarly I don't understand why all this psycholinguistic-theory-of-mind stuff is always front and center in _intro_ linguistics. -
Furthermore, maxims seem to me, intuitively, a lot less rigorous than other principles of linguistics. I've never heard a description of Grice's maxims that make them sound _probably complete. _ There could easily be more maxims because in this video, as basically everywhere, there's no effort to suggest how these maxims might totally encompass all efforts to accomplish communication (given a manner of signaling. - And that's only in first-order use of the maxims, which doesn't resemble human conversation at all, as the video illustrates. -Here's the cooperative principle, and here's why real human conversation doesn't resemble it at all and therefore it's not a very good way to understand language, so please discard this entire lecture, - every explanation seems to go.
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jeff
Way back in ancient, (and more open and honest) times in '74, I took a course entitled General Semantics which was about the exact same subject and concepts. Are they the same study, changed ONLY with a hybridized name of -practical semantics- becoming the more understandable 'pragmatics' evolving to make the study more appealing to the general public?
In any case, General Semantics and Pragmatics are a vital course by either name for those who's lives and livlihood depend upon successful communication above all else, like almost all of us now.
I loved the course and got an A!
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Way back in ancient, (and more open and honest) times in '74, I took a course entitled General Semantics which was about the exact same subject and concepts. Are they the same study, changed ONLY with a hybridized name of -practical semantics- becoming the more understandable 'pragmatics' evolving to make the study more appealing to the general public?
In any case, General Semantics and Pragmatics are a vital course by either name for those who's lives and livlihood depend upon successful communication above all else, like almost all of us now.
I loved the course and got an A!
reply
Podcast
In Italian we would add -pure- (-also-) when we want to give someone permission to do something without making it sound like an order. -Siediti pure- (-sit also-, meaning -Please have a seat, if you please! -, -dimmi pure- (-tell me also- meaning -tell me- but in a way that's not too direct. Imperatives are REALLY impolite in Italian in most circumstances and it's always a little bit of a clash when speakers of other languages (slavs, for instance, who don't have as many) don't add these little hedges; it makes them sound aggressive, which obviously they are not.
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In Italian we would add -pure- (-also-) when we want to give someone permission to do something without making it sound like an order. -Siediti pure- (-sit also-, meaning -Please have a seat, if you please! -, -dimmi pure- (-tell me also- meaning -tell me- but in a way that's not too direct. Imperatives are REALLY impolite in Italian in most circumstances and it's always a little bit of a clash when speakers of other languages (slavs, for instance, who don't have as many) don't add these little hedges; it makes them sound aggressive, which obviously they are not.
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Ammar
Hi! A native Malay speaker here. We do not add '-lah' to the end of a sentence to make it sound less impolite, in fact '-lah' is used quite differently. To make a sentence sound more polite, we say -Awak boleh tolong saya tak? - or perhaps in a more formal setting you could say -Boleh saya minta bantuan? -. The first sentence means -Can you help me? - and the second sentence means -Can I ask you for help? -.
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Hi! A native Malay speaker here. We do not add '-lah' to the end of a sentence to make it sound less impolite, in fact '-lah' is used quite differently. To make a sentence sound more polite, we say -Awak boleh tolong saya tak? - or perhaps in a more formal setting you could say -Boleh saya minta bantuan? -. The first sentence means -Can you help me? - and the second sentence means -Can I ask you for help? -.
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Akanksha
Hindi has all of these features for making requests polite:
1. We use -na- also the word for no to make it sound polite: -baitho na- sit no
2. We repeat the word: -baitho, baitho- sit sit.
3. We have not one, not two but three second person pronouns based on formality: tu, tum and aap.
reply
Hindi has all of these features for making requests polite:
1. We use -na- also the word for no to make it sound polite: -baitho na- sit no
2. We repeat the word: -baitho, baitho- sit sit.
3. We have not one, not two but three second person pronouns based on formality: tu, tum and aap.
reply
Frederick
Great video, but no mention of illocutionary force and speech acts. It would be nice to have some coverage of reference as well, which at least according to the Pragmatics article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is near-side pragmatics. Thanks again for the nice video.
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Great video, but no mention of illocutionary force and speech acts. It would be nice to have some coverage of reference as well, which at least according to the Pragmatics article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is near-side pragmatics. Thanks again for the nice video.
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dogvetusa
With the - sugar free- tag applied to non sugar containing foods I see -gluten free- on many products that are in no way even close to being made of a gluten containing grain. I am positive that the label gets them more sales
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With the - sugar free- tag applied to non sugar containing foods I see -gluten free- on many products that are in no way even close to being made of a gluten containing grain. I am positive that the label gets them more sales
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Arturo
I studied this for my Linguistics class in college and I FORGOT IT at the final exam, so my grade went down.
I knew it, but the nerves got the best of me, and I blanked out, and now watching this triggered me a little.
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I studied this for my Linguistics class in college and I FORGOT IT at the final exam, so my grade went down.
I knew it, but the nerves got the best of me, and I blanked out, and now watching this triggered me a little.
reply
twothreebravo
There is salt being sold in grocery stores bearing a -GMO Free- label. Salt does not nor will it ever have GMO ingredients because it does not have genes. This is misleading labeling.
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There is salt being sold in grocery stores bearing a -GMO Free- label. Salt does not nor will it ever have GMO ingredients because it does not have genes. This is misleading labeling.
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Internet
I think you guys covered Grice's Maxims in Philosophy. You guys also covered implicature, although its pronounced here as im-PLI-ca-ture, not IM-pli-ca-ture.
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I think you guys covered Grice's Maxims in Philosophy. You guys also covered implicature, although its pronounced here as im-PLI-ca-ture, not IM-pli-ca-ture.
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