The Intersection of Language and Culture (2024)

We’re now starting to consider how our minds represent the meanings of words. If someone asked you, “What’s the meaning of the word pencil?” you’d probably be able to describe it — it’s something you write with, it has graphite in it, it makes a mark on paper that can be erased, it’s long and thin and doesn’t weigh much. Or you might just hold up a pencil and say, “This is a pencil.” Pointing to an example of something or describing the properties of something are two pretty different ways of representing a word meaning, but both of them are useful.

One part of how our minds represent word meanings is by using words to refer to things in the world. The denotation of a word or a phrase is the set of things in the world that the word refers to. Another word for denotation is extension.

If we look at the phrase, the President of the United States, the denotation or extension of that phrase right now in 2022 is Joe Biden. So does it make sense to say that Biden is the meaning of that phrase the President of the United States? Well, only partly: in a couple of years, that phrase might refer to someone else, but that doesn’t mean that its entire meaning would have changed. And, in fact, several other phrases, like, the father of Hunter Biden and vice-president of Barack Obama, all have Joe Biden as their current extension, but that doesn’t mean that all those phrases mean the same thing, does it? Along the same lines, the phrase the Prime Minister of the United States doesn’t refer to anything at all in the world, because the US doesn’t have a prime minister, so the phrase has no denotation, but it still has meaning. Clearly, denotation or extension is an important element of word meaning, but it’s not the entire meaning.

We could say that each of these images is one extension for the word bird, but, in addition to these particular examples from the bird category, we also have in our minds some list of attributes that a thing needs to have for us to label it as a bird. That mental definition is called our intension.So think for a moment: what is your intension for the word bird? Probably something like a creature with feathers, wings, claws, and a beak. It’s a creature that lays eggs. It can fly. If you see something in the world that you want to label, your mental grammar uses the intension to decide whether that thing in the word is an extension of the label, to decide if it’s a member of the category.

One other important element to the meaning of a word is its connotation: the mental associations we have with the word, some of which arise from the kinds of other words it tends to co-occur with. A word’s connotations will vary from person to person and across cultures, but when we share a mental grammar, we often share many connotations for words. Look at these example sentences:

Both sentences are talking about someone who doesn’t like to spend much money, but they have quite different connotations. Calling Dennis cheap and stingy suggests that you think it’s kind of rude or unfriendly that he doesn’t spend much money. But calling him frugal and thrifty suggests that it’s honorable or virtuous not to spend very much. Try to think of some other pairs of words that have similar meanings but different connotations.

To sum up, our mental definition of a word is an intension, and the particular things in the world that a word can refer to are the extension or denotation of a word. Most words also have connotations as part of their meaning; these are the feelings or associations that arise from how and where we use the word. Regardless, all of these concepts are related to meaning.

Semantics is the study of meaning. This relationship is clearly rule-governed, just as other aspects of linguistic structure are. For example, no one believes that speakers memorize every possible sentence of a language; this cannot be the case because new and unique sentences are produced every day, and they are understood by people hearing them for the first time. Rather, language learners acquire a vocabulary (lexicon), together with a set of rules for combining vocabulary items into well-formed sentences (syntax).

The same logic forces us to recognize that language learners must acquire not only the meanings of vocabulary items, but also a set of rules for interpreting the expressions that are formed when vocabulary items are combined (syntax). All of these components must be shared by the speech community in order for linguistic communication to be possible. When we study semantics, we are trying to understand this shared system of rules that allows hearers to correctly interpret what speakers intend to communicate.

1. word meaning

2. sentence meaning

3. utterance meaning (also referred to as “speaker meaning”)

In order to understand the third level, “utterance meaning,” we need to distinguish between sentences and utterances. A sentence is a linguistic expression, a well-formed string of words, while an utterance is a speech event by a particular speaker in a specific context. When a speaker uses a sentence in a specific context, he produces an utterance. As hinted in the preceding section, the term sentence meaning refers to the semantic content of the sentence: the meaning which derives from the words themselves, regardless of context. The term utterance meaning, in contrast, refers to the semantic content plus any pragmatic meaning created by the specific way in which the sentence gets used.

Compositionality

The relation between the form of a sentence (or other multi-word expression) and its meaning is generally not arbitrary, but compositional. This term means that the meaning of the expression is predictable from the meanings of the words it contains and the way they are combined.

To give a very simple example, suppose we know that the word yellow can be used to describe a certain class of objects (those that are yellow in color), and that the word submarine can be used to refer to objects of another sort (those that belong to the class of submarines). This knowledge, together with a knowledge of English syntax, allows us to infer that when the Beatles sang about living in a yellow submarine, they were referring to an object that belonged to both classes, i.e., something that was both yellow and a submarine. This principle of compositionality is of fundamental importance to almost every topic in semantics, and we will return to it often.

But once again, there are exceptions to the general rule. The most common class of exceptions are idioms, such as kick the bucket for ‘die’ or X’s goose is cooked for ‘X is in serious trouble’. Idiomatic phrases are by definition non-compositional: the meaning of the phrase is not predictable from the meanings of the individual words. The meaning of the whole phrase must be learned as a unit.

The relation between utterance meaning and the form of the utterance is neither arbitrary nor, strictly speaking, compositional. Utterance meanings are derivable (or “calculable”) from the sentence meaning and the context of the utterance. However, it is not always fully predictable; sometimes more than one interpretation may be possible for a given utterance in a particular situation.

In talking about the meaning of phrases and sentences, so far we’ve focused on the literal meaning of words and morphemes—their denotations—and how those literal meanings compose with one another in predictable ways. The study of these types of meaning is the domain of semantics.

But there are other aspects of meaning that can’t be studied or understood in these terms, things we communicate not with the literal meanings of our words and how they’re arranged, but instead by the way we choose to say them, or the social context of our communication. These types of meanings are the domain of pragmatics, the study of meaning in its social or communicative context. While semantics is concerned with the inherent meaning of words and sentences as linguistic expressions, in and of themselves, pragmatics is concerned with those aspects of meaning that depend on or derive from the way in which the words and sentences are used.

Probably all of us have had the experience of having our words misinterpreted, or taken “out of context”. This often happens even if someone definitely understood our literal words — they may simply have misread our intentions or goals. This type of misunderstanding is precisely the kind of thing we might investigate in pragmatics — both what we intend to communicate, and how someone else might interpret our communications.

In this chapter, we focus on one particular type of pragmatic reasoning, the the calculation of conversational implicatures on the basis of what are known as Gricean Maxims—these maxims were proposed by the philosopher H.P. Grice in a (1975) paper that proposed that in conversation we adopt a Cooperative Principle when interpreting what people say.

Terminology: Entailment, Presupposition, and Implicature

Before discussing the Cooperative Principle and the individual maxims, let’s introduce some terminology that will help us talk about the logical relationships between sentences—the different ways in which we can draw conclusions.

Consider the following pair of sentences:

If the first of these sentences is true, the second one also has to be true! Put another way, if the second sentence is false, then the first sentence is also definitely false. This is the relationship of entailment.

Entailment

For two propositions (i.e. things that can be true or false) P and Q, P entails Q if whenever P is true, Q must also be true.

Entailment is technically a semantic relationship, rather than a pragmatic one, but it’s useful to have it in mind to contrast two other relationships with presupposition and implicature.

Consider next the following two sentences:

This might seem to be another case of entailment, but it works a little bit differently. If the first sentence is true, the second one also has to be true. But if the second one is false—if Nadim doesn’t have a brother—then it’s not just that the first sentence is false, it seems like we can’t even really interpret the first sentence. Here we say that the first sentence presupposes the second one.

Here’s another pair of sentences where the first sentence presupposes the second one:

If someone asks you Have you stopped smoking in the last year? and you never smoked, you couldn’t answer “yes” or “no”—instead you might say “Hey, wait a minute! I never smoked!” This temptation to say something like Hey wait a minute! is a sign of a presupposition that isn’t satisfied.

Presupposition

For two propositions P and Q, P presupposes Q if Q has to be true for P’s truth or falsity to be evaluated.

Finally this brings us to implicature, which is the relationship most relevant for our discussion of Gricean maxims.

Consider a final pair of sentences:

If someone said to you, “I have two pet cats,” in most contexts you would assume that they didn’t have 10 cats—if it turned out that they did have 10 cats, you’d feel that they’d misled you somehow. But there’s nothing about the first sentence in the pair above that logically entails that Marie doesn’t have more than two cats.

Grice (1975) introduced the term implicature for the relationship between the first and second sentences in this pair.

Implicature

For two propositions P and Q, P implicates Q if a listener would infer Q on the basis of someone saying P, despite P not entailing or presupposing Q.

Implicatures, unlike presuppositions or entailments, are cancellable—that is, you can negate them without contradicting yourself or saying something infelicitous.

Grice distinguished two types of implicatures:

• Conventional implicatures: triggered by specific words
• Conversational implicatures: calculated based on the Cooperative Principle / specific maxims

We will be mostly concerned with conversational implicatures. Just for illustration, though, an example of a word that triggers a conventional implicature in English is the coordinator but. Consider the contrast between the following two sentences:

Logically speaking, both and and but mean the same thing—both of these sentences are true only if it’s true that Ruowen likes chocolate ice cream AND true that Helen likes vanilla ice cream.

Grice observed that the coordinator but implies that there’s a contrast between the two clauses, though, or that it’s somehow surprising to assert the second one. This is the conventional implicature of using but instead of and.

Gricean Maxims and the Cooperative Principle

What are we trying to do when we have a conversation with someone? There probably isn’t any one thing that we’re always trying to do, but often part of what we’re trying to do is exchange information.

Some of the things we communicate are not part of the logical or literal meaning of our words. For example, consider the following exchange (adapted from Grice 1975):

What does B mean by saying their friend hasn’t been sent to prison yet? They could mean a number of things: maybe B is given to telling jokes, or maybe they mean that their friend isn’t usually trustworthy, or maybe they mean that if you didn’t like working at a bank you’d steal money.

The actual meaning conveyed will depend on the context: what A and B both know, their relationship to one another and to B’s friend, and other factors. Whatever B means, though, it’s clear that by saying “they haven’t been sent to prison yet”, B is conveying something more than just the literal meaning of their words! Many many people haven’t been to prison! Why is B bringing it up?

The meaning conveyed by a utterance based on these kinds of considerations is its conversational implicature: implicatures that arise from the structure of discourse or conversation, based on our understanding of how communication works.

Cooperative Principle

Conversational implicatures arise in the context of a general Cooperative Principle for communication. The idea of this principle is that we assume, when we speak to people, that we are working towards a common goal (or common goals), and we can interpret what people say in light of that. So in the mini dialogue above, A can assume that there was some reason that B mentioned that their friend hadn’t been sent to prison yet—they didn’t simply add a true but irrelevant statement to the conversation for no reason!

Under the general heading of the Cooperative Principle, there are four more specific maxims that Grice proposed:

1. Maxim of Quantity
2. Maxim of Quality
3. Maxim of Relation
4. Maxim of Manner

In the following sections we will review how each of these maxims works when it is successful, before turning to two ways in which someone can fail to follow the maxims in conversation: either by violating a maxim or by flouting one.

If we violate a maxim, then we simply fail to follow it. At best, violating a maxim results in being a confusing or uncooperative conversationalist. At worst, violating a maxim involves lying or being intentionally misleading.

If we flout a maxim, by contrast, we blatantly fail to follow it—we aim to communicate something precisely by making it very obvious that we have chosen not to follow the cooperative principle, and trusting that our audience will draw the intended conclusions.

Maxim of Quantity

The maxim of quantity states:

• Make your contribution as informative as is required.
• Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

To follow this maxim, we make the strongest claim that’s both compatible with the facts and relevant in context.

For example, consider the following conversation:

When hearing B’s response, A assumes that B is fully answering the question—that is, that B is being as informative as possible. So A would naturally assume that Elspeth has exactly one sister, and doesn’t have any brothers.

If it turned out that Elspeth has two sisters and a brother, A would feel that B had misled them—this would be an example of violating the maxim of quantity.

Changing the context can change how we calculate this implicature, though. Suppose that A needs to borrow a car in order to run an errand, and the following conversation ensues:

In this context A will conclude that Elspeth has at least one car. Even if it turns out that Elspeth has two cars, A won’t feel like B misled them—because the second sub-maxim above says that you shouldn’t be more informative than a conversation requires, and in the relevant context all A needs to know is whether there’s a car they can borrow.

Flouting the maxim of quantity can be done in a few different ways! Grice gives the example of a reference letter for a job as a Philosophy professor that says, in its entirety:

• “Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.” (p. 52)

This letter is ostentatiously much shorter than a reference letter would usually be, and so gives rise to the implicature that there is nothing else that the writer can say about Mr. X that would be positive.

A possibly more subtle example of flouting the maxim of quantity might be something like the following:

In this exchange, the professor hasn’t actually provided an answer to the student’s question—in that sense it is an uncooperative response. The professor intends to communicate that the student should be able to answer their own question on the basis of information available to them. (The professor’s response probably also involves flouting the maxim of relevance, since they have not directly answered the question asked.)

Maxim of Quality

The maxim of quality states:

• Do not say what you believe to be false.
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

In some ways the first of these points is the most basic maxim for the Cooperative Principle: communicating in good faith seems to require that we are—or at least try to be—truthful.

The second point—don’t say that for which you lack adequate evidence—is a bit harder to judge, and what counts as “adequate evidence” varies a great deal from context to context.

Violating the maxim of quality involves lying—intentionally saying things that are untrue—or else saying things that you don’t have enough evidence for.

If your housemate asks you what day garbage is being collected this week, and you can’t really remember but you think it might be Tuesday or Wednesday, you would be violating the maxim of quality if you confidently replied: “Garbage pickup is definitely Wednesday this week.”

Flouting the maxim of quality usually involves irony or sarcasm. For example, consider the following mini-dialogue between a child on a road-trip and their parent:

• Child, asking for the 20th time: Are we there yet?
• Parent, fed up with answering: Nope, we’re just going to keep driving in this car for the rest of our lives.

In this case the parent doesn’t intend their child to take their words literally; they’re flouting the maxim of quality to convey an implicature that the question was unwelcome.

Metaphors or idioms are also cases of flouting the maxim of quality! If I say a scarf is as light as a feather, this is not literally true—but I don’t intend for it to be taken as true!

Maxim of Relevance

The maxim of relevance states:

• Be relevant.

The idea behind this maxim is that when we converse, we shouldn’t introduce irrelevant topics—we try to stick to the topic of conversation, and we assume that our contributions will be interpreted in that light.

Consider the following exchange:

A natural interpretation of this exchange is that B is saying that they do not plan to visit family this weekend, and that the reason is that they have to work instead.

But this interpretation is an implicature, because if we think only about the literal meaning of B’s words, this interpretation is a bit mysterious—B doesn’t actually directly answer A’s question, but introduces new topic that doesn’t have anything to do with travel or families.

If we assume that B does intend to be relevant, though, we can explain the implicature: for the term paper to be relevant to the question about travel, it must be that working on the paper controls whether B is able to travel to visit family.

Indeed, suppose we know that B finds it easier to write term papers at home for some reason. In that case we might interpret their statement above as meaning that they do plan to visit family. This illustrates the type of context dependency that’s typical of conversational implicatures!

Violating the maxim of relevance means making irrelevant contributions. You might do this because you’re absent-minded, or because you aren’t actually paying attention to what the other person is talking about, but you can also violate the maxim of relevance more subtly. Consider a slightly different dialog:

Imagine this dialog uttered in a context where D does actually have time to hang out, but for whatever reason doesn’t want to spend time with C. Assuming D does have a term paper due on Monday (and therefore is not violating the maxim of Quality), their response would violate relevance: they’re saying something true but irrelevant, in the hopes that C will draw the (incorrect) implicature that D doesn’t have time to hang out because of the time needed to work on the term paper.

Flouting the maxim of relevance involves saying something obviously irrelevant, often to communicate that you want to change the topic of conversation.

For example, if a conversation starts getting awkward and you interject by saying: “How about that hockey game last night?” (when nobody had been talking about sports, never mind about hockey), then you would be flouting the maxim of relevance in the hopes that your audience would understand that you were trying to convey: “Can we please talk about something, anything, else?”

Maxim of Manner

The maxim of manner states:

• Avoid obscurity of expression. (That is, don’t use words or phrases that are hard to understand.)
• Avoid ambiguity.
• Be brief.
• Be orderly.

This relates not to the content of what you say, but the way you express yourself.

It is easiest to discuss each of these sub-maxims in turn, because they have slightly different effect in conversation.

Avoid obscurity of expression

To follow this maxim, we try to use words and expressions that our audience understands. For example, the terminology you would use when explaining a topic in a university class is different from the terminology you’d use if talking about the same thing to a Grade 1 class!

Violating this sub-maxim involves using words and phrases your audience doesn’t know. We often do this accidentally—for example, your linguistics professor might accidentally use a grammatical term that they haven’t defined in class—but if you use a word that you suspect your audience will misinterpret, with the goal of misleading your audience, that would also be a violation of this sub-maxim.

Flouting this sub-maxim would involve intentionally using words that you don’t expect your audience to understand—in most contexts, this would be with the goal of conveying something like: “I’m smarter / know more than you do”, which is pretentious and rude.

Avoid ambiguity

To follow this sub-maxim, we try to avoid saying things that can reasonably be interpreted in more than one way.

It’s very easy to violate this sub-maxim accidentally, because often you don’t see the ambiguity in something you say until it’s pointed out to you! But again, you can be intentionally ambiguous in the hopes of misleading people—this is an uncooperative way of talking.

Flouting this sub-maxim often happens in certain kinds of jokes, as in the following:

• A man walks into a bar. Ouch!

This joke turns on two things: 1. being familiar with the common joke set up: “Someone walks into a bar.” and 2. intentionally using the other meaning of the ambiguous word bar.

Be brief

To follow this sub-maxim, we avoid going on at great length when a shorter statement would do.

Violating this sub-maxim involves saying or writing something much longer than is needed.

Flouting this maxim is more subtle. One example is avoiding a single word and instead using a long paraphrase, as in:

By using this long paraphrase, instead of saying “We made risotto milanese.”, the second speaker’s response gives rise to the implicature that the recipe didn’t turn out as intended, or wasn’t very good.

Be orderly

To follow this sub-maxim, we list or relate things in an order that makes sense. For example, when telling a story, we usually start at the beginning and then relate events in the order they happened in.

Violating this sub-maxim can be very confusing, as you’ll know if you’ve ever had to interrupt someone for clarification about the order of events in a story they’re telling!

Flouting this sub-maxim is not something we would do very often. A possible example might be intentionally relating events out of order when writing a fictional story, to convey something about the mood or the narrator’s state of mind.

References

Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech acts, ed. Cole et al. (pp. 41–58). Brill.

Attributions:

The content in this chapter has been adapted from the following OER resources:

Essentials of Linguistics by Catherine Anderson licensed CC BY SA 4.0.

Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics by Paul Kroeger licensed CC BY.