Chapter published in:
Implicitness: From lexis to discourse
Edited by Piotr Cap and Marta Dynel
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 276] 2017
► pp. 259–279

Why don’t you tell it explicitly?

Personal/subpersonal accounts of implicitness

|
Why do we use implicitness as a communicative strategy? In this chapter I suggest that the reason has to do – among other things – with the structure of memory, on the one hand, and the human ability to construct contextually shared chains of goals, on the other. I also propose that by framing the issue of implicitness in these terms we may both gain a vantage point for the evaluation of pragmatic theories and have important insights about practical reasoning and its relation with utterance understanding.Implicitness phenomena may be approached at personal and sub-personal levels. On the one hand, they are explained by communicative predispositions anchored in the structure of human memory, on the other they reflect human ability to construct contextually shared chains of goals. These two research paths are not incompatible: personal and sub-personal components work together to explain cooperation between automatic and controlled associative processes.
Keywords: motives for implicitness, levels of implicitness, personal level, subpersonal level, politeness, relevance
Published online: 30 June 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.276.12maz
References

References

Barsalou, Lawrence W.
1982 “Context-independent and Context-dependent Information in Concepts.” Memory & Cognition 10: 82–93. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2005 “Situated Conceptualization.” In Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, ed. by Henry Cohen, and Claire Lefebvre, 619–650. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Brumark, Åsa
2006 “Non-observance of Gricean Maxims in Family Dinner Table Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1206–1238. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Carston, Robyn
2000 “The Relationship between Generative Grammar and (Relevance-theoretic) Pragmatics.” Language & Communication 20: 87–103. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2007 “How Many Pragmatic Systems Are There?” In Saying, Meaning, Referring. Essays on the Philosophy of François Recanati, ed. by Maria Frapolli, 1–17. New York: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Dehaene, Stanislas
2014 Consciousness and the Brain. Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Viking Press.Google Scholar
Dehaene, Stanislas, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Lionel Naccache, Jérôme Sackur, and Claire Sergent
2006 “Conscious, Preconscious, and Subliminal Processing: A Testable Taxonomy.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10: 204–211. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Escandell-Vidal, Victoria
1998 “Politeness. A Relevant Issue for Relevance Theory.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 11: 45–57. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Bruce
1990 “Perspectives on Politeness.” Journal of Pragmatics 14: 219–236. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Geurts Bart, and Paula Rubio-Fernández
2015 “Pragmatics and Processing.” Ratio 28: 446–469. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goody, Esther
(ed.) 1978 Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grice, Paul
1957 “Meaning.” Philosophical Review 66: 377–388. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hommel, Bernhard
2003 “Planning and Representing Intentional action.” The Scientific World Journal 3: 593–608. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hommel, Bernhard, Jochen Müsseler, Gisa Aschersleben, and Wolfgang Prinz
2001 “The Theory of Event Coding (TEC): A Framework for Perception and Action Planning.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24: 849–937. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jary, Mark
1998 “Relevance Theory and the Communication of Politeness.” Journal of Pragmatics 30: 1–19. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, Daniel
2011 Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kasper, Gabriele
1990 “Linguistic Politeness: Current Research Issues.” Journal of Pragmatics 14: 193–218. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, Robin
1973 “The Logic of Politeness: Or Minding Your p’s and q’s.” In Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society , 292–305. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leech, Geoffrey
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C.
1992 “Activity Types and Language.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew, and John Heritage, 66–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mazzone, Marco 2009 “Pragmatics and Cognition: Intentions and Pattern Recognition in Context.” International Review of Pragmatics 1: 321–347. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 “Schemata and Associative Processes in Pragmatics.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 2148–2159. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013a “Automatic and Controlled Processes in Pragmatics.” In Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, ed. by Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo, and Marco Carapezza, 443–467. New York: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013b “Attention to the Speaker. The Conscious Assessment of Utterance Interpretations in Working Memory.” Language & Communication 33: 106–114. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014a “Crossing the Associative/Inferential Divide: ad hoc Concepts and the Inferential Power of Schemata.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5: 583–599. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014b “The Continuum Problem: Modified Occam’s Razor and the Conventionalisation of Meaning.” International Review of Pragmatics 6: 29–58. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015a “Constructing the Context through Goals and Schemata: Top-down Processes in Comprehension and Beyond.” Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1–13. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015b “Pragmatics and Mindreading. Forward and Backward Inferences in Shared Intentional Contexts.” Intercultural Pragmatics 12: 289–307. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “What Kind of Associative and Inferential Processes? A Response to Rubio-Fernández (2013).” International Review of Pragmatics 8: 143–161. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mazzone, Marco, and Emanuela Campisi
2013 “Distributed Intentionality: A Model of Intentional Behaviour in Humans.” Philosophical Psychology 26: 267–290. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Jerry
1978 “Two Types of Convention in Indirect Speech Acts..” In Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 261–280. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Recanati, François
2004 Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rundquist, Suellen
1990 “Indirectness in Conversation: Flouting Grice’s Maxims at Dinner.” Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society , 22–46. Linguistic Society of America.
Satpute, Ayai B., and Matthew D. Lieberman
2006 “Integrating Automatic and Controlled Processing into Neurocognitive Models of Social Cognition.” Brain Research 107: 86–97. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1986/1995 Relevance. Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
1987 “Precis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10: 697–754. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1998 “The Mapping between the Mental and the Public Lexicon.” In Language and Thought, ed. by P. Carruthers and J. Boucher, 184–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Jenny
1995/1998 Meaning in Interaction. An Introduction to Pragmatics. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael 2008 Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
2009 Why We Cooperate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre
2004 “Relevance and Lexical Pragmatics.” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 16: 343–360.Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre, and Robyn Carston
2007 “A Unitary Approach to Lexical Pragmatics: Relevance, Inference and ad hoc Concepts.” In Pragmatics, ed. by Noel Burton-Roberts, 230–260. New York: Palgrave. CrossrefGoogle Scholar