First, Grice's Theory: The Development from Classical to New
Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory has made important contributions to linguistics and logic. Now, the study of conversational implicature has developed from "classic Grice an theory of conversational implicature" to "neo-Grice an theory of conversational implicature", which is a new impetus to the study of pragmatic inference.
The academic value, practical significance and some shortcomings of the classical Grignard theory will not be discussed here, except one point: when Grignard constructed the "cooperative principle", he didn't have time to put forward a mechanism to use this principle to deduce the conversational implicature. Therefore, I wrote "Pragmatic Inference" (Journal of Foreign Languages, June, 1991), trying to give this mechanism and related rules.
Grignard made a special speech in 196s and published an article in 197s. After that, researchers sprang up, which made great progress in the theory of conversational implicature. Scholars have made two efforts to make up for the shortcomings of the "cooperative principle": (1) using the "politeness principle", "salvation" and "cooperative principle"; (2) Reforming and reconstructing the new conversational implicature principle. For the first aspect, many articles have been reviewed by Chinese scholars. For the second aspect, the response of Chinese scholars is still rare at present.
there are two main ideas to transform and reconstruct the principles of conversational implicature: one is to replace the principles of cooperative principle with a single "relevance principle", which was put forward by Sperber and Wilson (1986). The other is to concretize the criteria, especially the quantitative criteria. Many scholars have made great achievements, such as Gatestar, Atlas, Horn and Joseph Richmond Levenson. Among them, Atlas and Joseph Richmond Levenson put forward a relatively complete concept in Atlas and Levinson, 1981. After that, Joseph Richmond Levenson elaborated in Levinson, 1983 that the quantitative criterion can be reconstructed from two aspects: (1) under the guidance of the first quantitative criterion, the hierarchical meaning and the clause meaning are deduced; Guided by the second rule, we can invite more information from less information, which can be called "information principle". This is actually the actual content of the first two principles of Joseph Richmond Levenson's Three Principles. In 1987, Joseph Richmond Levenson put forward his three principles of conversational implicature; Liege himself said that this is a neo-classical interpretation of Grignard's criteria. It is generally believed that the development of Grignard's theory from "classical" to "new" has now moved from the gestation period to the transition period. In 1991, Joseph Richmond Levenson officially called his three principles "neo-Gricean pragmatic apparatus", and he also used "classical" to explain his own theory. (See Levinson, 1987, 199 respectively), some scholars began to use the terms "classical-"and "new-"in this sense.
Second, New Grice's Theory of Conversational Implication: Liesl's Three Principles
The main points of Liesl's Three Principles of Conversational Implication, which Joseph Richmond Levenson called "New Grice Pragmatic Mechanism", are as follows:
The principle of quantity
1. The speaker's criterion:
Don't let your statement be less informative than your understanding allows, unless a strong statement conflicts with the information principle.
The speaker's inference:
I believe that the speaker has provided the strongest information he knows, so:
(1) The speaker speaks A(W), which forms a "Horne hierarchy" (hereinafter referred to as "Horne relationship" for short, so it means-the author presses it), and even a (s) ├.
(2) The speaker speaks A(W), but A(W) does not contain the content of embedded sentence Q, but the content of Q is contained in A(S) with strong information, and SW forms a comparison set, then ~ k (q) can be deduced, that is, the speaker does not know whether Q can be established. (The meaning of these symbols and expressions is explained in the following)
2. Information principle
Speaker criterion: minimum limit criterion
"Speak as little as possible", that is, only minimal language information is provided, as long as the communicative purpose can be achieved;
speaker's inference: expansion rules
expand the information content of the speaker's speech by finding out the specific understanding until it is recognized as the speaker's semantic intention. Especially:
(1) The relationship between the object and the event mentioned in the setting sentence is conventional, unless a. This is inconsistent with the confirmed situation; B. The speaker violated the minimum criterion and used a lengthy expression;
(2) If a certain existence or fact coincides with the confirmed situation, it is assumed that this is exactly what the sentence is about to say. 3. Mode principle
Speaker's rule:
Don't use long, obscure or marked expressions for no reason.
Inference of the speaker:
When the speaker uses a long marked expression, his meaning is different from what he could have expressed in an unmarked form, especially when he tries his best to avoid conventional association or deduce the meaning of the unmarked expression by using the information principle.
regarding the principle of quantity, I would like to talk about the "Holstein relationship". Horn believes that there is a semantic-information intensity difference between words in the following groups: < P > < All, Big.