Lingua inglese III

3) CHANGE OF STATE VERBS:

- stopped, continued, finishes → A had been doing X

- started, began → A had not been doing X

- left → A was at/with Y

- arrived → A was not at Y before

4) FACTIVE VERBS: clause introduces contains truth or fact

- regret, realize, be aware, be sorry, be proud

5) COUNTERFACTUAL

Ex. “If I had done x, y wouldn’t have happened” → A did not do X

Triggered by the past perfect tense

6) IMPLICATIVE

- manage, forget to

X happened to Y

7) TEMPORAL: triggered by temporal clauses introduced by subordinating conjunctions

- before, since, when → X happened

8) CLEFT CONSTRUCTION

It wasn’t A who did X → someone else did X

9) COMPARISON AND CONTRAST

10) NON-RESTRICTING, NON-DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSES

Entailments are sentences which are automatically true if the original sentence is true; all you need is

linguistic knowledge. They are inferences that can be drawn solely from our knowledge about the semantic

relationship in a language. The entailments of a sentence can be regarded as those propositions that can

be inferred in any context.

Ex. “The painters broke the window”

Entailment 1 → someone broke the window

Entailment 2 → the painter did something to the window

Entailment 3 → the painter broke something

Entailments vs Presuppositions

Presuppositions survive negation and remain constant in interrogative constructions; entailments do not.

a) George didn’t realize that she was ill: factive verb, the introduced clause contains truth or fact “she

was ill”. The presupposition is triggered by “didn’t realize”.

b) Jane was on a diet when she got pregnant: temporal. Triggered by temporal clauses introduced by

subordinating conjunctions.

5) What are the implicatures in the following exchanges? What maxims are flouted?

Conversational implicatures depend on the context; they are a kind of inference. Speakers cooperate to

achieve a shared meaning for utterances. It is inferred from an utterance but it is not a condition for the

truth of the utterance; it refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even if neither is expressed nor

strictly implied.

They are implications derived on the basis of assumptions.

Maxims are flouted when the speakers do not observe them intentionally, but expect hearers to

understand correctly, therefore speakers remain cooperative.

Implicatures can arise from deliberately flouting/breaking the maxims → speakers can produce implicatures

in two ways: observance and non-observance of the maxims.

- Will Sally be at the meeting this afternoon?

- Her car broke down → it implies she won’t be there.

Maxims flouted: quantity because the contribution is not sufficiently informative; Sally could take the bus

for example, therefore it is not sure she won’t be there 2

6) Illustrate Grice’s cooperative principle and its maxims. Say how it explains such figures of

speech of irony, metaphor and metonymy.

Grice’s cooperative principle is a principle of conversation stating that participants expect that each of

them will make a conversational contribution at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of

the talk exchange; participants assume that a speaker is being cooperative and they make conversational

implicatures about what is said.

Inferences: deductions made by participants based on available evidence. Speaker’s intended meaning,

not what is said but what is implicated.

According to Grice the figures of speech flout the cooperative principle’s maxims. Irony flouts the maxim of

relevance; metaphor and metonymy flout the maxims of relevance and quality.

There are four maxims to respect in order to be cooperative:

RELEVANCE (be relevant): whatever is said must be relevant to the conversation

QUALITY (be true): one must not say what he believes to be false or something for which he lacks of

evidence

QUANTITY (be brief): the contribution has to be sufficiently informative for the purpose of the conversation

and not more informative

MANNER (be clear): the contribution has to avoid being obscure, ambiguous or difficult to understand.

Grice regarded irony as a figure of speech resulting from a violation of the maxim of quality, even if the

cooperative principle is observed because the hearer understands the relevance of the speaker’s

contribution.

7) A brief summary of “A modest proposal” and say which theories of irony best describe the

argument

Swift satirically express his anger towards Ireland’s colonial role under England. It’s a harsh satire with ever

present irony.

Swift lived in Ireland which was a colony, overpopulated, full of beggars, wracked periodically by famine,

heavily taxed and with no say at all in its own affairs.

It’s a parody of Swift’s own serious proposals.

The main point is the extent to which a human being can be dehumanized. Its satirical power depends on

the contrast between the rational, closely-argued case he sets out, and the horror of what’s actually

proposing.

The projector starts with words of hope in the title. He has a good case, it seems at the on set, of having

found a solution to the problem of too many hungry and disadvantaged children and a way of making them

beneficial to the public. The essay continues with rather a sad description of the situation of beggars, poor

children and the dreadful circumstances they live in.

The reader doesn’t expect the harsh proposal put forward in the text.

The projector goes on about the problems the country has with these children since the cost of raising

them will always be more than the profit they can make under the current circumstances. The parents have

no real means of supporting them and therefore the vicious cycle of begging and poverty continues

generation after generation.

The metaphor “the English are devouring the Irish” is the foundation of swift’s proposal.

THE PROPOSAL’S ARGUMENTS

1. EATING CHILDREN AND KEEPING THEIR NUMBER DOWN WILL REDUCE THE NUMBER OF CATHOLICS. Swift

himself was an Anglican and would have wanted to reduce the number of Catholics, although not with such

inhuman manners.

2. IT WOULD GIVE THE POOR SOMETHING OF VALUE TO SELL, GIVE THEM AN INCOME THAT THEY COULD

KEEP STABLE BY CONTINUING TO PROVIDE BABIES

3-4. THE NATION ITSELF WOULD SAVE A GREAT DEAL OF MONEY SINCE IT’S QUITE EXPENSIVE TO RAISE

AND FEED CHILDREN. Most of the native Irish lived in extreme poverty so any scheme that would save

them money and make their living conditions more bearable was worth taking a close look at. It would

have made perfect economical sense to give the people something of value to sell, since they had nothing

at all at the present situation.

5. THE TAVERNS AND RESTAURANTS OF THE AREA WOULD SEE AN INCREASE IN BUSINESS SINCE THEIR

OWNERS WOULD ALL WANT TO SERVE THE BEST MEAT ON THE MARKET.

This has the potential of being a very good economical prospect for those business.

CONCLUSIONS

His cannibal proposal seems reasonable and practical. The irony lies in the falseness of the conclusion

(fallacy of the arguments). The irony lies in the falseness of the presupposition that it’s possible to eat

children. Irony as saying the opposite of what is meant.

In being ironic the theory goes a speaker is pretending to be an injudicious person speaking to an

uninitiated audience. However, the argument is fallacious, because the presupposition is false: children

cannot be eaten. 3

8) What is the major utterance between traditional rhetoric view of metaphor and cognitive

linguistic approaches?

a) The first assumption of the traditional view of metaphors is that they are regarded, like all other

rhetorical devices, as being deviations from everyday language. This assumption is based on the premise

that “all everyday conventional language is literal and none is metaphorical”.

b) The second assumption is that metaphors are merely a matter of words.

c) The third assumption states that there has to be literal language first, for us to have metaphor.

According to this assumption metaphor was defined as “a novel or poetic linguistic expression” where one

or more words for a concept are used outside of their normal conventional meaning to express a “similar

concept”.

The traditional view of metaphor concentrates on the principle of transference of qualities from one thing

to another, which is a result of using the vehicle in place of the ordinary language.

The major shift in terms of perceiving metaphors happened when linguists replaced the notion of

metaphors as a deviant use of language with a view that stated that metaphors are an essential device in

human thought and discourse. By stating that human reasoning is largely figurative, linguists have

attempted to determine not only the role of metaphors in our cognitive activity but also the way in which

we use metaphors to communicate our thoughts.

According to this new perspective, the metaphor is defined as a cognitive mechanism whereby one

conceptual domain is partially mapped onto a different conceptual domain, the second domain being

partially understood in terms of the first one: “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing

one kind of thing in terms of another.” The domain that is mapped is called the source and the domain

onto which it is mapped is called the target. In a later revised version, Lakoff provides further explanations

and defines metaphors as “permanent mental mappings between source domains and target domains” .

The general idea governing the traditional approach to metaphor focused only on the literal content,

metaphors being regarded as confusing and merely emotive matters of language, and defined as figures of

speech, completely unsuited to serious or scientific discourse. They were solely used for some artistic and

rhetorical purpose, their role being primarily decorative and ornamental.

However, the perspective has definitely changed since the emergence of the cognitive view of metaphor.

According to this, metaphor is the main mechanism that helps us understand abstract concepts and

perform abstract reasoning. Furthermore, metaphors are fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature

and they are mostly based on correspondences in our experiences, rather than on similarity.

9) Provide the metaphoric utterances that express the conceptual metaphor of

”LOVE IS A JOURNEY”

- Our relationship has hit a dead-end street

- Look how far we’ve come

- We can’t turn back now

- We’re at a cross-roads

- We may have to go our separate ways

- The relationship isn’t going anywhere

- We’re spinning our wheels

- The marriage is on the rocks

”ARGUMENT IS WAR”

- Your claims are indefensible

- He attacked every weak point in my argument

- His criticisms were right on target

- I demolished his argument

- I’ve nev