Minding Our Manners: Investigating The Nature Of Gricean Manner Implicature Using Psychological Priming Techniques

That we often mean more than we say is a hallmark of human communication. As per the Gricean-inspired perspective of communication, the gap between what is said and what is implicated is bridged using a set of conversational maxims that can be exploited to trigger conversational implicatures. This thesis investigates the nature of Gricean Manner Implicature (MI) and its relationship with other types of conversational implicature, specifically ad-hoc and adjectival scalar Quantity Implicature (QI) and I-Implicature. While QI, which arises from violations of the Maxim of Quantity, has enjoyed broad theoretical and experimental investigation, MI—triggered by violations of the Maxim of Manner (e.g., “Be perspicuous”)—remains comparatively underexplored. Moreover, there is no consensus between popular models of conversational implicature derivation concerning the extent to which shared or partially shared mechanisms derive MI, QI and I-Implicature. Similarly, there is a lack of clarity concerning the nature of different implicature subtypes, their qualities, and the extent to which they constitute unique types of conversational implicature. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and theoretical pragmatics by extending Bott and Chemla’s (2016) priming paradigm to MI, which contributes to the scant body of research concerning Manner-based enrichments. The thesis presents a series of experiments with adult native English speakers that used a novel sentence-to-picture matching task to prime the derivation of MI using MI primes, two types of QI primes and I-Implicature primes, to explore the extent to which priming occurs within and between different types of conversational implicature. In Experiment 1, a novel methodology for eliciting MI and I-Implicature is developed, establishing baseline rates for each and providing evidence of the psychological validity of marked-based contrasts. Experiment 2 explores whether other MI can prime MI and whether the effect is influenced by implicit or explicit instruction. Experiments 3–6 extend the priming paradigm to test cross-phenomenon effects, investigating whether I-Implicature, ad hoc QI, adjectival scalar QI, and a neutral condition can prime MI. The findings suggest that both MI and QI and I-Implicature can prime MI but suggest that the nature of the within-category and between-category priming effects are fundamentally different. These findings are discussed with respect to theoretical models of implicature derivation.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Cowan, Joe

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Katsos, Napoleon
• Gibson, Jenny

• Linguistics
• Experimental Pragmatics
• Pragmatics
• Gricean Pragmatics
• Priming
• Implicature
• Conversational Implicature
• Gricean Implicature

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4e554c26-b53a-4bff-b553-a0da7806e8af/download
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.117755

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/383343