Marius Mumbeck
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Consider differences in register (or style), such as “dead/deceased” or “dog/bow-wow”. The items in each pair have the same truth-conditional meaning; yet, they differ in their social appropriateness. However, this aspect is still underexplored in pragmatics. To improve our understanding of register items, I will examine their role in (putative) manner implicatures (considering them GCIs; Levinson 2000).
Assuming that in cases like “dog/bow-wow”, the former item is unmarked and the latter marked, I argue that marked register items can be used inappropriately relative to social maxims (i.e., by flouting them) to manner-implicate something—e.g. using “bow-wow” may implicate that the mature addressee is behaving childishly. Since Grice didn’t postulate (but did hold out the prospect of (1989, 28)) such social maxims, I suggest extending the notion of manner implicature with the social (sub-)maxim “be socially appropriate”.
I further argue that marked register items (MRIs) not only serve to flout this maxim. Rather, it seems more common to use MRIs in accordance with the maxim. Describing MRIs in terms of conditions of social appropriateness rather than content (Sander 2022), I argue that ordinary uses of MRIs implicate the speaker’s awareness of the social context (which works because the interlocutors observe the context and the maxim). I suggest that such implica-tures—I call them “social implicatures”—are a subset of manner implicatures. However, considering the properties commonly attributed to manner implicatures (Rett 2020), social implicatures might represent an unusual case.
References
Grice, P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Oxford: HUP
Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge: MIT Press
Rett, J. 2020. “Manner implicatures and how to spot them”, in: International Review of Pragmatics 12. 44-79
Sander, T. 2022. “Meaning without content”, in: Inquiry
Chair: David Holtgrave
Time: 03 September, 17:30 – 18:00
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 