Personal Narrative Analysis

Using natural language to communicate is, for the vast majority of us, something we do every day from a very young age. That said, when we look closely, communication is not without its fair share of hurdles. Indeed, is a fact of human social intercourse that individuals do not always say what they mean, or mean what they say in conversational contexts. In this paper, we will expound upon the issue of implicatures present in human communication, as described by Grice. In addition, we will present two related theories which attempt to elucidate how human beings are able to grasp what others mean with seemingly little effort. Lastly, we will look at how easily our cognitive system can be co-opted, by introducing the notion of deception.

Having a conversation seems straightforward enough. After all, it is something most of us do every day. That said, conversing is not as plain sailing as it appears. Indeed, conversing requires us to go beyond the individual meaning of words or the literal meaning of individual sentences in isolation. We must contend with an ever-evolving spiral of ideas and thoughts often not conveyed explicitly to us. This obvious gap between semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning should in theory completely hinder our ability to communicate. It is by observing this common phenomenon that philosopher of language H. P. Grice came up with the term “implicature”. Grice described two types of implicatures: conventional implicatures (communicating by the words themselves) and conversational implicatures. In this paper, we will concern ourselves with the later. Simply put, a conversational implicature is a feature of human verbal communication, by which what a speaker means is suggested, rather than literally stated. At all times, both speaker and listener must make inferences about each other; the speaker must infer what the listener knows and doesn’t know in order to maximize the impact of their utterance, and the listener must work out what the speaker wishes to convey. Moreover, this phenomenon is highly context-dependent, which adds a layer of complexity. Indeed, the same utterance in different contexts could communicate completely different ideas or information. To illustrate, let’s take a possible utterance: “He is very sociable!” and plug it in two different contexts: A daycare employee talking about a child’s first day at their establishment to the child’s parent. The response from a child’s piano teacher to a parent inquiring about their child’s piano lesson. In the first context (a), the parent could reasonably infer that their child was well-behaved and got on with the other children at daycare. In the second context (b), perhaps the parent may come to understand that their child may not have a natural talent for piano after all. The same utterance, used in two different contexts, yielding two different meanings. To understand how Grice attempted to explain the phenomenon by which individuals are able to understand implicatures, we must first understand what Grice believes is the goal of communication, that is, information. …show more content…
For Grice, gathering (on the part of the hearer) and spreading information (on the part of the speaker) is at the essence of why humans communicate. Information,of course, can be used to influence or be influenced, also an important part of human interaction. Following this logic, Grice believes in the primacy of truth; untrue information is not bad information it is merely not information. This will be an important detail as we move forward. So, how do listeners infer what speakers