Michael Haugh Im/Politeness Implicatures Mouton Series in Pragmatics Editor Istvan Kecskes Editorial Board Reinhard Blutner (Universiteit von Amsterdam) N.J. Enfield (Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics) Raymond W. Gibbs (University of California, Santa Cruz) Laurence R. Horn (Yale University) Boaz Keysar (University of Chicago) Ferenc Kiefer (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Liuis Payrató (University of Barcelona) François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod) John Searle (University of California, Berkeley) Deirdre Wilson (University College London) Volume 11 Michael Haugh Im/Politeness Implicatures ISBN 978-3-11-024006-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-024007-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039466-5 ISSN 1864-6409 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Contents List of tables and figures | viii Transcription conventions | ix Morphological gloss conventions | x Preface | xi Introduction | 1 1 I m/politeness implicatures | 1 2 Overview of the volume | 7 Chapter One: Indirectness and im/politeness | 13 1 Politeness and indirectness | 13 2 Interpersonal functions of indirectness | 17 3 Analysing indirectness | 20 3.1 Indirectness as pragmatic mismatch | 21 3.2 Indirectness as mitigation | 30 3.3 Indirectness as social action | 33 3.4 Indirectness as culturally imbued practice | 34 4 From indirectness to implicature | 38 Chapter Two: Approaches to implicature | 41 1 Gricean and neo-Gricean approaches to implicature | 42 1.1 Conversational implicatures and normativity | 43 1.2 Types of Gricean implicature | 47 1.2.1 Conventional implicature | 48 1.2.2 Conversational implicature | 52 1.2.3 Non-conventional, non-conversational implicature | 60 1.2.4 Types of neo-Gricean implicature | 62 1.3 Implicatures and cancellability | 63 2 Post-Gricean approaches to implicature | 69 2.1 Implicature and defaults | 69 2.2 Implicature in Relevance theory | 73 2.2.1 Implicatures as implicitly communicated assumptions | 74 2.2.2 On differentiating implicatures from explicatures | 78 vi       Contents Chapter Three: Implicature, social action and indeterminacy | 86 1 Implicature and interaction | 86 2 Implicature and social action | 89 2.1 Implicature and indirect speech acts | 90 2.2 Implicature and intentions | 95 2.3 Implicature as social action | 98 2.4 Implicature and action ascription | 107 3 Implicature and meaning-actions | 111 4 Implicature and indeterminacy | 122 4.1 Types of indeterminacy | 125 4.2 Indeterminacy and accountability | 136 Chapter Four: Implicature, im/politeness and social practice | 142 1 Implicature, relationality and (im)propriety | 143 2 Politeness as implicature | 149 3 Im/politeness as attitudinal evaluation | 158 4 Im/politeness and social practice | 171 4.1 Im/politeness and the moral order | 172 4.2 Im/politeness and the participation order | 179 Chapter Five: Situating im/politeness implicatures in interaction | 189 1 Im/politeness implicatures as social practice | 190 1.1 Im/politeness as occasioned by implicatures | 191 1.2 Implicatures as constitutive of im/politeness | 202 1.3 Implicatures as occasioned by im/politeness | 210 2 Im/politeness implicatures and the temporal-sequential order | 215 2.1 Temporality: adjacency, incrementality and emergence | 216 2.2 Sequential position and accountability | 224 3 Im/politeness implicatures and the socio-inferential order | 229 3.1 Default im/politeness implicatures | 230 3.2 Nonce im/politeness implicatures | 233 4 The pragmatics of im/politeness implicatures | 237 Contents       vii Chapter Six: Politeness implicatures and social action | 240 1 Analysing politeness implicatures vis-à-vis social action | 240 2 Attenuating and withholding | 247 3 Pre-empting | 257 4 Soliciting | 262 5 Disattending | 268 6 Doing delicacy | 272 Chapter Seven: Impoliteness implicatures and offence | 278 1 Implicating negative assessments | 280 2 Registering and sanctioning offence | 286 3 Mock impoliteness implicatures and relationality | 292 4 Disputing implicated offence | 300 Chapter Eight: Conclusion | 307 1 Im/politeness implicatures, social action and social practice | 307 2 Theoretical implications | 313 2.1 Implications for theorising implicature | 313 2.2 Implications for theorising im/politeness | 317 3 Towards an interactional pragmatics | 320 References | 323 Index | 353 List of tables and figures Figure 1: Key interpersonal functions of indirectness | 19 Figure 2: Types of Gricean implicature  | 47 Figure 3: Key types of neo-Gricean implicature | 63 Figure 4: The participation order | 181 Figure 5: The post-Aristotelian/Apuleian Square of Opposition | 204 Figure 6: Evaluations of im/politeness in English and the Square of Opposition | 205 Figure 7: Evaluations of im/politeness in Chinese and the Square of Opposition | 209 Figure 8: Types of pragmatic inference | 229 Figure 9: Im/politeness implicatures as social practice | 238 Figure 10: The (meta)pragmatics of im/politeness implicatures | 321 Table 1: Key dimensions of the moral order | 310 Transcription conventions [ ] overlapping speech (0.5) numbers in brackets indicate pause length (.) micropause : elongation of vowel or consonant sound - word cut-off . falling or final intonation ? rising intonation , ‘continuing’ intonation = latched utterances underlining contrastive stress or emphasis CAPS markedly loud ° ° markedly soft .hh in-breath hh out-breath/aspiration ↓ ↑ sharp falling/rising intonation > < talk is compressed or rushed < > talk is markedly slowed or drawn out ( ) blank space or talk in parentheses indicates uncertainty about the transcription (( )) double brackets indicates extra contextual or non-verbal information Morphological gloss conventions Acc accusative ASP aspect C counter Cont contrastive marker Cop copula CP complement Dim diminuative Imp imperative M mood marker Gen genitive Hon honorification Imp imperative Neg negation Nom nominative Nomi nominaliser Past past tense PL plural Pol “polite” form Pot potential Prog progressive PRT particle Q question marker Quot quotation Tag tag question marker Te “te”-form Top topic marker Vol volitional % code-switch