PRESUPPOSITION

This is a very long post (which I was trying to avoid) but I was hoping I could explain what I sort of introduced at the end of a previous post called SPEECH ACT THEORY in The Big Bang Theory.

Presuppositions are implicit assumptions about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted. “I'm doing the dishes now” implies that the speaker, he or she, must have dirty dishes Any listener assumes it to be true. It refers to common knowledge. It's usually shared by the different participants involved in the speech act. You can also put the same sentence into a negative one, but the presupposition would still be the same.

There are six “major” types. Though I have read there are many more, for the purpose of this entry I will only list these six.
1. Existential Presupposition: By saying “Give me the glass, please”, the speaker is basically saying that the mentioned glass does exist.
2. Factive Presupposition: Can be used with verbs such as “regret”, “know”, “realize”, “be aware of” and so on. “He regrets stealing the bike” presupposes that he (whoever he is) stole a bike.
3. Non-factive Presupposition: Presupposes the non-truth of the fact. “She pretended to be rich”. If she was rich, she wouldn't have needed to pretend being rich.
4. Lexical Presupposition: Presupposes something that is not explicitly said. By saying “Tom escaped”, the speaker implies that Tom tried to escape and finally succeeded. The speaker is understood without explicitly saying that Tom had been trying to escape before succeding. Words such as “still”, “again”, “continue”, or “no more/any more/no longer” give listeners hints: “The King is still ruling the country” → The King ruled the country before.
5. Structural Presupposition: Is mainly used with “wh-” words. By asking “When did your dog die?” a listener knows immediately that the dog died. There is no answer needed to presuppose this fact. “How many years have you been living in Spain” makes the listener presuppose that you (i.e. the addressee of the question) has been living in Spain in the past.
6. Counterfactual Presupposition: What is presupposed is not only not true but it is the opposite of what is said that is true. “If I weren't poor” means, then, that the speaker actually is ill. “I wish I had called him” → The speaker did not call him.

In order to draw these conclusions for ourselves in our everyday life, we use unconsciously a “tool” called Entailment, which helps us to get to a logical consequence when we hear or read sentences. The utterance “Tom has been caught by the police” entails the truth of another one. Firstly, the presupposition would be that Tom escaped (if not, the police wouldn't be trying to catch him, for example). And secondly, the entailment would be that he is no longer free (if we imagine that he escaped temporarily from jail), that he is under arrest.

Finally, we must also know what an Implicature is: we usually talk in order to successfully communicate and thus, cooperate each other with our interlocutors -that is, we contribute to build up information and the understanding of it. If someone asks you “Have you passed your Literature exam?” and you answer “My brother has a new girlfriend” there is no cooperation whatsoever in trying to maintain a coherent conversation. Hence, there is no implicature. If a speaker uses implicatures and the listener recognizes them, we speak of an inference.

Well, now we may apply this to what Leonard said to Sheldon in the Episode about the sarcasm sign. This was the conversation they had in the kitchen:
- "For God's sake, Sheldon. Do I have to pull out a sarcasm sign everytime I open my mouth?" As usual, Sheldon doesn't get the point and asks
- "You have a sarcasm sign?!" And, again, as usual, Leonard put on his I-can't-believe-this-face and answers:
- “No, I do not have a sarcasm sign”.

What I wanted to explain in this post is that Sheldon, in his linguistic/interactive etc. etc. clumsiness again does not understand irony, sarcasm because of his lack of understanding indirect speech acts and this way takes Leonards “rhetoric question” literally. Usually, “normal people” understand the difference between saying “a sarcasm sign” and “the sarcasm sign”*. Is is the latter example, the definite noun phrase, that linguistically "assures" the existence of whatever is named after it. But again, Sheldon doesn't work well with implicatures, entailments, inferences, which are all related to speech acts.

*Think about it. Usually, when actually have that X, when we speak with someone who also knows of the existence of it, we would say “the X”. If many Xs exist, but we do not own one, we use “a X”. As in “I might buy a car soon”. Whereas, if a friend forgot something in your car you would say “Have a look in the car”.

WHY PATCHWORK DESIGN?

This year I had an incredible teacher in the subject Discourse and Text who explained which the features of language are. She spoke about the texture language has, the ability to make all elements work together in an articulated or non articulated manner. The form it has, what its structure is. All the elements -even if tiny words- work together to create a larger element. There is always an internal unity. It is always (whether spoken or written) a unified whole.

The thread that forms a piece of cloth could be a tiny element, then, some more words, or even phrases or sentences put together could be one of these patchwork squares. And if we put together the squares, we can get short or huge texts. But they are always linked to another thread of another square.

This roughly explains cohesion (lol). Why we can find a lot of lexical repetition throughout a long text, substitution without losing track of what is meant and so on.

This brilliant teacher showed us a close-up picture of a piece of cloth, so at first sight we couldn't really identify what it was. This way she also emphasised the necessity of getting information about the context. Hence, if we only see the threads (according to the visual metaphor: only some words) we can't guess what it is/its meaning. But later on, as she showed us another image in which we could see the whole piece, we knew what it was. A beautiful lesson!

So I thought that a patchwork background is a nice visual metaphor to extend this idea. Not to speak about the fact that we can perceive language as colorful, playful and creative as creating a patchwork blanket... 

These images are only examples that illustrate the idea I explained before. They are not the actual images my teacher used.

PROSODY IN ORAL LANGUAGE – Stress, Intonation, and Pause/Timing

In Linguistics Prosody the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Thus, as it is part of the oral language, we may consider many more posibilities of “manipulation” the sound of a word, a sequence of words or whole sentences as if they are written. I will consider only stress and intonation for the purpose of this entry.

In Discourse, Consciousness, and Time (1994), Wallace Chafe gives us plenty of information about the term prosody: it “embraces a variety of perceptual and physical properties of sound, including pitch, loudness, timing, voice quality, and the presence or absence of vocalization itself.” Further: we can “approach prosody from the perspective of a phonetician, using displays of frequency, intensity, and duration as the primary data for understanding what language does with these aspects of sound” (page 56). A little later, Chafe states that language is segmented into spurts, or “intonation units” (page 57).

Steven Pinker further states in his book The Language Instinct (2007) that we continuously change pitch over the course of a sentence. This process is called Intonation: “Intonation is controlled in sarcasm, emphasis, and an emotional tone of voice such as anger or cheeriness” (page 160).

In the TV series Cougar Town, episode 4 from season 2 “The Damage you've done” (min. 11:20) Travis, previous to going to college agreed with his still-girlfriend Kylie to have a freer relationship and see others when they're not together. When he comes home and meets up with her, he suddenly realises Kylies new “kissing-behavior”. So he asks her why she is biting him while kissing:

Travis: […] Well, it was a little scary. Where is this coming from? Are you seeing this guy from before?

Kylie: I told you. I'm not seeing...him.
Travis: You stress the word him as if there were other hims.




Through this example, we can observe how Kylie uses two different aspects of prosody: stress of the word “him” and a slight pause immediately before the emphasised word. In this case, we can certainly say that it is done on purpose to make the listener notice the little lie behind the utterance. As if saying “well...not him, but another guy/him”.
We could even see it as an attempt to soften what is being told in a second, or to warn about something the listener won't like a bit.
I also find Travis' answer quite amusing, especially when uttering the plural of “him”, also emphasised, as if being aware of the lie and of the strangeness in using a plural for this pronoun. Of course, if you watch the episode, you can observe additional features surrounding the utterance, such as facial and body gestures, which also give away much information to the “simply” connected words.
Besides, Chafe considers the use of “well” at the beginning of a sentence to be an example of a regulatory intonation unit. In his book he also speaks about substantive and fragmentary intonation units (page 63).

Obviously, there is much more to Prosody and all its components. We will see them as I will be finding some examples...

WELCOME

This blog is essentially about anything related "farfetchedly" or directly to linguistics. In order to not bore you, I will try to apply random linguistic theory to or explain them through fun/interesting TV series, movies, comics, novels, etc.

There is no order in which I will deal with the specific topics. I usually watch something interesting worth explaining or commenting on and then search for theory from different sources.

Please don't take this blog too seriously. Even though I always try to give the year, type and title of the source, there may be mistakes. And obviously, I won't give the whole theory surrounding a topic, but rather what I think is important to what I want to mention in relation to the series, movie and so on.

As I am still studying (Complutense University in Madrid) and not a native English speaker, I kindly ask you to pardon all the possible grammar or subject-related mistakes. Of course, any comments, suggestions, and opinions are more than welcome.

Thanks a lot and enjoy the stay :) Greets,

Lingueek.

INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

Through this comic stripe taken from Calvin and Hobbes we can see a good example of Indirect Speech Acts.

Calvin

View more documents from lingueek

SPEECH ACTS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Finally, in order to complete this "unit", here's an audio file recorded by a fun guy who speaks about Speech Acts and how, knowing on what they're based, people mainly uses them to "lie".

Needless to say, this is a parody. Nevertheless, we get many nice examples of how Locutionary, Illocutionary and Perlocutionary acts are performed in real life.


Taken from Youtube.com and converted into MP3 with the kind permission of  http://www.youtube.com/user/BenLoka?feature=watch

As Linguistics is a huge field of study, I recommend you to have a look on these pages, mainly online journals about Ideology, Stylistics, Pragmatics, Semantics, etc.

- http://www.discourses.org/resources/journals/
- http://www.davidcrystal.com/David_Crystal/stylistics.htm
- http://www.equinoxpub.com/JAL
I had the pleasure of attending a talk about Ideology recently, given by Teun Van Dijk. This is his page:

There is also a very interesting link about the pronunciation in many different languages which I discovered recently:

SPEECH ACT THEORY in The Big Bang Theory

Once understood what a speaker can do (and most of the time does unknowingly) with language and how this is reflected in utterances, we may understand better the main character Sheldon Cooper and why he is the funniest one of the sitcom.

In other words, Sheldon does not perceive these uses people make of language, and thus, is utterly unable to perceive irony, sarcasm, etc. when somebody is messing with him or, on the contrary, when his friends do actually mean what they are saying.

Here you have a video which illustrates his "social/linguistic clumsiness":

Obviously, there are more factors (tone, gestures, facial expression) besides only the words Penny uses which hint that she does not want to be a waitress at the Cheescake Factory for the rest of her life.

It goes even further when Leonard asks somewhat rhetorically:
"For God's sake, Sheldon. Do I have to pull out a sarcasm sign everytime I open my mouth?"
As usual, Sheldon doesn't get the point and asks -more interested in the apparent fact (according to Leonards previous utterance): "You have a sarcasm sign?!".

The latter question is actually about another interesting topic: Presupposition.

INTRODUCTION TO SPEECH ACT THEORY

In order to understand what I will explain through some hilarious scenes from the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, here you have a short Power Point Presentation about Speech Acts (Austin, 1962).

Speech acts