1.

Place Deixis

Definition: deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Place deixis, also known as space deixis, concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person deixis, the locations can be those of the speaker and addressee, or those of persons or objects being referred to. The most salient English examples are the adverbs here and there and the demonstratives this and that, though they are far from the only deictic words. The correspondences in Bulgarian are and the demonstratives and . Examples: I enjoy living in this city. . Here is where he lives. . She was sitting over there. . As a first approximation, English here denotes a region including the speaker, there a distal region more remote from the speaker. Unless otherwise specified, place deictic terms are generally understood to be relative to the location of the speaker, as in The shop is across the street. . Where across the street is understood to mean across the street from where I am right now.This is relevant for Bulgarian as well. Demonstratives are also deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference) that indicate which entities a speaker refers to, and distinguish those entities from others. Demonstratives are employed for spatial deixis (using the context of the physical surroundings) and as discourse deixis, referring to propositions mentioned in speech. The demonstratives in English are this, that, these, and those, possibly followed by one(s) in case of pronouns, as explained below. Many languages make a two-way distinction between demonstratives. Typically, one set of demonstratives is proximal, indicating objects close to the speaker (English this), and the other series is distal, indicating objects removed from the speaker (English that). Demonstrative determiners and pronouns: It is relatively common for a language to distinguish between demonstrative determiners (or demonstrative adjectives, determinative demonstratives) and demonstrative pronouns (or independent demonstratives). A demonstrative determiner modifies a noun: This apple is good. . I like those houses. . A demonstrative pronoun stands on its own, replacing rather than modifying a noun: This is good. . I like those. .

Gesture is one way of securing the addressees attention to a feature of the environment. In philosophical approaches to language, gestural presentation has been thought to be crucial for language learning. Demonstratives and many other deictics have no substantial descriptive content, so that once the contextual parameters have been fixed they are directly referential (Kaplan 1990). Note that a true demonstrative remains transparent in an intentional context Ralph said he broke that can only have that identified as the thing the speaker is now pointing at, not the thing Ralph pointed at the speaker cannot withhold a gesture on the grounds that Ralph made it. Further, deictics do not generally fall under the scope of negation or modal operators: That is not a planet cannot be understood as I am not indicating x and x is a planet (En 1981). The following examples are hopefully self-explanatory of the distinctions involved: 1. Give me that book (exophoric: book available in the physical context). . 2. I hurt this finger (exophoric gestural: requires gesture or presentation of finger) . 3. I like this city (exophoric symbolic: does not require gesture) . 4. I broke this tooth first and then that one next (gestural contrastive) , . 5. The cowboy entered. This man was not someone to mess with. (anaphoric) . , . 6. He went and hit that bastard (empathetic) . 7 Do you remember that holiday we spent in Devon? (recognitional) , ? There is another interesting issue, concerning the space deixis. The verbs come and go. Verbs of coming and going have been thought to be universal, but that is not the case. In the first instance, many languages do not have verbs that encode motion to or away from the deictic center. Thus if we say He didnt come home , you are unlikely to read He didnt go home (except possibly with contrastive emphasis on come).

2. Presupposition
A presupposition is a proposition that is part of the common ground (shared assumptions) of the speaker and hearer(s). Presuppositions thus contrast with what is asserted by an utterance. The distinction between assertion and presupposition and the role of shared assumptions in presupposition is clarified by the following examples from Heim and Kratzer (1998: 77): a. John is absent again today. . b. Today is not the first time that John is absent. , . c. John is absent today, and that has happened before. . All of these statements indicate that (the speaker believes that) a) John is absent today and b) John has been absent before. However, they assume different knowledge on the part of the hearer. If the hearer knows that John has been absent before but does not know that John is absent today, then (a) is appropriate, but (b) is not: (a) presupposes that John has been absent before and it asserts that he is absent today. On the other hand, if the hearer knows that John is

absent today but does not know that John has been absent before, then (b) is appropriate, but (a) is not: (b) presupposes that John is absent today and asserts that he has been absent before. Lastly, if the hearer does not know that John is absent today and also does not know that he has been absent before, then (c) is appropriate, but not the other two: (c) does not presupposes knowledge of Johns absence today or his previous absences and instead asserts both that he is absent today and that he has been absent before. In other words, a rough generalization is that one asserts new information (new to the conversation) and presupposes old information. A presupposition trigger is a construction or item that signals the existence of a presupposition in an utterance. In the linguistic branch of pragmatics a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. There are two major types of views of what presuppositions are: View 1: Presuppositions as conventional implicatures. According to this view, the presuppositions of a sentence are just another component of the total package of information that the sentence can be used to convey. Other components of this package include the content and the conversational implicatures. Only Karttunen & Peters use the term "conventional implicatures"; Gazdar calls them "presuppositions View 2: Presuppositions as admittance conditions. This notion of presupposition relies on a notion of "common ground": Roughly, the common ground of a context of utterance is the conjunction of all those propositions that the interlocutors take for granted in that context (either because they are permanently shared beliefs in their community, or because they have been established in the course of the preceding conversation). Examples of presuppositions include: Do you want to do it again? ? o Presupposition: that you have done it already, at least once. Jane no longer writes novels. . o Presupposition: that Jane once wrote fiction. A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance. Lets give a few customary illustrations of the phenomenon: Definite descriptions have existence presuppositions, therefore (1) presupposes (2). (1) John talked to his brother. . (2) that John has a brother A certain class of sentence embedding verbs, the so-called "factives", presuppose the truth of their complement. So (3) presupposes (4). (3) John realized that he had lost. , . (4) that John had lost Aspectual verbs like start, stop, and aspectual adverbs like still, again presuppose certain things concerning the truth or falsity of the embedded proposition at times before or after the reference time. E.g. (5) presupposes (6). (5) It stopped raining (at 5 o'clock). 5 . (6) that it had been raining (for an interval immediately preceding 5 o'clock) Words like too, also, presuppose the truth of certain propositions that are in some sense analogous to the one they apply to. E.g. (7) presupposes (8).

(7) John will come too. (Spoken with focus on John.) . (8) that someone other than John will come. Crucially, negation of an expression does not change its presuppositions: I want to do it again and I don't want to do it again both presuppose that the subject has done it already one or more times. My wife is pregnant. and My wife is not pregnant both presuppose that the subject has a wife. In this respect, presupposition is distinguished from entailment and implicative.
3.

Conversational Implicature and Conventional Implicature

Maxims of Conversation (Grice, 1975) Obeyance and Violation: Grice claims that the listed maxims offer the basis for utterance interpretation. Sometimes, adherence to maxims will allow hearers to understand more than the literal content of the utterance. Sometimes, a seeming flouting of a maxim leads to richer information. The maxim of Quality: Try to make your contribution true, specifically a. do not say what you believe to be false; b. do not say that for which your lack adequate evidence. Hearers try to interpret speakers in a way that leads to a true utterance (unless debating): Violation of Quality: with his eyes covered: Oh, what an absolutely lovely christmas decoration. Status of lying? The maxim of Quantity: a. Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange. b. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. be as informative as you can (1) What did your teacher say about your forgotten homework? Well, he got pretty furious. (Indeed, he got me kicked out of school.) Do not say more than required. How are you? Well, so-so. (Instead of full rendering of days desasters.) The maxim of Relevance: Make your contribution relevant. Do you know the time? The bus No. 9 just passed by. The maxim of Manner: a. avoid obscurity; b. avoid ambiguity; c. be brief; d. be orderly Sally caused the car to start. =Sally started the car. Violation of brevity leads hearer to suspect unnatural circumstances. Now. Put your left arm into the left sleeve of your coat. Put your right arm into the right sleeve. And close the buttons. => You are an idiot,=> Think of first things first, rather than worrying about the eventual outcome before we even started. Be Orderly original cases: (1) Joe read Simplify your life. He quit his job. He moved to a log hut in the woods. Relate events in the order in which they occur. (2) Joe did everything in order to avoid a stroke. He read Simplify your life. He quit his job. He moved to a log hut in the woods. Still, at the age of 45 he dropped down dead. Avoid ambiguity / obscurity: Example for obscurity: Parents discussing whether one should have I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M, in front of children. Example for ambiguity: British General mailing that he conquered Sined as peccavi = I have sinned / I have Sind. Conventional implicatures were identified by Grice along with the conversational implicatures driven by the Maxims. In fact, conventional implicatures were generally not distinguished from presuppositions in early work. According to Grice in some cases, the

conventional meaning of the words used will determine what is implicated, besides helping to determine what is said. In sum, conventional implicatures are like presuppositions in being triggered and being separate from assertions. However the key difference between the two is that, unlike presuppositions, conventional implicatures do not affect the truth of their context. Lets consider two of the principal cases of conventional implicature identified and analyzed by Potts: Supplements (appositives, parentheticals) Lance Armstrong, a Texan, won the Tour de France. Appositive indefinite Assertion: Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France. Conventional implicature: Lance Armstrong is a Texan. Expressives (epithets, evaluative modifiers) Agent Mills found George passed out by the couch and said the idiot had choked on a pretzel. Epithet, the idiot = George Assertion: Agent Mills found George passed out by the couch and said George had choked on a pretzel. Conventional implicature: The speaker thinks George is an idiot. The key to the distinction between conventional implicatures and presuppositions is that presuppositions affect truth, but conventional implicatures do not. This is readily apparent if we contrast a presupposition trigger, such as a definite description, with a conventional implicature trigger, such as a supplement (in this case, an appositive definite description): (1) The King of France, Jacques Chirac, is in town. Main Clause presupposition: There is a King of France. Main Clause conventional implicature: The King of France is Jacques Chirac. (2) Jacques Chirac, the King of France, is in town. Main Clause presupposition: Main Clause conventional implicature: Jacques Chirac is the King of France. Presupposition inside conventional implicature: There is a King of France. Grice suggested that conventional implicature involves the performance of "noncentral" speech acts. He had in mind the use of such expressions as these: English: after all, anyway, at any rate, besides, be that as it may, by the way, first of all, finally, frankly, furthermore, however, if you want my opinion, in conclusion, indeed, in other words, moreover, now that you mention it, on the other hand, otherwise, speaking for myself, strictly speaking, to begin with, to digress, to oversimplify, to put it mildly Bulgarian: , , , , , -, , , , , , , , , , , .

4. Speech Acts
We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "Im sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include real-life interactions and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture.

When we speak, our words do not have meaning in and of themselves. They are very much affected by the situation, the speaker and the listener. Thus words alone do not have a simple fixed meaning. Locutionary act: saying something (the locution) with a certain meaning in traditional sense. This may not constitute a speech act. Illocutionary act: the performance of an act in saying something (vs. the general act of saying something). The illocutionary force is the speaker's intent. A true 'speech act'. E.g. informing, ordering, warning, undertaking. Perlocutionary acts: Speech acts that have an effect on the feelings, thoughts or actions of either the speaker or the listener. In other words, they seek to change minds! Unlike locutionary acts, perlocutionary acts are external to the performance. e.g., inspiring, persuading or deterring. Oh! - is an utterance (note that communication is not intended - it is just a sound caused by surprise). The black cat - is a propositional act (something is referenced, but no communication may be intended) The black cat is stupid - is an assertive illocutionary act (it intends to communicate). Please find the black cat - is a directive perlocutionary act (it seeks to change behaviour). Here are some examples of speech acts we use or hear every day: Greeting: "Hi, Eric. How are things going?" , , , Request: "Could you pass me the mashed potatoes, please?" , , , Complaint: "Ive already been waiting three weeks for the computer, and I was told it would be delivered within a week." . Invitation: "Were having some people over Saturday evening and wanted to know if youd like to join us." , , Compliment: "Hey, I really like your tie!". , , , , Refusal: "Oh, Id love to see that movie with you but this Friday just isnt going to work." , , a, Expression of an apology: the speaker uses a word, expression, or sentence containing a verb such as "sorry," "excuse," "forgive," or "apologize". Such intensification is usually accomplished by adding intensifiers such as "really" or "very" -- e.g., "I'm really sorry." Bulgarian examples: a, , , . . Acknowledgement of responsibility: The offender recognizes his/her fault in causing the infraction: "It's my fault." "I was confused/I didn't see/you are right." "I didn't mean to." "I was sure I had given you the right directions." Bulgarian examples: , , , , . Speech acts are difficult to perform in a second language because learners may not know the idiomatic expressions or cultural norms in the second language or they may transfer their first language rules and conventions into the second language, assuming that such rules are universal. Sarah: "I couldnt agree with you more. " Cheng: "Hmmm." (Thinking: "She couldnt agree with me? I thought she liked my idea!")