Implicature phenomena in classical rhetoric

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Journal of Pragmatics 50 (2013) 129--151 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Implicature phenomena in classical rhetoric Attila L. Nemesi * Department of Communication Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Egyetem u. 1., H-2087 Piliscsaba-Klotildliget, Hungary Received 31 August 2012; received in revised form 8 February 2013; accepted 12 February 2013

Abstract Should pragmatics incorporate some key notions of classical rhetoric, or is it better to insist on its own concepts? How do we imagine the relationship between pragmatics and rhetoric? The aim of this paper is to explore three classic rhetorical terms (enthymeme, trope, and figure of thought) as being closely related to Gricean implicature. After discussing different attitudes to rhetoric held among pragmaticists, the definitions are scrutinized and straightforward examples are analyzed in the light of the literature on implicatures. It is argued that classical rhetoric describes a great number of phenomena on empirical grounds which manifest themselves not only in public speeches but in everyday conversations as well. Although tropes have been discussed extensively, figures of thought are gravely understudied in pragmatics (with a few exceptions such as the simile and the rhetorical question). The paper specifies which figures of thought convey, per se, conversational implicature. It is difficult to assess, however, the similarity of enthymeme to implicature because of their vagueness. As a link between rhetoric and pragmatics, the two notions are proposed to complement each other: enthymemes have one or more missing premises, whereas in case of implicatures it is the conclusion which remains unexpressed. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Implicature; Rhetoric; Enthymeme; Tropes; Figures of speech; Figures of thought

1. Introduction Appreciations of the essential contribution H. P. Grice made to pragmatics often emphasize that he was the first scholar to systematically study utterances by which the speaker means something more than, or different from, what the sentence s/he used means in itself (Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, 1990:188; Davis, 1998:5, 2005/2010; Horn, 1999:391, 2004:3). Without going into what counts as a ‘systematic’ study and what does not, it is important to reconsider the intellectual legacy of the past. Ancient rhetoricians noticed that orators tend to use hidden premises (moreover, Aristotle in The ‘‘Art’’ of Rhetoric even advised them to do so for the purposes of persuasiveness), and it has been recognized that the meaning of the words in usage may differ from their ordinary sense, not to mention the thoughts and intentions that speakers, for certain reasons, do not express in the simplest and most overt way possible. For Grice, the rhetorical parallels to his own work either seemed irrelevant, or he simply overlooked them. We can suspect the latter from a completely unfounded remark that occurs in the retrospective epilog of his book Studies in the Way of Words, saying that ‘‘[g]enuine monologs are free from speaker’s implication’’ (1989:369). And, naturally, rhetoric deals with ‘‘solitary talk production,’’ whereas he is concerned ‘‘only with concerted talking,’’ the character of which ‘‘the presence of implicature rests on’’ (Grice, 1989:369). Note that, as Kiefer (1979:59--60) pointed out more than three decades ago, Grice’s ‘‘concerted talking’’ is a rather restricted type of communication (noncooperative exchanges, unequal interest, nonidentical social status, and interpersonal goals, such as influence and politeness, are avowedly excluded from his model).

* Tel.: +36 26 375 375/2300; fax: +36 26 375 375/2302. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.02.004

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Given that most of the pragmatic inquiry inspired by Grice has ignored any mention of the rhetorical tradition (see the very cursory historical references in two comprehensive chapters: Horn, 2004:3; Huang, 2011:407), I devote this paper to the examination of the connection between implicature and three notions inherited from classical rhetoric: enthymeme, trope, and figure of thought. Following the line of inquiry set by Dascal and Gross (1999), I believe that the advantages of Gricean pragmatics and Aristotelian-Quintilianian rhetoric can be combined fruitfully, as can be their terminology, at least partly. In section 2 I outline some rival views, including Dascal and Gross’, on the relation of the two disciplines, an issue addressed recently by Liu and Zhu (2011). Section 3 will focus on the concept of implicature and its (sub)types, indicating briefly the most prominent directions of current theoretical debates in pragmatics around the notion coined by Grice. The three sections following it, sections 4--6, explore the three central rhetorical terms one by one, aiming to illuminate the implicature properties their examples display (inasmuch as they do). Data taken from texts of various genres will show that the linguistic inventory of rhetoric contains a rich set of phenomena whose thorough pragmatic study in talk exchanges would add greatly to our understanding of conversational strategies. Tropes and/or figures of speech (no matter how wide their scope is compared one to the other) are common treasures of the two fields, but figures of thought have been quite neglected so far within pragmatics. Only simile and rhetorical question (more precisely, interrogation; έrv
thσiς, εrvthma in Greek, interrogatio in Latin) are generally familiar to pragmaticists. I will identify which groups of figures of thought are prone to create implicatures. The sceptical result I will arrive at is that rhetorical definitions are as loose as the typology of implicatures and the notion of implicature itself. My positive suggestion is that enthymemes and implicatures are best conceived as complementing each other: while an enthymeme has one or more missing premises, in case of implicatures we should infer the conclusion which is left unexpressed. Enthymematic implicatures, of course, also exist and will be exemplified.

2. Approaches to the relationship between rhetoric and pragmatics Let us adopt as general definitions that rhetoric concerns itself with effective public speaking, writing, and visual communication, whereas pragmatics investigates how people use language to achieve their multiple instrumental and interpersonal goals in different contexts and how they understand each other’s utterances. For Leech (1983), there is no reason not to apply a rhetorical approach to pragmatics, since speakers aim at communicating effectively not only in public genres but in everyday conversation as well. Communication is a goal-oriented activity to solve the problem of, from the speaker’s perspective, finding the best way to bring about a particular result in the hearer’s mind and, from the hearer’s perspective, working out what the speaker meant by what s/he said. The ‘‘pragmatic force’’ of an utterance is made up of its ‘‘illocutionary force’’ and ‘‘rhetorical force.’’ Illocutionary force, a term borrowed from speech act theory, determines the central action the utterance performs (e.g. an apology, command, compliment, promise, request, or a statement). The other component, rhetorical force, is defined as the meaning the utterance conveys regarding the speaker’s adherence to some rhetorical principles. What Leech calls ‘‘interpersonal rhetoric’’ is a set of conversational principles and their subordinate maxims. One of its constituents is Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle with the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Another involves Leech’s own Politeness Principle that subsumes the maxims of Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement, and Sympathy. A further ‘‘Phatic Maxim’’ is added to the list linking politeness to occasions of talking merely to preserve sociability, and, finally, two ‘‘higher-order’’ principles (Irony, Banter) as well as two more (Interest, Pollyanna) are introduced to account for rhetorical figures such as irony, hyperbole, and litotes. No doubt, Leech’s principles and maxims can be freely supplemented and modified to explain every alleged tendency in the language use of different social groups, communities, and cultures, which ‘‘makes the theory at best inelegant, at worst virtually unfalsifiable’’ (Thomas, 1995:167). Another problem is that they do not account for the daily use of metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, tautology, interrogation, etc. Nevertheless, the interpersonal rhetoric framework sheds light on what the two disciplines have in common: both study the principles and strategies, albeit under different labels, that make language use effective, and deal with how people negotiate the manifold constraints influencing their linguistic choices in the course of discourse (cf. Verschueren, 1999:55--69).1 The flexiblilty of this negotiation between illocutionary goals (Gricean maxims) and social goals (Leechian maxims) is well demonstrated by the four possible cases that

1 Liu and Zhu (2011:3404) claim that Leech in his model appropriates the notion of rhetoric, assigning it a new meaning to organize pragmatic principles and maxims into a new theoretical configuration. Actually, he attempts to broaden its scope to everyday conversations: ‘‘whereas rhetoric has been understood, in particular historical traditions, as the art of using language skillfully for persuasion, or for literary expression, or for public speaking, I have in mind the effective use of language in its most general sense, applying it primarily to everyday conversation, and only secondarily to more prepared and public uses of language’’ (Leech, 1983:15). In this way, the principles and maxims he enumerates underlie each kind of human communication. More specific rhetorical considerations like the officia oratoris can be applied to the ‘‘more prepared and public uses of language.’’ Another remarkable comment Liu and Zhu make is that some key notions (adaptability, linguistic choices) of Verschueren’s (1999) approach to pragmatics as a prespective ‘‘are reminiscent of terms long circulating in rhetoric’’ (3405).

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Leech (1983:104) describes: they can (1) compete (ordering, asking, demanding, or begging; telling the truth or lying to be polite), (2) coincide (offering, inviting, greeting, congratulating), (3) be indifferent to (asserting, reporting, announcing, instructing), and (4) conflict (threatening, accusing, cursing, reprimanding) with each other. Interpersonal rhetoric is much more elaborately discussed in Leech’s book than ‘‘textual rhetoric,’’ the principles of which -- Processibility, Clarity, Economy, and Expressibility -- are mentioned only in a cursory fashion (15--17, 131--151). Many scholars have more thoroughly investigated the everyday use of irony, hyperbole and, especially, metaphor and metonymy (e.g. Attardo, 2000, 2001; McCarthy and Carter, 2004; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Papafragou, 1996). It is a linguistic commonplace today that these tropes or figures of speech are as ubiqutious in banal conversations as they are in literary works and political speeches. One line of research focuses on comprehension: how people understand figurative expressions recognizing the intended meaning; what in fact this (often quite complex) intended meaning consists of; how human thinking can identify the different tropes; what role (if any) literal, conventional, or stored meaning plays in the interpretation process, etc. (for an up-to-date summary, see Gibbs and Colston, 2012). The other line is of production involving the frequency, co-occurrence (e.g. hyperbolic metaphors, ironic litoteses), and discourse goals of figures of speech (Kreuz and Roberts, 1993; Kreuz et al., 1996). Several attractive theories of figurative language exist, each based on distinct assumptions. Most notably for the present discussion, advocates of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1990; Reboul and Moeschler, 1998:160--171; Vega Moreno, 2007; Wilson and Sperber, 2012:84--96) sharply contrast their view with that of rhetoric, like followers of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the founders of the best-known cognitive theory of metaphor, who stress repeatedly that rhetoricians -- and the whole linguistic tradition that is rooted in their tenets -- have assigned only a peripheral (decorative) role to metaphor and other tropes in language, assuming literal meaning to be the default: the starting point of the interpretation process, clearly separable from the figurative meaning which can be paraphrased perfectly by a literal equivalent (cf. Deignan, 2005:1--9; Kövecses, 2002/2010:ix--xiii). In a similar vein, Sperber and Wilson (1990; Wilson and Sperber, 2012:84--96) suggest that rhetoric, portrayed as a discipline of ‘‘intellectual barrenness’’ (Liu and Zhu, 2011:3405), has failed to notice the extra cognitive effects associated with metaphors or irony, and sum up its ‘‘very rich and complex history’’ as ‘‘[e]ssentially the same substance [being] passed on by eighty generation of teachers to eighty generation of pupils’’ without any theoretical improvement (1990:140; 2012:84). Rhetorically, the essence of their argumentative strategy is to narrow down the subject matter of rhetoric to one of its branches, elocutio, which is defined as the study of tropes or figures of speech, and then, having equated rhetoric with tropology, to deconstruct the very notion of trope concluding that it is better abandoned. Naturally, if this were accepted, nothing would remain for rhetoric to study and teach: ‘‘metaphor and irony exploit quite different basic processes and are more closely related to other forms of speech -- the former to loose talk, the latter to a variety of echoic uses -- than to one another’’ (1990:154; 2012:96; cf. 2012:97--122; 123--145). As I argued elsewhere (Nemesi, 2010:402), in Grice’s framework cases of ‘loose talk’ (e.g. when someone asks me abroad where I am from, I respond, not misleadingly, that ‘‘I live in Budapest’’ instead of ‘‘I live in Piliscsaba’’, the latter village being some 30 km from the capital of Hungary) can be accounted for elegantly as a clash between the second maxim of Quantity and the first maxim of both Quantity and Quality, while metaphor and irony, closely related to one another, flout the first maxim of Quality. Thus, for Griceans at least, loose talk and metaphor exploit quite different basic processes, and this is also true of irony and nonironic echoic utterances (e.g. when I quote seriously my grandmother’s old saying which is well known within the family). Nonetheless, a convincing deconstruction of the relevance-theoretic view of figurative language requires a more elaborated argumentation in the light of negated (e.g. Life is not a bowl of cherries) and nonnegated but both literally and figuratively true (e.g. She has her heart in the right place) tropes. In contrast, Dascal and Gross’ (1999) programme is not to ‘‘abolish’’ rhetoric for the benefit of cognitive pragmatics (or cognitive psychology; see Wilson and Sperber, 2004:625) but to ‘‘marry’’ them. This endeavor might be realized, on the one hand, by reconstructing rhetoric as a cognitive theory, placing inference at its center, and, on the other hand, by extending Gricean theory to cover persuasive communication. As for the latter, Dascal and Gross (1999:107) highlight Grice’s (1975:47, 1989:28) own words by which he leaves the door open for unifying pragmatics and rhetoric: ‘‘I have stated my maxims as if [the particular purpose that talk is adapted to serve] were a maximally effective exchange of information; this specification is, of course, to narrow, and the scheme needs to be generalized to allow for such general purposes as influencing or directing the actions of others.’’ However, since persuasion may involve a discrepancy between the goals of the speaker (S) and the hearer (H) or may even be misleading, the Cooperative Principle (CP) and its maxims need to be revisited. Liu and Zhu, who propose a classical interdisciplinary relationship between pragmatics and rhetoric as two independent fields instead of merging or ‘‘marrying’’ them, postulate the ‘‘Non-Cooperative Principle’’ (NCP)2 as a general rhetorical principle compared in applicability and functionality to CP in pragmatics:

2 The idea of postulating a Non-Cooperative Principle is not new: on Attardo’s (1999:461, 2001:58; Eisterhold et al., 2006:1243) account, it is a negative counterpart to the CP for capturing the fact that violations of the CP are not random but obey principled patterns.

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Table 1 Liu and Zhu’s (2011:3411--3412) maxims of the NCP.

Maxims of Quantity: Maxims of Quality: Maxims of Relation: Maxims of Manner:

For the speaker

For the hearer

Say no less than is required for producing the intended effect on your addresse. Say only what your addressee believes or could be made to believe is true or valuable. Say only what your addressee deems or could be made to deem relevant. Adapt your mode of presentation to both your addressee and the context of communication.

Concede no more to the addressor than you feel noncoercively compelled to. Grant the addressor’s point only when you are not in doubt of its truthfulness or value. Consider only those of the addressor’s remarks which you find relevant. Treat the addressor’s talk seriously only when you find its mode of presentation appropriate.

‘‘When engaging and addressing another party, always proceed without assuming that the addressee would voluntarily cooperate with you in producing the effect or result you desire. When being engaged and addressed, always respond without assuming that the addressor would voluntarily cooperate with you in your effort to see the matter concerned from your own perspective or to reach a decision about it on your own terms.’’ (Liu and Zhu, 2011:3408; emphasis added.) As the emphasis indicates, the prefix ‘‘Non-’’ does not refer here to the reverse of the CP, for merely the voluntary kind of cooperation is precluded in persuasive interactions by the NCP: a rhetorical act is seen as presupposing noncooperation to start with, but orienting toward establishing, maintaining, and strenghtening cooperation as its goal.3 According to Liu and Zhu, the whole discipline of pragmatics maintains that participants in talk exchanges always have a common purpose or they are at least in agreement on the direction of the talk, while rhetoric postulates a teleological divergence between S and H. Recall at this point Kiefer’s (1979) critique summed up in the introduction and Kasher’s early attack against the CP and his rationality principle of effective means formulated to replace it: ‘‘[g]iven a desired end, one is to chose that action which most effectively, and at least cost, attains that end, ceteris paribus’’ (Kasher, 1976:205). That is, every conversationalist may have his or her own purposes and the right to change the direction of the talk within certain limits. Liu and Zhu’s NCP is meant as the alter ego for the CP; reflecting the reciprocal and reversible nexus of rhetoric and pragmatics, the maxims of the NCP -- which depict the image of a tactical speaker and a critical hearer ‘‘who is constantly on the alert for ‘misdirection’ and capable of discerning what is hidden behind the ‘appearance of truthfulness and perspicuousness’ in discourse’’ (2011:3410) -- are also in contrast with the maxims of the CP (Table 1). Once again, Grice’s model is avowedly too narrow for explaining pervasive discourse goals such as persuasion and impression management (Schlenker, 1980; Leary, 1995; Schlenker and Pontari, 2000). However, its inverse by Liu and Zhu is also too narrow for explaining bona fide rhetorical situations where the goal of the orator is not to persuade a suspicious audience but to reinforce the mutually shared beliefs and values among them (cf. Carey, 1992/2009:11--28). The two models complete each other very well both in day-to-day conversation and in public speaking: it is not the genre that makes a difference but the intention of (or attributed by the hearer/audience to) the speaker. As far as Dascal and Gross’ (1999) solution is concerned, they appeal to higher-order intentions to save their CPgoverned approach to rhetoric from the consequences of deceptive communication. Evidently, persuasion may depend on the systematic employment of vagueness (when it is not clear what is meant by S) and ambiguity (when more than one thing is meant by S), thus perspicuousness may not apply. In terms of Árvay’s (2004:233--235) relevance-theoretic account for manipulation, on the surface layer where the CP and its maxims operate, successful communication can take place, but on the second, hidden layer the manipulator does not make it mutually manifest that s/he intended to convey another piece of information to manipulate H. What Dascal and Gross stress is that, although the intentions inferred in deceptive communication are erroneous, they are still inferences that S expects H to draw as a result of recognizing S’s first-order intention. The bridge they build between the Gricean approach and Aristotelian rhetoric is made of inference: not only the results of a logical proof but all audience reactions (emotions, stylistic effects) are, in their view, products of inferences. As we have seen, Liu and Zhu (2011) refuse the idea of a fusion of rhetoric and pragmatics and argue for a productive tension between them to deepen our understanding of language use. Considered from the perspective of Dascal and

3 For the sake of comparison, it is worth mentioning that Gu (1994) distinguishes between pragmatic and rhetoric cooperation: the former is said to function at a lower level of interaction and can be assumed by great confidence, whereas the latter operates at a higher level and cannot be taken for granted but needs to be achieved. One of his examples is the situation when a detective is interrogating a subject: it is argued that pragmatic cooperation works even in conflictive exchanges like this because both the detective and the subject try their best to interpret each other’s utterances (181). But such a low level of interaction, in my opinion, is not that which most pragmaticists are interested in. Hence, it seems to me useless to demarcate strictly pragmatic and rhetoric purposes as belonging to different levels.

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Gross, much can be gained by combining the strengths of Gricean pragmatics and Aristotelian rhetoric: the latter might realize that its practices are not only a jumble of techniques but elements of a broader encompassing cognitive theory, while pragmatics might benefit from widening its explanatory scope to include inferences pertaining to style, emotion, and character. Certain topics -- and pragmatically oriented argumentation theories (e.g. Jackson and Jacobs, 1980; van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1984, 2004; Walton, 1996, 2008) in general -- obviously require a combination of the two areas of inquiry: printed advertisements (Árvay, 2004), parliamentary discourse (Ilie, 2010), and dramatic dialogs such as in Shakespeare’s Othello (Keller, 2010). In the latter, for instance, Iago rouses Othello’s suspicions about Cassio by, among other things, the repeated use of aposiopesis (interruption), a figure of thought of classical rhetoric, leaving his utterances deliberately obscure and incomplete, thus inviting a Manner implicature. As a skillful rhetorician of conversation, Iago also prefers the figure of paralipsis or praeteritio (pretending to pass over a matter in order to give it more emphasis) and anadiplosis (echoing words from Othello’s mouth to suggest that he knows more than he is willing to express), leading Othello to wrong and dangerous inferences. According to Keller (2010:406), ‘‘putting these strategies into practice involves rhetorical figures as well as exploiting inferential processes any hearer makes in normal conversation to recover the intended meaning of indirect utterances’’ (cf. Vickers, 1993:74--91). Modern rhetoricians need to attend to the cognitive mechanisms behind the use and understanding of the classical devices they examine, and pragmaticists need to attend to those classical rhetorical devices that emerge in the linguistic material they analyze. 3. The notion of implicature Albeit widely debated and differently interpreted, implicature has been one of the core concepts in pragmatics from Grice’s 1967 William James Lectures at Harvard (a revised version of which was published two decades later in Grice, 1989). It designates a certain type (or certain types) of meaning that can be conveyed implicitly by an utterance. To be more precise, the term implicature was originally intended to refer to the process of implying such meanings, and what is implied by this process should have been called implicatum (Grice, 1975:43--44, 1989:24--25). However, as is frequently the case, the product became early interwoven with the process so that today implicature is understood as the object of the act of implying a thought by saying something else rather than as the act of implying (Davis, 2005/2010). Since the guiding assumption of Grice’s seminal theory is that a distinction can be made between what one says and what one implicates, the significance of this simple dichotomy needs to be empirically underpinned. Grice discusses several (invented but realistic) examples of implicature. The subtype which he devotes most of his attention to is dubbed particularized conversational implicature (PCI). It is contrasted with generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs) and, at the same time, these two kinds of conversational implicature with what is called conventional implicatures (CIs). Each subtype is illustrated in (1a--c): (1)

a. b.

c.

Tim is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave. (CI: ‘Englishmen are brave’.) Tom is meeting a woman this evening. (GCI: ‘The woman to be met is not Tom’s wife, mother, sister, close friend, etc., but someone else who is unknown to the speaker’.) Ted was a little intoxicated. (PCI: ‘Ted was very drunk,’ since both S and H know that he has broken up all the furniture.)

In cases of conventional implicatures, it is the conventional meaning of the words that determines not only what is said but also what is implicated (Grice, 1975:44, 1989:25). In (1a), for example, the CI is due to the conventional meaning of therefore. CIs are characterized traditionally as detachable, noncancellable, noncalculable, and non-truth-conditional inferences (Levinson, 1983:128; Huang, 2011:412--414; Salmon, 2011:3417). The property of detachability means that it is possible to find another way of saying the same thing which will not carry the same implicature. But here is a paradox: if we replace therefore by any conjunction with nearly the same coded meaning (hence, so, thus), the CI in question will remain; however, if we use, for example, and in (1a) instead of therefore, the CI will evaporate, but the conventional meaning of therefore which clearly differs from that of and cannot determine what is said (cf. Bach, 1999). CIs are noncancellable, because it would be contradictory to add the opposite claim of the CI to (1a), and, due to convention and not to a complex derivation process based on premises from different sources, noncalculable. Finally, Grice insists that CIs do not affect the truth-conditions of the sentence: (1a) can be true even when its CI is false. Conversational implicatures are, by contrast, nonconventional, nondetachable, cancellable (defeasible), calculable, and, as Levinson (2000:165--260) points out, they sometimes play a role in the assignment of truth-conditional content. GCIs like (1b) are default inferences: ‘‘the use of a certain form of words [e.g. ‘‘a woman’’] in an utterance would normally (in the absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implicature’’ (Grice, 1975:56, 1989:37). The difference between a GCI and a PCI is that the latter can be inferred only by virtue of the specific context of the utterance, while the former is preferred unless there are unusual specific contextual assumptions that defeat it

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(Levinson, 2000:16). Central to the inferential process are the well-known maxims as postulates of the rational conversational behavior grouped under the CP and Kant’s four categories of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Equipped with these conceptual tools, Grice explains the notion of conversational implicature as follows: ‘‘[a] man who, by (in, when) saying (or making as if to say) that p has implicated that q, may be said to have conversationally implicated that q, provided that (1) he is to be presumed to be observing the conversational maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; (2) the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required’’ (1975:49--50, 1989:30--31). Accordingly, the hearer of (1b) might reason as follows: ‘‘S has apparently violated the first maxim of Quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’)4 when failed to specificate the relation between Tom and the woman he would meet; under normal circumstances, the use of the expression ‘a woman’ indicates that S does not know closely that person; thus, she may not be Tom’s wife, mother, sister, ex-classmate, etc.; perhaps S has hinted that it would be a private talk or even a date’’ (one might argue that this hint is a PCI that goes beyond the GCI). As for (1c), the context of the utterance, including the interactants’ knowledge of Ted’s unrestrained behavior, helps to recognize that what has been said by S was flouting the first maxim of Quality (‘‘Do not say what you believe to be false’’): it is a straightforward example of understatement (see the entries of meiosis and litotes in any handbook of rhetoric) implicating that the state of affairs described at the level of conventional meaning needs to be strongly augmented. The first Quality maxim triggers not only understatements but, as I mentioned above, nonconventional metaphors, ironies, metonymies, and hyperboles, whereas the implicit meaning of tautologies can be comprehended by noticing the violation of the first Quantity maxim (Grice, 1975:52--53, 1989:33--34). I would say, moreover, that oxymora flout the first Manner maxim (‘‘Avoid obscurity of expression’’) which may collaborate secondarily in the recognition of metaphor, metonymy, irony, and litotes as well (Nemesi, 2010:397). This is not the place to discuss in detail the results of extensive research having been done so far on implicature. Comprehensive books and reviews summarize the most important findings from time to time (e.g. Koutoupis-Kitis, 1982; Levinson, 1983:97--166, 2000; Horn, 1984, 1999, 2004; Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995; Davis, 1998, 2005/2010; Carston, 2002; Saul, 2002; Borg, 2009; Huang, 2011). Due to limitations of space and aiming at relevance in the Gricean sense, let me merely highlight three related points. First, though Grice’s role in clarifying the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics is generally acknowledged, the boundary between what is said and what is implicated seems to be more and more blurred today, and there is little consensus about the status of CIs and GCIs. Only PCIs are clear-cut candidates of pragmatic investigations, because their detection relies on the particular context. Bach (1999, 2006), for example, questions the existence of the category of CI (cf. Potts, 2005; Salmon, 2011 for different views), while Davis (2005/2010) calls it ‘‘semantic’’ implicature in contrast with GCIs as ‘‘conventional conversational implicatures.’’ One subclass of GCI linked to the first maxim of Quantity, dubbed ‘‘scalar implicature’’ (e.g. ‘‘Some of my colleagues speak Spanish pretty well’’ -- GCI: ‘Not all of my colleagues speak Spanish pretty well’), is currently in the crossfire of heated disputes at the semantics--pragmatics interface (Levinson, 2000; Carston, 2002; Chierchia, 2004; Horn, 2009; Geurts, 2011). Second, pragmaticists who deal intensively with the notion of implicature have been commonly divided into two camps: ‘‘neo-Griceans’’ (e.g. Horn, 1984, 2009; Levinson, 2000) try to offer tenable solutions to the problems that Grice’s original account raises with an attitude of defending his program and improving on it, whereas ‘‘post-Griceans’’ (e.g. Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995; Carston, 2002) tend to depart radically from the conversational-maxim view, taking a cognitive psychological approach to utterance interpretation and human communication in general. The gray zone between what is said and what is implicated is reconsidered by introducing the layer of explicatures (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995; Carston, 2002) or implicitures (Bach, 1994), which sheds more light on the linguistic underspecification of utterance meaning (e.g. Everyone [of a narrower group of my friends] planned a trip to London [during the 2012 Olympic Games to see some of the sporting events on the spot]). Third, the growing number of experimental studies conducted to corroborate linguistic intuitions provide critical data on the time course of processing utterances that convey richer meaning than what is said in the minimal sense, making the implicature and anti-implicature accounts empirically testable (see Noveck and Posada, 2003; Katsos and Breheny, 2010). 4. Enthymemes as implicatures There is hardly a more fundamental, and, at the same time, a more controversial idea of Aristotelian rhetoric than that of proof by enthymemes. Although the proper interpretation of the authentic concept of enthymeme5 requires a thorough

4 It is not clear whether in (1b) S is flouting the first Quantity maxim, or what we see is a clash between the maxims of Quantity and Quality (cf. Grice, 1975:49, 1989:30). 5 The word comes from the Greek έn (en, ‘within, with’) and uymo´ς (thymos, ‘soul, heart, mind’). According to Quintilian (1921), its first meaning is ‘anything conceived in the mind’ (Institutio Oratoria, 5.10.1).

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grounding in classical philology (e.g. McBurney, 1936; Burnyeat, 1994), modern logic textbooks and argumentation theorists usually define it simply either (1) as an abbreviated syllogism, argument, or chain of argumentation with one or more missing (implicit) premises (or conclusions), or (2) as a syllogism based on probabilities or signs (Walton, 1983, 2001, 2008; Walton and Reed, 2005). The most important places with regard to the notion of enthymeme in Aristotle’s (1926, 1927, 1938, 1960) works are the following: ‘‘[a]n enthymeme is a syllogism from probabilities or signs’’6 (Prior Analytics, 70a); ‘‘the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism’’ (The ‘‘Art’’ of Rhetoric, 1355a); ‘‘I call an enthymeme a rhetorical syllogism, and an example rhetorical induction [. . .] all orators produce belief by employing as proofs either examples or enthymemes and nothing else; [. . .] when, certain things being posited, something different results by reason of them, alongside of them, from their being true, either universally or in most cases, such a conclusion in dialectic is called syllogism, in rhetoric an enthymeme’’ (1356b); ‘‘the enthymeme [as] a kind of syllogism [is] deduced from few premises, often from fewer than regular syllogism; for if any one of these is well known, there is no need to mention it, for the hearer can add it himself. For instance, to prove that Dorieus was the victor in a contest at which the prize was a crown, it is enough to say that he won a victory at the Olympic games; there is no need to add that the prize at the Olympic games is a crown, for everybody knows it’’ (1357a); ‘‘[t]here are two kinds of enthymemes, the one demonstrative [. . .], and the other refutative [. . .] The demonstrative enthymeme draws conclusions from admitted premises, the refutative draws conclusions disputed by the adversary’’ (1396b); ‘‘as it is possible that some syllogisms may be real, and others not real but only apparent, there must also be real and apparent enthymemes, since the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism’’ (1401a); ‘‘the material of enthymemes is derived from four sources -- probabilities, examples, necessary signs, and signs’’ (1402b). The main problem with Aristotle’s above characterization is that neither the probability nor the lack of at least one premise (or the conclusion) seems to be a necessary condition for a syllogism to be an enthymeme. By the age of Quintilian, the notion of enthymeme had become somewhat more obscure. His Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian, 1921), on the one hand, confirms that an enthymeme is a ‘‘rhetorical form of syllogism’’ (1.10.38) and ‘‘is content to let its proof be understood without explicit statement’’ (5.14.24), but, on the other hand, it mentions three different views: it may be (1) a proposition with a reason, (2) a conclusion of an argument drawn either from denial of consequents or from incompatibilities (he adds that ‘‘there is some controversy on this point’’), or (3) an incomplete syllogism (5.10.1). Furthermore, Quintilian uses the term epicheireme (in Greek έpixε´irεma; ‘grasping in the hand’), cursorily touched upon by Aristotle as a dialectical syllogism (Topica, 8.162.a), in a very similar meaning: an argument consisting of at least three parts (a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion) by which one tries to prove something, and which is frequently concerned with statements that are not true but only credible (5.10.4, 5.14). As for the enthymeme, he takes the 2nd view: the statement ‘‘Virtue is a good thing because no one can put it to a bad use’’ draws its conclusion from denial of consequents, while the (rhetorical) question ‘‘Can money be a good thing when it is possible to put it to a bad use?’’ draws its conclusion from incompatibilities (5.14.25). After this brief philological commentary, let us go back to example (1a) repeated here as (2) for convenience, by which Grice illustrates the phenomenon of conventional implicature. (2)

Tim is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave.

If the enthymeme is typically based on probabilities and content to have an unexpressed premise, (2) could be one of the best candidates for demonstrating it. As far as I know, Koutoupis-Kitis (1982:21--23) was the first to notice the enthymematic nature of Grice’s example. She claims that the missing component is this: ‘All Englishmen are brave’ (cf. van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1984:132--149).7 However, Walton (2008:364) rightly reasons that such a universal generalization as the major premise, which presumes a deductive syllogistic form of argument, is not plausible. Rather, the defeasible generalization ‘English people generally tend to be brave’ is omitted, which is subject to exceptions. Grice’s example, therefore, displays both key features of the enthymeme. Contrary to what Grice (1975:50) says, the intuition behind grasping the unstated premise (or conventional implicatum) is replacable by an argument. We can proceed bravely by asking whether (1b) and (1c), that is, GCIs and PCIs are also enthymemes. Dascal and Gross (1999:119) find that

6

Probabilities are propositions which are concerned with things that generally happen but may be other than they are, while signs can be either necessary (e.g. ‘‘A woman has had a child because she has milk’’) or refutable (e.g. ‘‘All wise men are just, because Socrates was both wise and just’’). Refutable signs cannot be reduced to syllogistic form (The ‘‘Art’’ of Rhetoric, 1357b). 7 As has been mentioned in the previous section, Bach (1999) denies the existence of CIs as such. He treats expressions like therefore in (2), but (e.g. Tim is an Englisman, but he hates tennis) and still (e.g. Tim is an Englishman, he is still averse to irony) as ‘‘preservative operators’’ which operate on a sentence to yield an additional proposition (as we would say, the unexpressed premise of the enthymeme) while preserving the original one, for, on his account, the content of a sentence may include more than one proposition. So, these examples belong to semantics (what is said), not to pragmatics (what is implicated). Other alleged carriers of CIs that flunk Bach’s IQ (indirect quotation) test (e.g. on the other hand, moreover, nevertheless) and hence do not contribute to what is said are identified as bringing about second-order speech acts (cf. Grice, 1989:359--365).

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conversational implicatures and enthymematic inferences are alike in that they are cancellable without contradiction, so such implicatures ‘‘in a sense’’ are enthymematic. Not surprisingly, they regard rhetorical reasoning as easily compatible with the Gricean variety. Some argumentation theorists suggest that the implicit premises and conclusions of enthymemes are recovered by conversational implicatures (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1984:119--149; Walton, 2008:364--365).8 Given that the enthymeme, in its widest meaning, may lack any of the three parts that form a perfect syllogism, but is not necessarily incomplete, we must conclude that all implicatures are enthymemes, but not all enthymemes are implicatures. It is striking that the term enthymeme cannot be found in the indexes of most books on pragmatics or even more specifically on implicatures. The question arises: why do both neo-Griceans (e.g. Levinson, 2000) and post-Griceans (e.g. Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) refrain from referring to the Aristotelian doctrine of enthymeme? This fact is quite curious, as both lines of research see the human mind as having a highly evolved ability to draw conclusions from premises, filling in the information gaps in language use. Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) claim that although inferential processes in natural language understanding are nondemonstrative (i.e. not strictly valid as opposed to deductive inferences), deductive rules -- which in their relevance theory are said to be the only logical rules spontaneously accessible to the mind -- play a crucial role in deriving implicatures, ‘‘a form of suitably constrained guesswork’’ (69). They cite several (neo-Gricean) scholars like Leech (1983:30--31), who argues that ‘‘all implicatures are probabilistic’’ and can be arrived at by ‘‘an informal rational problem-solving strategy,’’ not by a formalized deductive logic, but defend that there must be a set of deductive rules which automatically function in the inferential comprehension, guaranteeing the accuracy of any conclusion drawn from accurate premises. Misunderstandings or, in other words, wrongly inferred conclusions are explained as results of a mismatch between the context envisaged by the speaker and the context construed by the hearer. The premises that form the context for the comprehension of an utterance come from the previous utterances and their contexts, the explicit meaning and possible presuppostition(s) of the new utterance, the hearer’s encyclopedic knowledge attached to any concept used in the preceding and the new utterance, and the observable physical environment (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995:132--142). According to relevance theory, these sources of premises determine a range of potential contexts, and the hearer will choose the most relevant of them following a path of least effort in searching for the greatest cognitive effect (Wilson and Sperber, 2004:613). Interestingly, the authors ‘‘distinguish two kinds of implicatures: implicated premises and implicated conclusions’’ (1986/1995:195; see also Blakemore, 1992:125-127) but leave the concept of enthymeme unmentioned.9 Levinson (2000) does not believe that the process of the recovery of speakers’ intention, which has been at the heart of inferential pragmatics, is governed by deduction. He argues that deductive systems are monotonic (nondefeasible), whereas implicatures are defeasible. An argument is monotonic if the addition of further premises cannot defeat the preceding conclusions. There are a number of formal models of nonmonotonic reasoning discussed by Levinson to which certain groups of implicatures might be suited: induction derives a general law from multiple observations of singular facts, abduction derives a plausible cause from an observed fact and a general law, ‘‘practical reasoning’’ aims to get from ends (goals) to means (plans), while ‘‘default logics’’ lead to reasonable presumptions (e.g. when hearing the utterance ‘‘The noise of the gun frightened off the birds’’ it is reasonable to think that ‘The birds flew away,’ although penguins do not fly, quails may run, swans may swim away, etc.). Developing an elegant theory for GCIs, Levinson finds that only default logics have the two properties that GCIs exhibit: defeasibility and default (preferred, presumptive) meaning. However, even this promising inferential scheme is too narrow to capture the rich phenomena that come under the category of GCI, to say nothing of PCIs. He concludes that anyone interested in formalizing GCIs should investigate the potentials of nonmonotonic logics, but it is more fruitful to invert the argument: rather than seek understanding of implicature in theories of default inference, we should instead think of GCIs as the prototype of default inferences (2000:49). Put differently, we do not need formal models of nonmonotonic reasoning to account for the process of default interpretation. Instead, what we do need are three inferential heuristics, related to Grice’s maxims, as inducers of GCIs. The Q-heuristic (‘‘What isn’t said, isn’t’’) stems from Grice’s first maxim of Quantity and is patently applicable to scalar implicatures such as ‘Not all of my colleagues speak Spanish pretty well’ following from the utterance ‘‘Some of my colleagues speak Spanish pretty well.’’ The I-heuristic (‘‘What is expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified’’) is a reformulation of the second Quantity maxim, supported by examples like ‘‘Barbara and Steve bought a piano,’’ which conveys the stereotypical interpretation 8 It is worth noting Jackson and Jacobs’ (1980) approach to conversational argument as a collaborative production organized by conventions of language use, in which enthymemes, being matched to the amount of support that requires to get agreement, are subsumed under Grice’s two maxims of Quantity. They consider enthymemes to be constructed from the questions and objections of the recipient, emphasizing their embeddedness in the conversational structure. 9 More recently, strong emphasis has been placed in relevance theory on mutually constraining parallel processes of inference (Wilson and Sperber, 2000, 2004, 2012; Carston, 2002, 2007). The idea is that explicatures and implicatures are equally inferential and often arrived at by a process of mutual adjustment between them, in which explicatures influence the implicatures derived, and vice versa: implicatures can also affect elements of explicatures.

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that they bought one together. And, finally, it is the M-heuristic (‘‘What is said in an abnormal way isn’t normal’’) that is responsible for Manner implicatures of this sort: ‘He slept longer than usual’ if the speaker says that ‘‘He went to bed and slept and slept.’’ Levinson’s tripartite apparatus is intended to underpin the apparently effortless speed of utterance comprehension. Even though both deductive and nondeductive syllogisms are excluded from his theoretical machinery in favor of the three heuristics, implicatures must be calculable (Levinson, 2000:15). In my view, the heuristics can be conceived as tacit premises in the inferential process, and, consequently, GCIs as enthymematic implicatures. Such pragmatic explanations of implicature bear obvious similarities to argumentation researcher Walton’s (2001, 2008; Walton and Reed, 2005) dialogical theory of enthymeme. In one of his early papers, Walton (1983:404) argues for the utility of the doctrine of enthymemes, as in argumentation it may not only be unnecessary to state all premises needed for a ‘‘deductive closure of a conclusion,’’ but may even be an impediment. A ‘‘good’’ enthymeme for him is a premise that the arguee is inclined to accept and that the arguer needs to get a valid argument for his or her conclusion (410). In his later works (Walton, 1996, 2001, 2005) he embarks on a systematic exploration of the role of common knowledge and argumentation schemes in enthymeme reconstruction. If one compares the title of Levinson’s (2000) book Presumptive Meanings with that of Walton’s (1996) book Argumentation Schemes for Presumptive Reasoning, one will suspect that they address by and large the same general problem of natural language comprehension and seek solutions in very similar directions. Walton concedes that at present we are far from developing an automated enthymeme machine (or software) that could be mechanically applied to a given argument taken from a discourse to pick out the missing premises and/or conclusions, but recent interdisciplinary cooperation between the fields of argumentation theory and artificial intelligence has made a few small steps toward this ultimate goal (or dream), and he expects significant future progress. His theory, in its fullest (2008) form, hypothesizes three bases for the enthymeme: (1) the participants’ commitment sets (Walton, 1983), (2) sets of argumentation schemes, including presumptive ones (Walton, 1996; Walton and Reed, 2005), and (3) a set of propositions representing common knowledge shared by the participants (Walton, 2001). First, each participant has a commitment set or store containing statements that s/he explicitly or implicitly makes and accepts during the dialog with certain commitment rules that govern how statements are inserted into or deleted from the commitment set in the course of the argumentative exchange. Second, each participant, when confronted with an argument, can apply several argumentation schemes to (1) and (3) as their databases. Walton and Reed (2005) analyze well-documented cases of incomplete arguments and conclude that some of them are best handled using deductive logic, but others require an approach employing defeasible argumentation schemes like practical reasoning. Third, common knowledge (cf. encyclopedic knowledge in relevance theory) involves facts known by virtually everyone (e.g. ‘‘Many millions of civilians were killed in the twentieth-century wars’’), defeasible generalizations (e.g. ‘‘Birds fly’’, ‘‘Dogs bark’’), and can be represented in scripts or frames (e.g. going to a restaurant, visiting the doctor; see Schank and Abelson, 1977). There are many challenges which formal dialog systems advocated by Walton and his colleagues must cope with (e.g. how to attribute a statement to an arguer who never went on record as making that exact statement explicitly, and how to select the appropriate argumentation scheme), but this is true of any comprehensive theory of implicature as well. As we have seen, both Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) concept of implicature and Walton’s (2001, 2008; Walton and Reed, 2005) concept of enthymeme embrace implicit conclusions and implicit premises that arise in language use. The two concepts, therefore, seem to cover each other. However, such a terminological overlap is completely useless and can even lead to misunderstandings in closely related disciplines. To help combining the intellectual resources of classical rhetoric, argumentation theory, and pragmatics, I propose a clear-cut distinction to be made between the two terms: an enthymeme should be defined as an argument with one or more implicit premises intended by the speaker to be filled in by the hearer as so intended by the speaker, while an implicature is an argument with one or more implicit conclusions intended by the speaker to be understood by the hearer as so intended by the speaker. There are complex discourses or chains of arguments in which a conclusion may also function as a premise in the next inferential step (Walton, 2008:362), and there are enthymematic implicatures, i.e. arguments with at least one missing premise and at least one implicit conclusion. This view, diagrammed in Fig. 2, may be historically inaccurate (Burnyeat, 1994; Walton and Reed, 2005:340), but more straightforward, I hope, than any other alternative interpretation such as, for instance, the classical view sketched in Fig. 1. Now consider examples (1a--c) again as (3a--c) in the proposed view. Example (3a) is an enthymeme, whereas (3b) and (3c) are enthymematic implicatures (the implicit elements are in square brackets): (3)

a.

b.

Tim is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave. Premise 1: Tim is an Englishman. [Premise 2: English people generally tend to be brave.] Conclusion: Tim is brave. Tom is meeting a woman this evening. Premise1: Tom is meeting a woman this evening.

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Fig. 1. The classical relationship between enthymemes and implicatures.

Fig. 2. The proposed relationship between enthymemes and implicatures.

c.

[Premise 2: What isn’t said isn’t; rational speakers aim to be as informative as they can.] [Premise 3: S is rational, and s/he is not cracking a joke.] [Conclusion: The woman to be met is not Tom’s wife, mother, sister, close friend, etc., but someone else who is unknown to the speaker.] Ted was a little intoxicated. Premise 1: Ted was a little intoxicated. [Premise 2: Both S and H know that, in fact, Ted was so drunk that he broke up all the furniture.] [Premise 3: S’s tone of voice and facial expression imply that s/he does not believe his/her explicit statement to be true.] [Conclusion 1: S means that Ted was very drunk.] [Conclusion 2: S wants to express his/her attitude toward Ted’s behavior.] [Conclusion 3: S wants to cause an effect in H.]

To supplement the invented examples with a piece of spoken language data, I cite a short excerpt from a taped conversation analyzed by Muntigl and Turnbull (1998:247). The father (Dad) of a 14-year-old daughter (Child) deems her behavior inappropriate during a family visit to England. The first turn of the father carries an enthymematic implicature broken down into its components below: (4)

Dad: Oh, but for God’s sake but we have been through it. (.5) We know that it’s easy to follow the crowd. If the rest of the kids are doing certain things, it’ [s easy to do. Child: [Oh no, no, it wasn’t because everyone else, well, everyone else was doing it, it was because I wanted to try it, (.9) it’s not [that Dad: [If other kids weren’t doing it, you wouldn’t have had the chance though. Premise1: It’s easy to follow the crowd. Premise 2: If the rest of the kids are doing certain things, it’s easy to do.

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[Premise 3: The rest of the kids are/were doing the thing in question.] [Conclusion 1: She did the thing in question because the rest of the kids were also doing that.] [Conclusion 2: She just wanted to follow the rest of the kids.] It is interesting to observe that the daughter directly responds to her father’s enthymematic implicature, who reinforces it explicitly in his second turn. 5. Tropes as implicatures Tropes as ornaments of style were discovered by the Greek masters of oratory and were categorized for the posterity by the Roman rhetoricians. To say that tropes were approached from the perspective of eloquence is not to say that ancient authors did not recognize their pervasive presence in everyday language use. Aristotle (1926) remarks that ‘‘all use metaphors in conversation, as well as proper and appropriate words’’ (The ‘‘Art’’ of Rhetoric, 1404b). Cornificius10 adds: ‘‘the use of metonymies [. . .] is abundant not only amongst the poets and orators but also in everyday speech’’ (Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.32.43). Quintilian (1921), too, notes that metaphors (or translatio, as he calls them in Latin) and hyperboles are such natural tools of speech that they are often employed unconsciously even by peasants and uneducated persons (Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.4, 8.6.75). Given that rhetoric is a genre-specific area, there is nothing peculiar about the fact that its early theorists and instructors highlight the decorative side of employing tropes. An apt metaphor or a good hyperbole may always be a great virtue of any public speech. From this perspective, it is pardonable, I believe, that Aristotle and his Roman followers did not concentrate primarily on the daily use of tropes and their cognitive representation in human mind. Aristotle already has an elaborated, albeit not full-fledged, view of metaphor (including metonymy and synecdoche) and simile expounded in chapter 21 of his Poetics and in the third book of The ‘‘Art’’ of Rhetoric (for a critical evaluation, see Leezenberg, 2001:31--43). Cornificius goes one step further: he does not know the term trope11 yet, but it seems to him reasonable to distinguish its subcategories and separate them from the rest of figures of diction or word figures (exornationes verborum), claiming that ‘‘all belong in one class’’ in which ‘‘the language departs from the ordinary meaning of the words and is, with a certain grace, applied in another sense’’ (4.31.42). He enumerates and discusses ten such special ‘‘word figures,’’ namely, onomatopoeia (nominatio), antonomasia or pronomination (pronominatio), metonymy (denominatio), periphrasis (circumitio), hyperbaton (transgressio), hyperbole (superlatio), synecdoche (intellectio), catachresis (abusio), metaphor (translatio), and allegory (permutatio). Almost 200 years later, Quintilian gives the definition of the trope as an artistic alternation of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to another.12 As he depicts the keen interest the intellectuals of his age took in the subject, there had been ‘‘interminable disputes among the teachers of literature, who [had] quarreled no less violently with the philosophers than among themselves over the problem of the genera and species into which tropes may be devided, their number and their correct classification’’ (Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.1; note that this was written in the 90s of the first century A.D.). He does not want to join in these ‘‘quibbles,’’ as he believes that orators would not benefit from such training. Rather, he confines himself to dealing only with the ‘‘most necessary’’ tropes. In practice, however, he pursues the tradition criticized by several modern authorities because of its ‘‘rage to denominate,’’ while, nonetheless, being fascinated by the rhetorical masterpieces of taxonomic intelligence (Capt-Artaud, 1995). In Quintilian’s work 13 tropes, 26 figures of thought, and 28 word figures are denominated (8.6--9.3). His list of tropes is the following: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, antonomasia, onomatopoeia, catachresis (or abuse), metalepsis (or transumption), epithet, allegory, periphrasis, hyperbaton, anastrophe, hyperbole. Nine tropes can be found in Lausberg’s (1998:§§ 552--598) 20th century systematic summary: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, emphasis, hyperbole, antonomasia, irony, litotes, and periphrasis, all categorized as occurring in a single word (in verbis singulis), but four of them (irony, emphasis, synecdoche, and hyperbole, together with allegory) may also be figures of thought (§§ 893--910), while oxymoron, which is sometimes considered to be a kind of trope as well, is a special ‘‘antitheton,’’ that is, a figure with antithetical meaning (§ 807). To exaggerate a bit, there seem to be as many classifications as there are authors of manuals on rhetoric from Cornificius to the present, none free from inconsistencies. Under Grice’s (1975:53) view, tropes like irony, metaphor, meiosis (understatement), and hyperbole with nonconventional figurative meaning flout the first maxim of Quality. Tropes with conventional figurative meaning are

10 I adopt the humanist Raphael Regius’s (Utrum ars rhetorica ad Herennium Ciceroni falso inscribatur. Venice, 1491) and, among others, the Hungarian classical philologist Tamás Adamik’s (1987, 2010:1035--1036) arguments regarding the question of the authorship of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, the oldest surviving Latin treatise on rhetoric formerly attributed to Cicero. 11 The term trope (tro´poς in Greek) emerges first in Cicero’s (1939) dialog Brutus (46 B.C.): ‘‘The Greeks consider that language is embellished if such changes in the use of words are employed as they call tropes, and such figures of thought as they call schemata’’ (17.69). The first known study on tropes (Peri tropo´n, ‘On tropes’) by Tryphon of Alexandria originates from the second half of the first century B.C. (Adamik, 2010:1140-1141). 12 In the original: ‘‘Tropus est verbi vel sermonis a propria significatione in aliam cum virtute mutatio’’ (Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.1).

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not derived as implicatures but stored, since the starting point in the general pattern for the working out of a conversational implicature is the conventional meaning of the words used (50). There is good reason to suppose a diachronic path from tropes with nonconventional figurative meaning to those with conventional figurative meaning to dead tropes, and these three levels may yield different ways of comprehension (cf. Levinson, 2000:27). Note that when ancient rhetoricians speak about extraordinary grace and artistic alternation from one meaning to another, they think of tropes with nonconventional figurative meaning which is conveyed, according to Grice, by virtue of an implicature. In Aristotle’s view, such creative tropes are ‘‘above all that gives perspicuity, pleasure, and a foreign air’’ (The ‘‘Art’’ of Rhetoric, 1405a), some of the most desirable merits of style, and are construed as a matter of inference (Dascal and Gross, 1999:122--125). As Cicero (1939) puts it, tropes ‘‘transport the mind and bring it back, and move it to hither and thither; and this rapid stimulation of thought in itself produces pleasure’’ (Orator, 39.134). In relation to ironic allegory, Quintilian (1921) explains in unmistakably pragmatic terms that ‘‘the intention of the speaker is other than what s/he actually says’’ (Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.54). Over the years, the Gricean account of tropes has been subjected to widespread and vigorous criticism. It is clear that Grice’s model as a theory of comprehension is far from complete (cf. Saul, 2002), because (1) it fails to specificate how the different kinds of tropes are distinguished from one another (the same maxim of Quality triggers all of them, the flouting of which, hence, cannot be a sufficient condition of identifying the appropriate implicit meaning), (2) it says nothing about our general cognitive ability to reason via analogy, association, and, as for hyperbole and litotes, quantitative and qualitative scales (Cano Mora, 2009, 2011:31--61), and (3) it does not detail the role of context in constraining the interpretive search for the intended meaning (Levinson, 1983:147--162). Leezenberg (2001:114--118) checks whether or not metaphors display the characteristics of conversational implicature (cancellability, nondetachability, etc.), and finds that they or some of them do not satisfy certain criteria -- for example, conventional metaphors obviously do not fit the criterion of nonconventionality, but such metaphors, of course, are not implicatures in nature. Experimental psycholinguists have offered much empirical evidence against Grice’s (1975) and Searle’s (1979) two- or three-stage inferential schemes, often lumping them together as ‘‘the standard pragmatic view,’’ which would allegedly claim that the analysis of an utterance’s literal meaning is obligatory before figurative meaning is determined, and understanding tropes requires that a defective (e.g. false) literal meaning be found (Gibbs, 1984, 1993, 1994, 2002). However, as has been mentioned above, contrary to Searle, Grice prefers the term conventional meaning to literal meaning, and reckons that a conversational implicature may become conventionalized (1975:58).13 Moreover, methodological debates and contradictory results in psycholinguistic research have led Gibbs and Colston (2012) to the conclusion that no single theory may be able to account for the diversity of instances of tropes, so only a wide model of cognitive processes can accommodate the experimental findings with several factors that shape processing, including (1) people (their abilities, interest, beliefs, motivations, and goals), (2) the language materials (specific language and genre), (3) the task (to make a decision, to remember something, and to be emotionally affected by something said), and (4) the methods used to assess figurative performance (reading time, eye movements, and brain scanning). This reappraisal is especially remarkable because the first author strongly defended his ‘‘direct access view’’ for many years, insisting that hearers need not automatically analyze the complete literal meaning of a linguistic expression in an elaborated context before accessing pragmatic knowledge to calculate the figurative meaning of tropes (Gibbs, 1984, 1993, 1994, 2002; see my critical observations on the phrasing of the direct access hypothesis in Nemesi, 2009:81--82, 2010:395). At present, Gibbs adopts the relevance-theoretic idea that the processes involved in understanding tropes are the same as those employed in interpreting any other utterances (Gibbs and Colston, 2012). But I believe that understanding nonconventional tropes does require extra processing effort, which is not exactly the same as understanding conventional tropes even in the relevance-theoretic framework. The Gricean approach was refined by Attardo (2000, 2001) and Giora (1997, 2003). My position is very similar to these modifications. In a nutshell, I hold that the processing of nonconventional tropes can be divided into two stages: (1) recognition (or triggering) and (2) the identification of the appropriate figurative meaning. There exist some explicit linguistic markers of triggering (e.g. like and its equivalents for similes, extreme case formulations and the excessive in many languages for hyperboles), but the exploration of the recognition mechanisms is basically the job of pragmatics. The cornerstone of my account is the principle of the conventional use of language, which is analogous to Bach and Harnish’s (1979:12, 61) ‘‘presumption of literalness.’’ (5)

The principle of the conventional use of language The general tendency of communication and the mutual belief in the linguistic community CL that whenever any member S utters any u in L to any other member H, if S could (under the circumstances) be speaking conventionally, then S is speaking conventionally.

13 Dascal (1987), who rejects Gibbs’s direct access view, would integrate the feature of conventionality into the concept of literal meaning under the slogan of ‘‘moderate literalism.’’

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The principle of the conventional use of language, from the speaker’s point of view, is a fundamental bias; a natural tendency of linguistic behavior, which is automatically pursued in the lack of special (e.g. emotional) motivation or perlocutionary goal, whereas, from the point of view of the listener, it is the presumption of the speaker’s aforesaid bias in conversation. The default case is the form of conversation that fits in with the principle of the conventional use of language: this has the least production expense and risk of comprehension failure, although it is by no means certain that it has the greatest cognitive effect. The communication of nonconventional meanings is, in contrast, the marked -- but frequent and not extraordinary -- case, which urges the listener to start an active inferential process for working out the implicature(s). It is worth emphasizing that I use the terms conventional meaning and the most salient meaning (introduced by Giora, 1997, 2003) interchangeably, as Giora’s four factors of the most salient meaning (frequency, familiarity, conventionality, and prototypicality/stereotypicality), in my opinion, can be reduced to just one: conventionality (i.e. whichever meaning is frequent, familiar, and prototypical is at the same time conventional). According to this terminology, the fact that a meaning is stored in the mental lexicon does not guarantee that it is the conventional -- I mean, the most salient -- meaning of the lexical unit. Stored information is faster to access than the understanding of novel tropes is, which requires contextual support to become as accessible as conventional (salient) information. When more than one meaning is conventional (e. g. both the figurative and the literal meaning of a word are equally salient), parallel processing is induced. Conventionality (salience), however, is not an either-or notion; instead, it allows degrees (Giora, 1997:183, 2003:15) and may vary from generation to generation, from dialect to dialect, from speech community to speech community, as being prone to change in time and space. I agree with Giora that (1) conventional (salient) meanings have unconditional priority over nonconventional meanings, (2) contexts biased toward the nonconventional interpretation cannot prevent the activation of the conventional meaning of an expression used, but (3) a highly predictive context may help in guessing the intended nonconventional meaning even before the linguistic stimulus is encountered (see the phenomenon of priming in psycholinguistics). Though it is possible that the previous context temporarily activates a less salient meaning of a lexical unit in the mental lexicon, contextual information does not interact with lexical processes in online comprehension but runs in parallel to it. Gibbs and Colston (2012:87) indicate that the main difficulty with Giora’s graded salience view is the uncertainty of measuring which is (are) the salient meaning(s) of a word or expression for a listener. This uncertainty is, nevertheless, a natural feature of the dynamic representation of lexical meanings in our mind. One kind of empirical methods of detecting salient meanings is asking ordinary speakers to judge the frequency and familiarity of the alternative senses of a given word or phrase, or asking them to write down the meaning of a key expression that comes to mind first, to provide speeded responses to probes related or unrelated to words placed in neutral contexts, and the like. Another methodological direction might be to rely on corpus linguistics, that is, the in-depth analysis of the meaning patterns of either single words or collocates by obtaining concordance data from large computerized corpora that consist of texts taken from different genres. Grice’s maxims are cognitive aids to the machinery of understanding: they are rational heuristics (or premises), not necessary and sufficient conditions, by which the listener can recognize that the principle of the conventional use of language is flouted. In brief, the Quantity heuristic posits that the conventional meaning of the utterance is expected to be informative enough, the Quality heuristic posits that the conventional meaning of the expressions used and the utterance itself are expected to refer truly and adequately to the real state of affairs, Relation heuristic posits that the conventional meaning of the utterance is expected to be relevant to the context, and Manner heuristic posits that the utterance is expected not to be obscure, ambiguous, prolix, or unordered in its conventional meaning. The Quantity heuristic triggers tautologies, the Quality heuristic triggers metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, litotes, and irony, whereas the Manner heuristic triggers oxymoron (but it can collaborate secondarily in the recognition of metaphor, metonymy, irony, and litotes as well). The Relation heuristic is indispensable when the figurative utterance is true in its conventional meaning (e.g. Anchorage is a cold city; see Leezenberg, 2001). But the recognition phase is not built only on these heuristics. There are paralinguistic and nonverbal cues, such as the ironic tone of the speaker’s voice, typographical means (e.g. ‘‘scare quotes’’, dots ‘‘. . .’’ at the end of the utterance) in written texts, the ostensive mimic, winks, nudges, and other gestures (Attardo, 2001:55). Furthermore, people have genre-specific expectations (in connection with poetry or the ironicbantering colloquial conversation, etc.) and person-specific expectations, too (e.g. we know that our colleague likes to exaggerate, to joke, or to use metaphors). Although these additional cues and expectations can all play a part in discovering the figurative meaning, the four Gricean heuristics are the primary tools of triggering. The second, more complex stage of comprehending nonconventional tropes is the inferential recovery of the intended meaning -- in other words, the selection of the proper meaning-transforming scheme and its adaptation to the expression at hand that flouts the principle of the conventional use of language. This selection is guided by the heuristic that gives a clue to nonconventionality, but it will not solve the problem by itself on every occasion (once again, the Quality heuristic can trigger several tropes). If other cues do not arise, all the potential schemes will be checked, and the listener will choose the one that makes the utterance meaningful for the most part. In general less can be said about this second phase of the interpretation than about any one particular trope. Concerning metaphors, Searle (1979:116--120) and cognitive metaphor theorists (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2000, 2002/2010) have revealed the underlying semantic

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relations based on analogy between two semantic fields or conceptual domains, whereas metonymy (and synecdoche) operates within a single conceptual domain via contiguity (cf. Papafragou, 1996; Kövecses and Radden, 1998; Kövecses, 2002/2010:171--194). But, for instance, how do we know the reason why British military surgeon and scientist Denis Burkitt (1911--1993) received the nickname ‘‘The Fiber Man’’ from his colleagues, and whether it is a metaphor or a metonymy? Here also pragmatic inferences are needed. The case of irony would be easier if we had to think always of the opposite of the conventional meaning (for obvious counterexamples, see Wilson and Sperber, 1992, 2012:123--145). Hyperbole and litotes contrast the conventional meaning with the real state of affairs on some semantic scales, thus, their interpretive schemes are relatively straightforward (Cano Mora, 2009, 2011; Nemesi, 2010). In sum, the thorough description of the identification phase in the two-stage model is a predominantly semantic, trope-specific, and more or less complicated business. It is not only the process of trope understanding that is rather complex, but the nonconventional figurative meaning itself that tropes convey is as well. It usually seems to be impossible to rephrase the whole implicatum with a brief, precise, and completely conventional correspondent. That is why Gibbs and Colston (2012:192--259) replace the term ‘‘figurative meaning’’ with ‘‘figurative language experience,’’ which encompasses all kinds of cognitive and affective contents listeners get from a trope, assuming that nonfigurative language is often unable to evoke the wide range of experiences that tropes can create. Fortunately, relevance theorists have offered conceptual tools to capture some of these experiences as special types of meaning. They argue that implicatures of an utterance may have different strength, and what has been traditionally called ‘‘poetic effect’’ is, in fact, a cluster of weak implicatures (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995:193--224, 1990; Wilson and Sperber, 2012; Blakemore, 1992:128--131; Pilkington, 1992, 2000). In the glossary of her book, Carston (2002:380--381) defines weak implicatures as implicated assumptions with some degree of ‘‘indeterminacy’’ regarding whether they really fall under the speaker’s informative intention, so forcing the hearer to take a great measure of responsibility for grasping the speaker’s thoughts. Metaphor is characterized as having a range of weak implicatures (the more poetic a metaphor is, the greater the range of the weak implicatures it communicates), while irony is claimed to be ‘‘a use of language by which a speaker tacitly communicates a mocking or, at least dissociative attitude to a thought or view which she tacitly attributes to someone other than herself at the time of utterance’’ (378; cf. Wilson and Sperber, 1992, 2012:123--145). If this is so, irony (as well as hyperbole; see Nemesi, 2004, 2010) always carries a strong or weak attitude-implicature. The notion of ad hoc concept is also popular in the current version of relevance theory: such concepts are constructed pragmatically, that is, online by the listener in the process of utterance comprehension (Pilkington, 2000; Carston, 2002; Wilson and Sperber, 2012). As Carston (2002:358) puts it, ‘‘while a metaphor and its corresponding simile may communicate the same set of implicatures, the difference between them may be captured by the fact that an ad hoc concept is constructed as part of the explicit content of the metaphor, while the lexically encoded concept is preserved in the simile.’’ In my view, ad hoc concepts are weak implicata, that is, not semantic phenomena (cf. Leezenberg, 2001:283--294) but products of conceptual implicatures. Pilkington (2000) makes it clear that poetic effect (i.e. figurative meaning or ‘‘figurative language experience’’) does not just consist of fully propositional assumptions, and the precise nature of its nonpropositional content (ad hoc concepts, attitudes, self-impressions, etc.) is difficult to determine. Let me demonstrate the essential complexity of figurative meaning by an example from the Hungarian film comedy Három sárkány (Three spinsters, 1936; Nemesi, 2004:369--370). The story is the following. The happy-go-lucky Balázs Csaholyi lives under the guardianship of his sisters, the ‘‘three spinsters,’’ at their property in Kávás. He tries to exploit ´´s debt of his son, a law every rare occasion to leave his isolation in the country, so he wants to profit from the 8000 pengo student at Pest (Budapest), who is careless, too. Csaholyi gets Kempelen, the awkward lawyer of the family, to persuade his sisters that he should go to Pest to clear up the case. In (6) he is trying to convince Kempelen that he would like to see Pest once again, free from the watchful eye of his sisters. He accumulates the metaphorical-hyperbolic sighs conjuring the images of the Hungarian ‘wasteland.’ The hesitating Kempelen is unable to refuse the cunning demand, even though he suspects that he will have some problems caused by this trip: (6)

Most arro´l van szo´, Jo´ska, hogy téged akarnak felküldeni Pestre az ügyet elintézni. ((eagerly)) Nézd, Jo´ska, én kilenc éve nem voltam Pesten. Én már elepedek, én már elsorvadok, engem már ellep a gaz, szívemet benövi a bojtorján itt, a kávási határban. ((begging)) Jo´ska! Csináld meg, hogy én menjek föl Pestre! ‘What’s happening, Jo´ska, is that they want to send you to Pest to clear up this case. Look, Jo´ska, I have not been to Pest for nine years. I’m pining away, wasting away, I will be covered with weeds, and my heart will be overgrown with burdock here in the Kávás fields. Jo´ska! Please convince them that I should go to Pest!’ ´´sség. . . Kempelen: ((hesitating)) Nézd, lelkem, ez nagy felelo ‘Look, my dear, it is a great responsibility. . .’ Csaholyi:

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Jo´ska, ki tudja, hogy meddig élek én még. . . És, hát így haljak meg én, Csaholyi Balázs, volt hetes ´´ Pesten?. . . huszárkapitány, hogy legalább egy-két szép napom ne legyen azon a gyö:nyöru ‘Jo´ska, who knows how long more I will live. . . And should I, Balázs Csaholyi, ex-captain of hussars, die without having some days in that beautiful Pest?’ ´´lem 175 pengo ´´ és valami 60 fillért. Kempelen: Borzaszto´, hogy mindig leveszel a lábamro´l. Tavaly is így vettél ki to ´´s and some 60 ‘It is terrible that you always get me to do what you want. Last year you got 175 pengo fillérs out of me in this way.’ Csaholyi:

What all does Csaholyi implicate by saying that he is pining away, wasting away, he will be covered with weeds, and his heart will be overgrown with burdock in Kávás? These expressions are metaphorical hyperboles or hyperbolic metaphors; the first two (eleped, elsorvad) are rather conventional (if not dead) in Hungarian, while the third and the fourth are nonconventional. Their literal paraphrase (like the conventionalized meaning of the first two) might be that Csaholyi begins to lose his vitality in Kávás. But there is obviously much more in them: conceptual implicature (the picture of the weed and the burdock covering Csaholyi as a mood), attitude-implicature (he finds it hard to bear his fate), and self-implicature (as a man, he is worthy of compassion, his situation is unbearable, his sisters treat him unjustly, Kempelen must feel pity for him). And, perhaps, this is not an exhaustive description of the implicated content. Interestingly enough, the attitude-implicature also seems to be conventionalized in the meaning of the verbs eleped (‘pine away’) and elsorvad (‘waste away’).

6. Figures of thought as implicatures If we seek the differentia specifica of figures of thought within the system of figures of speech involving tropes, we will soon become embarrassed. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (82--86 B.C.; Adamik, 1987:18--22, 2010:1035) was the first manual, to my knowledge, to distinguish between word figures (verborum exornatio) and figures of thought (sententiarum exornatio). According to its author, in the case of a word figure ‘‘the adornment is comprised in the fine polish of the language itself,’’ while a figure of thought ‘‘derives a certain distinction from the idea, not from the words’’ (4.13.18). However, the subsequent enumeration is by no means consistent: many of the 35 ‘‘word figures’’ discussed in the book are actually figures of thought (e.g. exclamatio, ratiocinatio, sententia, subiectio, correctio, occultatio, permissio, dubitatio). As Cicero puts it wittily, ‘‘the figure suggested by the words disappears if one alters the words, but that of the thoughts remains whatever words one to employ’’ (De Oratore, 3.52.200, 55 B.C., also cited by Adamik, 2010:34; cf. Grice’s criterion of nondetachability for conversational implicatures). But this phrasing does not provide a sufficient definition either. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (93--95 A.D.), too, suggests that figures of thought can be said in different ways without changing their sense, and adds that a figure of thought may include several word figures (9.1.16). Later rhetoricians have not succeeded in improving the classical view, as attested in Lausberg’s (1998) imposing handbook which states that the figures of thought ‘‘are essentially independent of linguistic concretization, although they do need linguistic concretization, with which they are often linked in certain fairly fixed ways’’ (§ 755), and the boundaries between ‘‘figurae elocutionis’’ (i.e. word figures such as geminatio, gradatio, anaphora, epiphora, polysyndeton, ellipsis, zeugma, asyndeton, hyperbaton, isocolon, etc.) and ‘‘figurae sententiae’’ (figures of thought) are not clear-cut; there are figures which one theoretician regards as belonging to figurae elocutionis (or to tropes; see below) and another as belonging to figurae sententiae. Lausberg acknowledges that the classification of figures of thought is difficult: they do not form a closed class, and some of their examples may also be assigned to word figures (or to tropes). For these reasons, usually, rhetorical textbooks only enumerate them. Lausberg’s taxonomy, offered modestly as ‘‘an attempt to give a certain schematic grouping,’’ is the following (§§ 757--910): 1. Figures oriented toward the audience 1.1. Figures of address: obsecratio, licentia, apostrophe; 1.2. Figures of question: interrogatio, subiectio, dubitatio, communicatio. 2. Figures oriented toward the matter 2.1 Semantic figures: finitio, conciliatio, correctio, antitheton; 2.1.1. Special antithetons: regressio, commutatio, distinctio, subiectio, oxymoron. 2.2. Emotive figures: exclamatio, evidentia, sermocinatio, fictio personae, expolitio, simile, aversio. 2.3. Dialectic figures: conciliatio, praeparatio, concessio, permissio. 2.4. Figures according to the four modification categories: 2.4.1. Figures by adjection: interpositio, subnexio, aetiologia, sententia; 2.4.2. Figures by detraction: percursio, praeteritio, reticentia; 2.4.3. Figures by transmutation: hysterologia. 2.4.4. Figures by immutation: allegory, irony, emphasis, synecdoche, hyperbole.

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The number of Lausberg’s figures of thought, as can be seen, totals 38. Two of them, viz. subiectio and conciliatio. Recall that irony, emphasis, synecdoche, and hyperbole are also two-sided phenomena for Lausberg: in certain realizations they are tropes (§§ 552--598), whereas in others they are figures of thought. Instead of defining and exemplifying here all 39 figures of thought, I limit myself to showing that some groups of them are eo ipso intended to be understood as implicatures, while the rest, although occasionally may convey implicatures, should instead be considered simple narrative or argumentative strategies. Let us look at the former groups first. Insofar as allegory, irony, emphasis, synecdoche, hyperbole, litotes, and simile are regarded as not (only) tropes but figures of thought (as well), their intended meaning, if nonconventional, is communicated, as was clarified in the previous section, via implicatures. Irony is not excluded from the notion of allegory in the Roman rhetorical treatises (Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.34.46; Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.44--54), but today allegory is commonly defined as a metaphor sustained for the length of a whole utterance and beyond: its apparent sense refers to another sense (Lausberg, 1998:§ 895; Preminger and Brogan, 1993:31--36). Irony is conceptualized in pragmatics as meaning the opposite of what is said, as echoic pretense, indirect negation, relevant inappropriateness, tacit attitude, etc. (Grice, 1975; Wilson and Sperber, 1992, 2012:123--145; Giora, 1995; Attardo, 2000; Carston, 2002). Simulatio and asteism (praising or flattering someone by pretending to blame him/her) can be either separated from irony as independent figures of thought, or included in it. (7a) is a well-known example of simulatio, and (7b) is an asteism: (7)

a.

b.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest, (For Brutus is an honourable man, So are they all, all honourable men) Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me; But Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honourable man. (Mark Antony’s oration from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) ´´. Még vagy hatszor elolvasom az idén, ,,Toldi’’-t most olvasom hatodszor. Csakugyan nyomorú fércmu hogy silányságát minél jobban felfogjam. ‘I am reading ‘‘Toldi’’ for the sixth time now. It really is a terribly shoddy piece of work. I am going to read it about six more times to grasp its inferiority even better.’ ´´fi’s epistle to his friend János Arany, the (The famous Hungarian poet and revolutionary Sándor Peto author of the narrative poem Toldi. My translation.)

Allusion is missing from Lausberg’s list, but, as an intertextual reference that assumes listeners/readers having familiarity with the source text and sharing knowledge with the speaker/writer (Preminger and Brogan, 1993:38--40), it may evoke implicatures. The most invisible forms of allusion and allegory are called enigma and anagoge (spiritual or mystical senses especially in the Scriptures). Allusion is often ironic like (8a) and (8b), two variations on (7a): (8)

a.

b.

Lord Palmerston azt mondja, hogy ,,Austriára Euro´pának szüksége van’’, és a nemes lord ,,derék férfiú’’. ‘Lord Palmerston says that ‘‘Europe needs Austria,’’ and the noble lord is ‘‘an honourable man.’’’ (Lajos Kossuth: Felolvasások Angliában [Lectures in England] IX; also quoted in Adamik, 2010:202.) ‘‘And Olmert is a responsible man’’ (The title of an Israeli newspaper article addressing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s responsibility for the Second Lebanon War; see Giora, 2007.)

As a trope, emphasis expresses a more precise meaning of something by means of a less precise semantic content (Lausberg, 1998:§ 578, § 905; e.g. when saying ‘‘Be a man!’’ for ‘Be brave!’),14 but as a figure of thought, in Quintilian’s

14

In my view, this phenomenon is not a distinct trope but a kind of metonymy.

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words, it occurs ‘‘when some hidden meaning is extracted from some phrase’’ in an utterance ‘‘whereby we excite some suspicion to indicate that our meaning is other than our words would seem to imply; but our meaning is not in this case contrary to that of which we express, as is the case in irony, but rather a hidden meaning which is left to the hearer to discover’’ (Institutio Oratoria, 9.2.64--65). No matter what this hidden meaning exactly is, the hearer obviously discovers it by working out an implicature. One motivation behind using emphases is that some things which cannot be proved may be suggested in this way, for ‘‘at times such hidden shafts will stick, and the fact that they are not noticed will prevent their being drawn out, whereas if the same point were stated openly, it would be denied by our opponents and would have to be proved’’ (9.2.75). More comprehensively, emphases may be employed, Quintilian argues, under three conditions: first, if it is unsafe to speak openly, second, if it is unseemly to speak openly, and, third, when the speaker wants to foster the impression of elegance or aims to give esthetic pleasure by altering the straightforward language. The third case is illustrated in (9) by two of the Hungarian writer István Ӧrkény’s (1912--1979) One Minute Stories: (9)

a.

b.

Climax The janitor was the first to notice the smell. He broke down the door. He spotted the farewell note on the stone floor of the kitchen. It was tucked under a small ceramic ashtray with the butt of the victim’s last cigarette. IT IS MY FIFTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY, it said. THE TENANTS DO NOT LIKE ME. THE LANDLORD REFUSES TO FIX MY LEAKY TAP. I WANT TO DIE. (Signed Mrs. Mihály Berger.) The cigarette butt bore traces of fresh lipstick. (One Minute Stories. Selected and translated by Judith Sollosy. Corvina, Budapest, 1995:23.) In Lieu of Further Notices We are saddened to announce that Widow Mrs. Domokos Varga, née Johanna Krása, has passed away in the 89th year of a life of good works. She is mourned by her daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchild, namely, Mrs. Jack Kay, Dorothy, Christopher, Allan and Jack Jr., as well as Frau Magda Rüdiger, Horst, Annemarie, Walter, Joanna Esculidos Perez, and her greatgrandson Pepe. (Unpublished translation by Judith Sollosy.)

The ‘‘fresh lipstick’’ remark in (9a) gives some grounds for the title of the story (Climax), while (9b) implicates that Widow Mrs. Domokos Varga’s daughters have emigrated from Hungary to different Western countries. We can see by now that the recognition of the contrast between what is said and what is meant dates back earlier than the fourth century when Servius and Donatus, highlighted by Horn (2004:3), characterized litotes as a figure in which we say less but mean more (‘‘minus dicimus et plus significamus’’; see Hoffmann, 1987:28--29). (10a) is a litotes, whereas (10b) is a hyperbole, both being figures of thought: (10)

a.

b.

Roque Junior pedig visszajön. Hát új brazil csúcsot nem fog dönteni 100 méteren. ‘And Roque Junior comes back. Well, he will not set a new Brazilian record in the 100 metres sprint.’ (By a Hungarian football commentator; cited first in Nemesi, 2009:124. Gloss: The Brazilian defender of AC Milan Roque Junior got injured in the extra time of the 2003 UEFA Champions Ligue final, but he returned to play with a limp and a bandage on his leg. The implicature is that ‘he will be unable to run as fast as he should or at all.’) Le mec qui me fera bouffer des champignons n’ est pas encore né. ‘The guy who will make me gobble up mushrooms is not yet born.’ (From the French film Buffet Froid written and directed by Bertrand Blier, 1979; cited first by Fo´nagy, 2001:218--219. The implicature is that ‘I will never eat mushrooms.’)

Metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, three of the so-called ‘‘four master tropes’’ (Burke, 1941; the fourth being irony), may also take the form of a figure of thought. The essence of metaphor and simile understanding is to find the tertium comparationis. It happens that a simile combines with a synecdoche (11a), or metaphors with metonymies (11b), and so on: (11)

a.

Fuiste mía, so´lo mía, mía, mía, quando tu piel era fresca como la hierba mojada. ‘You were mine, only mine, mine, mine, when your skin was fresh like the wet grass.’

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b.

(From the popular song Lo mejor de tu vida -- ‘The Best of Your Life’ -- of the Spanish romantic singer Julio Iglesias. The propositional implicature here is that you were mine ‘when you were young,’ and the nonpropositional implicature is seeing a woman’s skin as the wet grass and grasping the tertium comparationis. If one feels an attitude-implicature, too, in this simile, it is about how nice that young woman was in the eyes of the singer as a ‘‘narrator.’’) Fly me to the moon Let me play among the stars Let me see what spring is like On Jupiter and Mars In other words, hold my hand In other words, darling, kiss me (The first verse of a famous song sung by Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, and others. The ‘‘space flight’’ metaphor is ‘‘translated’’ into literal language in the last two lines, but, ‘‘in other words,’’ what is implicated propositionally is that ‘make me happy by holding my hand, kissing me, etc.’ The nonpropositional content is manifold. Concepts of space, the moon, stars, Jupiter, and Mars are linked metonymically. For more on happiness metaphors, see Kövecses, 1991, 2000:24--25, 2002/2010:110-116, 195--197.)

Hysterologia violates Grice’s fourth submaxim of Manner (‘‘Be orderly’’) as consisting in an arrangement of two propostitions that runs counter to the natural order (Lausberg, 1998:§ 891), but it, per se, implicates nothing. Figures by detraction, in turn, require the inferential reconstruction of the omitted elements. When things that would deserve a detailed discussion are merely indicated briefly in an enumeration, the speaker/writer uses the figure of percursio. Perhaps the most famous percursio is attributed to Julius Caesar: ‘‘Veni, vidi, vici’’ (‘‘I came, I saw, I conquered’’), but also well known is Winston Churchill’s saying from a memorable 1940 speech to the House of Common: ‘‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’’, analyzed as metonymic by Chantrill and Mio (1996; see also Gibbs and Colston, 2012:233). This figure of thought tends to bring about not a single implicature but clusters of implicatures organized as scripts or frames (cf. Schank and Abelson, 1977). The point of praeteritio (occultatio) is the announcement of the intention to leave certain objects out, but it involves the mentioning of those objects and implicates that the speaker could say something (more) unfavorable to someone else, as in (12a), or (more) favorable to himself/herself, as in (12b), but s/he is smart enough not to blame others or praise himself/herself overtly (Lausberg, 1998:§§ 882--886): (12)

a.

b.

I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience. (The 73-year-old Ronald Reagan’s witty remark on whether he is too old to remain the President, followed by general laughter, in the second televised debate of the presidential campaign on October 21, 1984. Note that his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, who also could not help laughing at Reagan’s response, was 56 years old at that time, and he was the Vice President under Jimmy Carter between 1977 and 1981. Reagan implicates, beyond the above characterization of the usual implicatum of praeteritio, that Mondale and the Democrats try to exploit his age, making it an issue of the campaign, but he has much more life experience and political experience as well.) I’ve told you I don’t live and die by the polls. Thus, I will refrain from pointing out that we’re not doing too bad in those polls. What matters is the people that are hurting. And let’s try to solve the problems for the American people. (George H. W. Bush’s news conference, November 6, 1991.)

As regards reticentia, Dascal and Gross (1999:124) look it up in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, which expounds that ‘‘we begin to say something and then stop short, and what we have already leaves enough to arouse suspicion, as follows: ‘‘He who is so handsome and so young, recently at a stranger’s house -- I am unwilling to say more’’’’ (4.54.67). As was noted at the end of section 2, reticentia or aposiopesis (in Greek ápoσiv
phσiς) is one of Iago’s rhetorical weapons in manipulating Othello by false implicatures (Keller, 2010). The figures adapted for intensifying emotions like exclamatio, obsecratio, and licentia always induce an attitudeimplicature. (Lausberg’s ‘‘emotive figures’’ evidentia, sermocinatio, fictio personae, expolitio, simile, and aversion are not necessarily emotive in character.) Exclamatio ‘‘expresses grief or indignation by means of an address to some man or city or place or object’’ (Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.15.22), but Quintilian (9.2.26--27) remarks that when an exclamation is genuine, that is, not more or less simulated, it does not come under the heading of figures of thought. Obsecratio is the rhetorical form of deprecation or pleading request (Lausberg, 1998:§ 760), while licentia is a bold, insulting reproach to the audience, suggesting that the speaker insists on the truth. At first blush, it involves the risk of turning the audience against

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the speaker, who, however, expects the audience to be able to cope with the unpleasant ‘‘truth,’’ and, further, the figure may even be applied cunningly if the so-called truth and the attitude expressed are very timely and are quite in agreement with the opinion of the listeners (§ 761). Former Hungarian Prime Minister (2004--2009) Ferenc Gyurcsány’s notorious ´´szöd in May 2006 is a good source to illustrate the (dissociative type of) attitudespeech which he gave in Balatono implicatures of the three emotive figures in question. (13a) is an exclamatio, (13b) is an obsecratio (embedded in a subiectio), and (13c) is an example of licentia. The last utterance of (13c) is an interrogatio (often called ‘‘rhetorical question,’’ but there are other figures of question, i.e. subiectio, dubitatio, communicatio), which implicates that Gyurcsány and his fellow party members ‘could say nothing if they had to give an account to the country of what has been done in the previous four years.’ The last but one utterance in (13b) is a ‘‘reported interrogatio’’ conveying that ‘Sándor Demján is out of his mind,’ of course, in a figurative sense. (13)

a.

b.

c.

Aki a Magyar Szocialista Párt környékén befolyásos véleményformálo´ makrogazdasági ügyekben Kornaito´l ´´l Surányiig, Vértesto ´´l a jo´ ég tudja, kicsodáig, azokkal végigbeszéltük, végigszenvedtük, Bokrosig, Békésto ´´, a végigüvöltöztük. És azt is meg kell mondjam nektek, hogy nagyon sok nagy ötlettel találkozom. Phu ´´ hétszázát neki! És kiderül, hogy még a legnagyobbak is, a legtöbbre tartottak is százmilliárdos nagyságrendu tévedésekben vannak. ‘With whatever influential opinion-shaper around the Hungarian Socialist Party there is in macro-economic matters, from [economist János] Kornai to [former, 1994--1996, socialist finance minister Lajos] Bokros, from Békés [probably Lászlo´ Békesi, finance minister of the socialist government of 1994--1995] to [economist and banker György] Surányi, from [chairman of GKI Economic Research Co., Hungary, András] Vértes to heaven knows who, we have discussed it, suffered through it, yelled it back and forth. And I must tell you as well that I meet a lot of great ideas. Oh, gosh! And it turns out that even the greatest ones, the most respected ones make mistakes to the order of hundreds of billions [of forints].’ Odajön hozzám Magyarország talán legbefolyásosabb üzletembere, Demján Sándor. Hatalmas nagy hanggal, hogy ,,Ferikém, olvasom a Sárközy-tanulmányban, hogy ha minden háttérintézményt bezárunk, akkor 700--800 milliárd forintot fogunk megtakarítani’’. Mondom: ,,Sanyikám, normális vagy te? Hát legalább te tudhatnál számolni, áldjon meg a jo´ Isten!’’ ‘The most influential businessman of Hungary, Sándor Demján comes up to me and says, in an extremely loud voice, ‘‘Feri, my dear fellow, I’ve just read in the Sárközy-report [Tamás Sárközy was a governmental commissioner between 2004 and 2005], that in case we close every background institutions, we will save 700--800 billion forints.’’ I say: ‘‘Sanyi, my good man, are you out of your mind? At least you could know how to do calculations, for God’s sake!’’’ Nincsen sok választás. Azért nincsen, mer’ elkúrtuk. Nem kicsit, nagyon. Euro´pában ilyen böszmeséget még ország nem csinált, mint amit mi csináltunk. Meg lehet magyarázni. . . Nyilvánvalo´an végighazudtuk az utolso´ másfél-két évet. Teljesen világos volt, hogy amit mondunk, az nem igaz. Annyival vagyunk túl az ország ´´ségein, hogy azt, hogy azt, mi azt nem tudtuk korábban elképzelni, hogy ezt a Magyar Szocialista Párt leheto és a liberálisok közös kormányzása valaha is megteszi. És közben egyébként nem csináltunk semmit négy ´´s kormányzati intézkedést, amire büszkék lehetünk azon túl, évig. Semmit! Nem tudtok mondani olyan jelento hogy a szarbo´l visszahoztuk a kormányzást a végére. Semmit! Ha el kell számolni az országnak, hogy mit csináltunk négy év alatt, akkor mit mondunk? ‘There is not much choice. There is not, because we have fucked it up. Not a little but massively. No European country has done anything as boneheaded as we have. You can explain it away. . . We have obviously lied throughout the past one and a half to two years. It was perfectly clear that what we were saying was not true. We are beyond the country’s possibilities to such an extent that we could not conceive earlier that a joint government of the Hungarian Socialist Party and the liberals would ever do. And in the meantime, by the way, we did not do anything for four years. Nothing! You cannot mention any significant government measure that we could be proud of, apart from the fact that in the end we managed to get governance out of the shit. Nothing! If we have to give an account to the country of what we have been doing in the past four years, what are we going to say?’

The remaining figures of thought15 are not more than different narrative and argumentative strategies or tactics, which may carry implicatures, but this is not an inevitable feature of them. In the case of correctio, for instance, it may be

15 The complete list on the basis of Lausberg’s taxonomy is the following: apostrophe, subiectio, dubitatio, communicatio, finitio, conciliatio, correctio, regressio, commutatio, distinctio, evidentia, sermocinatio, expolitio, aversio, conciliatio, praeparatio, concessio, permissio, interpositio, subnexio, aetiologia, sententia, hysterologia.

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implicated why the speaker/writer corrects himself/herself (e.g. ‘‘She was dressed, or rather undressed, after the fashion of the country’’; Narrative of a Visit to Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the Sandwich Islands, during the Years 1821 and 1822 by Gilbert Farquhar Mathison). One can employ the ‘‘general truth’’ of a sententia, either metaphorical or not, to create a particularized implicature (e.g. ‘‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far,’’ used by Theodore Roosevelt as an alleged ‘‘West African proverb’’ first in a letter to Henry L. Sprague of the Union League Club, on January 26, 1900, characterizing his own communication tactic of forcing New York’s Republican leaders to pull their support away from a corrupt financial adviser, and, again, in a speech at Minnesota State Fair on September 2, 1901, in which what he meant by the ‘‘big stick’’ was ‘‘a thoroughly efficient navy’’ needed in the US). As for self-implicatures, licentia typically gives the impression of brave outspokenness, conciliatio (borrowing an argument from the opponent for the benefit of one’s own cause; Lausberg, 1998:§ 853) and praeparatio (§§ 854--855; calculating and disproving beforehand the line of thought of the opposing party) reflect a thorough grounding in the topic, while concessio (§ 856; the concession that one or other of the opponent’s arguments is right) and permissio (§ 857; acknowledging that the opponent has the opportunity to make a decision and act at his/her own discretion) defend the interlocutor’s positive or negative face (Brown and Levinson, 1987). In my view, fictio personae (personification) is a kind of a metaphor, oxymoron is a trope (its pair, paradox is a figure of thought), and, finally, tautology, which is treated in classical rhetoric as a solecism (Lausberg, 1998:§ 502) or, if deliberately employed, as a figure (cf. Quint. 8.3.50), also conveys implicatures (Grice, 1975:52, 1989:33; Ward and Hirschberg, 1991; Nemesi, 2009, 2010): (14)

In a small town, people don’t know the difference between vodkas. Vodka is vodka. (Chicago Tribune, 13 December, 1989; cited by Ward and Hirschberg, 1991:514. The speaker quoted in the daily newspaper is a restaurant manager. What he implicates by his tautological utterance is that the Russian origin or brand-name as a property of vodka is not relevant to the people of small-town Minnesota.)

7. Conclusion Most scholars of pragmatics have long believed that research on implicated meanings is a relatively new development in the study of language use. However, implicature phenomena are too ubiquitous to escape ancient rhetoricians’ attention. This paper has aimed to show that three concepts of classical rhetoric can be connected with the Gricean notion of implicature, viz. enthymeme, trope, and figure of thought. I have examined these concepts closely, revealing the definitional problems. Examples of them drawn from various kinds of data sources have been analyzed, and the classical authors’ claims have been compared with the implicature accounts. My findings suggest that (1) the interpretation of the concept of enthymeme preferred by argumentation theorist Douglas Walton and others is so similar to the standard notion of implicature that they seem to overlap one another; (2) classical rhetoricians were interested primarily in nonconventional tropes that convey complex implicatures; and (3) certain groups of figures of thought cannot work without generating an implicature, while others are less prone to function in this way. I have argued that we could fruitfully combine the advantages of classical rhetoric and pragmatics, if we made a tidy distinction between enthymemes (as arguments with one or more missing premises) and implicatures (as arguments with one or more implicit conclusions), which does not mean that there are no complex discourses with implicit conclusions that serve as premises of the subsequent inferential step, and there are no enthymematic implicatures. I have outlined, following Giora (1997, 2003), a two-stage model of nonconventional trope understanding and illustrated those figures of thought that evoke implicatures. The material of classical rhetoric is clearly genre-dependent: it was born in the Greek city-states for satisfying practical needs, and grew richer in the Roman Republic and Empire, to become the first storehouse of knowledge on language use. The task of pragmatics is declared sometimes as more general than that of rhetoric, sometimes as different from it. Either way, rhetoric, with its enormous empirical base established and reinforced during so many centuries, can contribute greatly to the job of pragmatics, as pragmatics can refresh the dull taxonomies of rhetoric (Dascal and Gross, 1999). It is not accidental that attempts having been put forward so far to amalgamate rhetoric and pragmatics in a practical analysis investigate some kinds of argumentative discourses (Árvay, 2004; Ilie, 2010; Keller, 2010). The reason is that the study of human argumentation -- called argumentation theory or ‘‘informal logic’’ (Walton, 1989, 1996), ‘‘new rhetoric’’ (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958/1969; Perelman, 1982), and ‘‘pragma-dialectics’’ (van Eemeren and Grootendorst, 1984, 2004) -- is situated at the interface of logic, rhetoric, and pragmatics. Pragmaticists may be interested in conversational argumentation, while rhetoricians deal with public argumentation, but the cognitive-strategic means examined by both camps are partly the same. This is what I have intended to stress in the present paper, developing crosswalks between the two fields of inquiry. The question whether or not there is a common territory of rhetoric and pragmatics outside the realm of argumentation is yet unanswered.

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