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i can't remember the threshold for distinction.
What will be marked for my degree is, as I've said before, my thesis, the combination of three problem sets and a syntax paper, and three exams. There's a standard you have to reach in order to pass, obviously, and I don't know specifically what that is, but I'm not so worried; and there's a separate standard for achieving distinction, which involves some number of papers being above a certain mark at the same time as none are below a different mark. I do not know what these marks are.
But I have back two of my essays from the mock Paper A. One has a 60% and one has a 63%, which, before anybody flips out, I urge you to bear in mind is more like /80 in each case, this being Britain. The comments on both essays are fair to encouraging, although not falling over themselves with praise. Let us review:
Give an analysis, using Gricean conversational maxims, of the steps the reader must implicitly go through in order to make sense of the following: 'Would you mind not doing that, please?'
Grice's conversational maxims impose burdens on both the speaker (or utterer, writer, in general the producer of language) and the hearer (reader or other interlocutor). These are the maxims of quality, quantity, manner, and relevance.
Grice's maxim of quality requires that the speaker make his meaning clear, and in that sense all three other maxims can be seen to serve this one. The maxim of quantity requires that he say neither more nor less than is required; the maxim of manner requires that he communicate in an appropriate tone and by appropriate means; and the maxim of relevance requires that his communication be related to his meaning.[*] Thus, the interlocutor should be able safely to assume that the speaker's communication will be clear, relevant, and of appropriate manner and length.
With this in mind, an interlocutor facfed with the utterance 'Would you mind not doing that, please?' and trusting that the speaker has heeded Grice's maxims can assume a number of things. First of all, she can assume that the speaker intended his meaning to be clear, because he was following Grice's maxim of quality. Likewise she can assume that the speaker judged his communication to be relevant and appropriate in terms of manner and quantity. If the communication is at this point not clear, therefore, the interlocutor must work out why the speaker judged his communication to be clear, and what he must have assumed she would understand by his uttering it.
If the speaker's communication seems irrelevant, the interlocutor, giving him credit for not violating Grice's maxim of relevance, must examin the situation in which the utterance occurred to find an aspect of htat situation which will make the speech relevant. Perhaps she has been tapping her pen against the table without realizing it; in this case, a sentence like 'Would you mind not doing that, please?' may initially seem irrelevant, if at first the interlocutor does not think she is doing anything. Only when she examines this situation and becomes aware of her inadvertent action does the speaker's communication become relevant.
On the other hand, if the speaker seems to have violated Grice's maxim of manner, but the interlocutor believes he did not intend to do so, she must work out why he beleived the manner of his communication was appropriate. If the sentence is shouted, for example, when it seems to the interlocutor that ordinary speech would have been sufficient, she must conclude that to the speaker, shouting was necessary; possibly his frustration has been building while he said nothing, or possibly he simply has ringing in his ears and does not realize he has raised his voice, but in any event, the interlocutor must seek an explanation for the speaker's apparent violation of the maxim of manner. At the same time, it may not be the means but rather the tone that is inappropriate. If the speaker and the interlocutor are of significantly different ranks, for instance, the framing of the communication as a request ('Would you mind ... please') may seem incongruous. The interlocutor must conclude that the speaker chose to make his request in this manner for a reason; perhaps he wished to de-emphasize the difference in their ranks by deliberately not issuing a direct order, or conversely perhaps he wished to highlight the formaility of the relationship by emphasizing the courtesy with which he made his communication.
The maxim of quantity is apparently violated if the speaker provides too much or too little information. The interlocutor here, still trusting that the speaker is not violating maxims deliberately, must assume that the spekaer believes she knows in this instance what 'that' refers to, and that 'would you' and 'please' are necessary to the completeness of the communication -- that is, that 'mind not doing that?' would not be sufficient. By this point it is evident that all the maxims are related; this assumption that 'please' is necessary falls, as we have seen, under the maxim of manner as well as of quantity, and the assumption that the interlocutor will understand 'that' falls under both quantity and relevance.
In summary, an interlocutor to whom 'Would you mind not doing that, please?' is not clear must go implicitly through the steps of working out what the speaker must have understood and intended, if the sentence is ultimately to make sense.
comments on this: mark - 60%
Your answer seems to me to beat around the bush rather than hitting the nail squarely on the head.[**] You don't actually say that the most likely interpretation for this is "Don't do that!" (in a 'bald' 'on the record' way), and hence you don't point up the obliqueness between this and the literal meaning.[***]
However, your answer is saved by the introductory sketch of the Gricean background, and some relevant observations about tone/politeness.
Explain the difference between the meanings of the following pairs of sentences:
a.i. John said Bill was a liberal democrat, and then HE insulted HIM.
ii. John said Bill was a liberal democrat, and then he insulted him.
b.i. Have another drink. After all, you've finished WORK.
ii. Have another drink. After all, YOU'VE finished work.
The pairs of sentences above, while containing in each case the same words in the same syntactic structure, nevertheless have differences in meaning. These differences are due to intonation, and have both implicit and explicit elements.
Considering the (b) sentences first, (bi) emphasizes 'work', implying that (at least as far as the speaker is concerned) the interlocutor may have many things to do yet, but none of these counts as work. Further details of the situation are not available -- possibly the interlocutor has just retired; or possibly he does still have a job and in fact job-related tasks yet to accomplish, but these are easy or non-time-consuming. This is not clear, but it is clear that the speaker believes the interlocutor is due to take a break. In (bii), on the other hand, the emphasized word is 'you' (actually 'you've', but it seems safe to suppose that if 'you have' had not been contracted only 'you' would have been emphasized), implying a different contrast -- not between work and not-work, as in (bi), but between you and not-you. That is, the interlocutor, unlike some other person or persons -- possibly including the speaker, but this is not clear or even particularly implied -- is finished with work. Thus, the interlocutor is entitled to a break while others are not.
In the (a) sentences, the problem is more complex due to the ambiguity of the pronouns. We might assume, in the absence of emphasis implying otherwise, that the correct reading of (aii) is as follows:
1. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then hej insulted himi.
That is, the second part of the sentence may be read to state that Bill insulted John. This is logical, as 'Bill' is the nearest (most recent) antecedent to which 'he' could reasonably refer; and 'him' must refer to a different antecedent than 'he', by rules of English that require a second co-referring pronoun to include '-self'. So the reading in (1) is a logical, grammatical possibility.
It is also possible, however, to read (aii) the opposite way, as in (2):
2. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then hei insulted himj.
That is, the second part of the sentence may be read to state that John insulted Bill. This is also a reasonable reading. 'John' is the subject of the first part of the sentence, so if the clauses are parallel the 'he' that is the subject of the second part will have 'John' as its antecedent; and, as before, because the next pronoun is 'him' rather than 'himself', the pronouns 'he' and 'him' may not co-refer so 'him' must (if 'he' refers to 'John') refer to 'Bill'. As was the case with (1), this reading in (2) describes two actions, a 'calling' and an 'insult'. However, the reading in (2) implies very strongly that John's calling Bill a liberal democrat was not, in itself, an insult. Depending on the audience, the (2) reading may or may not therefore be ironic. (A clearer or less ambiguous example of this type of irony would be a sentence like 'He had three pints and a couple of whiskies, and then went to get something to drink.') In the (1) reading, on the other hand, the status as an insult of John's calling Bill a liberal democrat is not clear, because while the next thing that happens is that Bill insults John, there is no emphasis to draw our attention to any aspect of the sentence; the events are simply presented without intonational comment.
However, (ai) is another matter. It is difficult to determine at first which pronoun refers to which antecedent, as both are emphasized; but given the above discussion, the most likely reading seems to be (3):
3. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then HEj insulted HIMi.
In this reading, it is clear that John's calling Bill a liberal democrat is an insult, and implicit that Bill's subsequent insulting of John is a retaliation in kind. The emphasis on 'he' draws attention to the fact that this pronoun refers to an unexpected antecedent, which must in this case be 'Bill', as the parallel structure is much more likely to be assumed than the structure in reading (1), where the pronoun referred to the nearest available antecedent. And once again, 'he' and 'him' cannot co-refer, so 'him' must refer to 'John' in this case.
It is conceivable that a context could be imagined in which (ai) could be read as in (4):
4. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then HEi insulted HIMj.
If, for example, John and Bill had been arguing for some time, and Bill suddenly insulted John, the sentence could be describing what happened next if John had called Bill a liberal democrat (as a sort of place-holder so he could keep the floor) and then insulted him. But of course this context is not available here.
What is available to us is a significant contrast between (ai) and (aii). With this contrast in mind, and without elaborate hypothetical context, it is only reasonable to read (ai) as in (3), and therefore to read (aii) as in (2).
comments on this: mark - 63%
This is a tricky question to answer, since the change in intonation and contrastive stress has a joint effect both on the interpretation of the verb insult and also on the indexing of the pronouns.
I think your analysis of verb interpretation comes out will, and you hit the nail on the head directly on page 2[****], with added levels of sophistication on pages 3/4.
The analysis of pronoun co-indexing on p. 2 is less successful, since you introduce "-self", which would only apply within the same clause. The issue here is 'discourse' co-indexing and the 'inverting' of the co-indexing pattern.
Good times!
* This is actually not quite right, but I don't appear to have lost points for misquoting the maxims. They are actually:
** Nothing like mixing metaphors, eh? ;-)
*** That's impossible to deny; in my defense, I don't think that's what the question asked. I suppose what this means is that on the day when I go to take the real exam, I'll have to go through the steps I've just described to try to work out what the question actually means, even if I think it's perfectly clear. I shall, that is, have to assume that the examiners have unintentionally violated one or more maxims of the cooperative principle.
**** He put a note next to the relevant paragraph, actually: the direct hitting of the head of the nail is "However, the reading in (2) implies very strongly that John's calling Bill a liberal democrat was not, in itself, an insult."
But I have back two of my essays from the mock Paper A. One has a 60% and one has a 63%, which, before anybody flips out, I urge you to bear in mind is more like /80 in each case, this being Britain. The comments on both essays are fair to encouraging, although not falling over themselves with praise. Let us review:
Give an analysis, using Gricean conversational maxims, of the steps the reader must implicitly go through in order to make sense of the following: 'Would you mind not doing that, please?'
Grice's conversational maxims impose burdens on both the speaker (or utterer, writer, in general the producer of language) and the hearer (reader or other interlocutor). These are the maxims of quality, quantity, manner, and relevance.
Grice's maxim of quality requires that the speaker make his meaning clear, and in that sense all three other maxims can be seen to serve this one. The maxim of quantity requires that he say neither more nor less than is required; the maxim of manner requires that he communicate in an appropriate tone and by appropriate means; and the maxim of relevance requires that his communication be related to his meaning.[*] Thus, the interlocutor should be able safely to assume that the speaker's communication will be clear, relevant, and of appropriate manner and length.
With this in mind, an interlocutor facfed with the utterance 'Would you mind not doing that, please?' and trusting that the speaker has heeded Grice's maxims can assume a number of things. First of all, she can assume that the speaker intended his meaning to be clear, because he was following Grice's maxim of quality. Likewise she can assume that the speaker judged his communication to be relevant and appropriate in terms of manner and quantity. If the communication is at this point not clear, therefore, the interlocutor must work out why the speaker judged his communication to be clear, and what he must have assumed she would understand by his uttering it.
If the speaker's communication seems irrelevant, the interlocutor, giving him credit for not violating Grice's maxim of relevance, must examin the situation in which the utterance occurred to find an aspect of htat situation which will make the speech relevant. Perhaps she has been tapping her pen against the table without realizing it; in this case, a sentence like 'Would you mind not doing that, please?' may initially seem irrelevant, if at first the interlocutor does not think she is doing anything. Only when she examines this situation and becomes aware of her inadvertent action does the speaker's communication become relevant.
On the other hand, if the speaker seems to have violated Grice's maxim of manner, but the interlocutor believes he did not intend to do so, she must work out why he beleived the manner of his communication was appropriate. If the sentence is shouted, for example, when it seems to the interlocutor that ordinary speech would have been sufficient, she must conclude that to the speaker, shouting was necessary; possibly his frustration has been building while he said nothing, or possibly he simply has ringing in his ears and does not realize he has raised his voice, but in any event, the interlocutor must seek an explanation for the speaker's apparent violation of the maxim of manner. At the same time, it may not be the means but rather the tone that is inappropriate. If the speaker and the interlocutor are of significantly different ranks, for instance, the framing of the communication as a request ('Would you mind ... please') may seem incongruous. The interlocutor must conclude that the speaker chose to make his request in this manner for a reason; perhaps he wished to de-emphasize the difference in their ranks by deliberately not issuing a direct order, or conversely perhaps he wished to highlight the formaility of the relationship by emphasizing the courtesy with which he made his communication.
The maxim of quantity is apparently violated if the speaker provides too much or too little information. The interlocutor here, still trusting that the speaker is not violating maxims deliberately, must assume that the spekaer believes she knows in this instance what 'that' refers to, and that 'would you' and 'please' are necessary to the completeness of the communication -- that is, that 'mind not doing that?' would not be sufficient. By this point it is evident that all the maxims are related; this assumption that 'please' is necessary falls, as we have seen, under the maxim of manner as well as of quantity, and the assumption that the interlocutor will understand 'that' falls under both quantity and relevance.
In summary, an interlocutor to whom 'Would you mind not doing that, please?' is not clear must go implicitly through the steps of working out what the speaker must have understood and intended, if the sentence is ultimately to make sense.
comments on this: mark - 60%
Your answer seems to me to beat around the bush rather than hitting the nail squarely on the head.[**] You don't actually say that the most likely interpretation for this is "Don't do that!" (in a 'bald' 'on the record' way), and hence you don't point up the obliqueness between this and the literal meaning.[***]
However, your answer is saved by the introductory sketch of the Gricean background, and some relevant observations about tone/politeness.
Explain the difference between the meanings of the following pairs of sentences:
a.i. John said Bill was a liberal democrat, and then HE insulted HIM.
ii. John said Bill was a liberal democrat, and then he insulted him.
b.i. Have another drink. After all, you've finished WORK.
ii. Have another drink. After all, YOU'VE finished work.
The pairs of sentences above, while containing in each case the same words in the same syntactic structure, nevertheless have differences in meaning. These differences are due to intonation, and have both implicit and explicit elements.
Considering the (b) sentences first, (bi) emphasizes 'work', implying that (at least as far as the speaker is concerned) the interlocutor may have many things to do yet, but none of these counts as work. Further details of the situation are not available -- possibly the interlocutor has just retired; or possibly he does still have a job and in fact job-related tasks yet to accomplish, but these are easy or non-time-consuming. This is not clear, but it is clear that the speaker believes the interlocutor is due to take a break. In (bii), on the other hand, the emphasized word is 'you' (actually 'you've', but it seems safe to suppose that if 'you have' had not been contracted only 'you' would have been emphasized), implying a different contrast -- not between work and not-work, as in (bi), but between you and not-you. That is, the interlocutor, unlike some other person or persons -- possibly including the speaker, but this is not clear or even particularly implied -- is finished with work. Thus, the interlocutor is entitled to a break while others are not.
In the (a) sentences, the problem is more complex due to the ambiguity of the pronouns. We might assume, in the absence of emphasis implying otherwise, that the correct reading of (aii) is as follows:
1. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then hej insulted himi.
That is, the second part of the sentence may be read to state that Bill insulted John. This is logical, as 'Bill' is the nearest (most recent) antecedent to which 'he' could reasonably refer; and 'him' must refer to a different antecedent than 'he', by rules of English that require a second co-referring pronoun to include '-self'. So the reading in (1) is a logical, grammatical possibility.
It is also possible, however, to read (aii) the opposite way, as in (2):
2. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then hei insulted himj.
That is, the second part of the sentence may be read to state that John insulted Bill. This is also a reasonable reading. 'John' is the subject of the first part of the sentence, so if the clauses are parallel the 'he' that is the subject of the second part will have 'John' as its antecedent; and, as before, because the next pronoun is 'him' rather than 'himself', the pronouns 'he' and 'him' may not co-refer so 'him' must (if 'he' refers to 'John') refer to 'Bill'. As was the case with (1), this reading in (2) describes two actions, a 'calling' and an 'insult'. However, the reading in (2) implies very strongly that John's calling Bill a liberal democrat was not, in itself, an insult. Depending on the audience, the (2) reading may or may not therefore be ironic. (A clearer or less ambiguous example of this type of irony would be a sentence like 'He had three pints and a couple of whiskies, and then went to get something to drink.') In the (1) reading, on the other hand, the status as an insult of John's calling Bill a liberal democrat is not clear, because while the next thing that happens is that Bill insults John, there is no emphasis to draw our attention to any aspect of the sentence; the events are simply presented without intonational comment.
However, (ai) is another matter. It is difficult to determine at first which pronoun refers to which antecedent, as both are emphasized; but given the above discussion, the most likely reading seems to be (3):
3. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then HEj insulted HIMi.
In this reading, it is clear that John's calling Bill a liberal democrat is an insult, and implicit that Bill's subsequent insulting of John is a retaliation in kind. The emphasis on 'he' draws attention to the fact that this pronoun refers to an unexpected antecedent, which must in this case be 'Bill', as the parallel structure is much more likely to be assumed than the structure in reading (1), where the pronoun referred to the nearest available antecedent. And once again, 'he' and 'him' cannot co-refer, so 'him' must refer to 'John' in this case.
It is conceivable that a context could be imagined in which (ai) could be read as in (4):
4. Johni said Billj was a liberal democrat, and then HEi insulted HIMj.
If, for example, John and Bill had been arguing for some time, and Bill suddenly insulted John, the sentence could be describing what happened next if John had called Bill a liberal democrat (as a sort of place-holder so he could keep the floor) and then insulted him. But of course this context is not available here.
What is available to us is a significant contrast between (ai) and (aii). With this contrast in mind, and without elaborate hypothetical context, it is only reasonable to read (ai) as in (3), and therefore to read (aii) as in (2).
comments on this: mark - 63%
This is a tricky question to answer, since the change in intonation and contrastive stress has a joint effect both on the interpretation of the verb insult and also on the indexing of the pronouns.
I think your analysis of verb interpretation comes out will, and you hit the nail on the head directly on page 2[****], with added levels of sophistication on pages 3/4.
The analysis of pronoun co-indexing on p. 2 is less successful, since you introduce "-self", which would only apply within the same clause. The issue here is 'discourse' co-indexing and the 'inverting' of the co-indexing pattern.
Good times!
* This is actually not quite right, but I don't appear to have lost points for misquoting the maxims. They are actually:
Quality: TruthThe idea is that listeners should assume that speakers are following these maxims, absent evidence that they're not. This is called the Cooperative Principle. Of course it's bunk; speakers flout the maxims all the time, and listeners damn well know it. Importantly, though, flouting a maxim is deliberately violating it, so it's understood between the speaker and the listener that the maxim has just been violated; it's when listeners assume speakers are adhering to the maxims but speakers violate them inadvertently that you run into a mess.
-- speaker must not lie or in fact even say sth he is not confident is true
Quantity: Information
-- speaker must be (only) as informative as necessary (i.e. I got that one right [g])
Relation: Relevance
-- speaker must be relevant (got that one right too)
Manner: Clarity
-- speaker must be concise, unambiguous, orderly, and otherwise easy to understand.
** Nothing like mixing metaphors, eh? ;-)
*** That's impossible to deny; in my defense, I don't think that's what the question asked. I suppose what this means is that on the day when I go to take the real exam, I'll have to go through the steps I've just described to try to work out what the question actually means, even if I think it's perfectly clear. I shall, that is, have to assume that the examiners have unintentionally violated one or more maxims of the cooperative principle.
**** He put a note next to the relevant paragraph, actually: the direct hitting of the head of the nail is "However, the reading in (2) implies very strongly that John's calling Bill a liberal democrat was not, in itself, an insult."
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For some reason, I have it in my head that the relevant numbers for me are 60 and 65 -- that is, if I have two or three papers at or over 65 and none below 60, I get distinction? I can't actually remember, though. Will have to ask the girl a year ahead of me who's in a position to know.
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