Page 136 - Costellazioni 6

GÜNTER RADDEN, Meaningful Grammar

changed: It is a little cute Italian boy sounds unusual, and It is an Italian
cute little boy sounds peculiar. Apparently, the position of attributive ad-
jectives relative to each other is determined by their semantics. Italian de-
notes a permanent property of the boy, little denotes a stable or tempo-
rary property, and cute denotes an evaluative property ascribed to the
child. Permanent properties inherently belong to the entity described by
the noun and adjectives denoting a permanent property are, therefore,
put closest to the noun. Temporary properties are accidental properties
of an entity and adjectives denoting these properties are put further away
from the noun. Evaluative properties are based on the speaker’s subjec-
tive assessment and hence external to the entity they qualify. These ad-
jectives are, therefore, put furthest away from the noun. The order of at-
tributive adjectives in English is thus also motivated by an iconic princi-
ple: the principle of proximity/distance, according to which conceptual
distance corresponds to linguistic distance.

1.3 Grammatical structure invites implicatures
Implicatures are implicit aspects of meaning which the hearer supplies
in interpreting an utterance the way it was intended by the speaker.
Thus, the two coordinated clauses in (2a), Silvia had a baby and got married,
tend to invite more than purely temporal meaning. As already men-
tioned above, we might also see a causal connection between the clauses:
‘Silvia had a baby and, therefore, she got married’. Such implicatures are
usually accurate but may, of course, also be mistaken. We may, therefore,
reject an implicature. I could, for example, say, “Mary had a baby and
got married, but not because of the baby.” The possibility of cancelling
an implicature is, in fact, the defining characteristic of implicatures.
The hearer usually reads more information into an utterance than
what is literally expressed by the speaker. Why would language users
do so? Communication is, amongst other things, governed by the prin-
ciple of economy: «Say no more than you must» (Grice 1975).The
speaker need not express information that she assumes the hearer can
supply anyway from the preceding discourse, the situational context
or their world knowledge. Since a speaker may rely on the hearer’s
ability to infer missing information, language tends to underspecify
meaning. Let us consider the implicated meanings invited in the
following sentences.

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