Page 410 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
'doublespeak.' For various motives speakers or writers may be equivocal or ambivalent: to avoid committing themselves, to save face, etc. The domains of political oratory and advertising frequently present examples of this.
In pragmatics, the term 'ambivalence' is now used for utterances with more than one illocutionary force. In traditional rhetoric this was termed 'amphibology' or 'amphiboly' ('ambiguity'), and interestingly it seems mainly to have been used in contexts that were open to intentional abuse rather than unintentional misinterpretation. So Chaucer writes in Troilus and Criseyde:
Tor goddes speken in amphibologies,
And for one soth ('truth') they tellen twenty lyes
In Shakespeare's Richard II, Bolingbroke's 'Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?' (v. iv) is inter- preted by Exton as a command to kill Richard; Bol- ingbroke himself, however, publicly claims after the event that it was merely a wish (v. vi).
3. LiteraryAmbiguity
There is another kind of doublespeak with intention, that is termed 'punning.' Puns exploit the same lexical and grammatical ambiguities referred to above, but for comic effect: common in jokes, riddles, and adver- tising ("Thames W ater Board: running water for you').
Here the clarity maxim is overridden by the ludic. The thin line between ambiguity and punning is revealed by examples where the comic intent cannot be known for sure, even if the effect is comic: e.g., the newspaper headline 'Planting of evidence at flower show alleged.' The expectation of humor in headlines are as yet ambivalent.
In literary language, however, readers expect mul- tiple meaning, and do not question it. One is accus- tomed to tropes like metaphor, allegory, and irony, which also give rise to two or more interpretations in a single context. One has come to expect 'inde- terminacy,' as reader-response criticism confirms; and the endless play of signification from deconstruction theory. And since the work of Empson (1949), ambi- guity in the widest sense has been seen as crucial to literary, especially poetic, language and its interpret- ation. For Empson, any verbal nuance which gives room for alternative reactions is a type of ambiguity.
Bibliography
Empson W 1949 Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd edn. Chatto and Windus, London
Grice H P 1975 Logic and conversation.In: Cole P,Morgan J L (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York
Leech G N 1983 Principles of Pragmatics. Longman, London Nowottny W 1962 The Language Poets Use. Athlone Press,
London
H.P. Grice had worked with the philosopher J.L. Aus- tin at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. Grice's work on the cooperative principle and its related con- versational maxims arises from the same tradition of ordinary language philosophy. In his book How to Do Things with Words (1962; 2nd edn. 1976), Austin made the distinction between what speakers say and what they mean. Grice's theory tries to explain how a hearer might get from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning.
It is perhaps easiest to begin with a concrete exam- ple of the type of problem which Grice's theory was designed to handle. On a visit to London, two friends returned to their parked car to find that it had been wheel clamped by the police. The driver turned to his passenger and said: Great, that's just what I wantedl It would doubtless have been clear to the passenger,
as it would have been to any competent interactant, that what the driver intended to imply was very different (just the opposite, in fact) from what he actually said. Grice set out to explain the mechanisms by which such implicatures are generated and inter- preted.
Grice first outlined his theory in the William James lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967 (a version of which was published in 197S in his paper 'Logic and Conversation'), and expanded upon it in papers published in 1978 and 1981. Grice never fully developed his theory—there are many gaps and sev- eral inconsistencies in his writings. Yet it is this work—sketchy, in many ways problematical, and fre- quently misunderstood—which has proved to be one of the most influential theories in the development of pragmatics.
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Conversational Maxims J. Thomas