11: Layers of meaning - Cooperation, humour, and Gricean Maxims

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2017

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

– Would you like some coffee? – Coffee would keep me awake. Does that mean yes coffee, or no coffee? It depends! Is it the morning or the evening? Is the person trying to pull an all-nighter or take an afternoon nap? A computer looking strictly at the meanings of the words would be confused, but we humans do this kind of thing all the time without even noticing it. In episode 11 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about the hidden assumptions of cooperation that we bring to every conversation. They were formulated by the linguist Paul Grice, and are known as the Cooperative Principle or Grice’s Maxims. Not only does stating these assumptions explicitly help us understand conversations where we exchange messages beyond the literal meaning of our words, but it also explains a lot of humour – many jokes rely on creative flouting of Gricean Maxims! This month’s Patreon bonus was about language play: games like Pig Latin, rhyming slang, and Verlan, as nominated and voted on by our patrons. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about hypercorrection, the doggo meme, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm We hit our next funding goal shortly after recording this episode, which will allow us to start bringing on guest linguists, so stay tuned for more info on upcoming interviews! For the links mentioned in this episode, check out our shownotes page at: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/164303700686/lingthusiasm-episode-11-layers-of-meaning

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to L'Enthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:19.0	And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today we're going to talk about
0:21.7	being cooperative and the linguistic humor that comes when you're not. But first, our Patreon
0:27.6	episode this month is about language games, language play, things like pig Latin, verlon, rhyming,
0:34.3	slang, and other ways of moving around bits and pieces of language and what that tells us about how language works.
0:40.8	And also on the Patreon, we have a new supporter level, which is the Lingthusiasm multi-pack.
0:46.5	For a $20 a month subscription, you can have the opportunity to privately share bonus episodes with your students, or if you have a
0:55.2	couple of broke friends and you want to share the Lenthusiasm bonus episode joy with them,
1:00.5	this tier is a way that lets you do that in good conscience, and you also get to nominate topics
1:06.3	and vote on future bonus episode topics. So you can find that and all the other levels of support
1:12.5	that we have at patreon.com slash link-thusiasm. So also this month, I did an interview on the
1:19.5	linguistic podcast World in Words, where I talked about weird Twitter and especially the
1:25.0	Twitter account of Johnny Sun, who's a very popular kind of weird
1:29.1	Twitter account, and some of the internet linguistic things that happen there. So we will
1:32.9	link to that interview, and you can listen to us on that podcast, which is also a linguistics
1:37.6	podcast that you might like. They do beautiful stories about language and have been doing so for a long
1:43.8	time. They have a massive collection
1:45.4	of back episodes. They're part of PRI. We'll put a link to those in the show notes.
1:49.6	Cool. So if you need something to do between your link to the other episodes, you can listen to them
1:53.0	too.
2:04.4	Let's talk about linguistic cooperation.
2:06.9	Okay, we'll do it cooperatively as well.
	...

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