Did you ever have that annoying teacher that would reply to your question "Can I go to the bathroom?" with "I sure hope so!"?
Enter Pragmatics. That teacher was not taking into account the law of Conversational Implicature (Grice). That's basically a fancy way of saying that there is often an extra meaning to something someone says beyond its semantic (literal) meaning. The semantic meaning of "Can I go to the bathroom?" is "Do I have the ability to go to the bathroom?" But the speaker's meaning is "Permission to go to the bathroom?" The extra part is that the student is asking for permission. People figure out the extra meaning behind an utterance by using the Cooperative Principle, which basically says that you can figure out the speaker's meaning from the semantic meaning by assuming that the speaker is behaving rationally and cooperatively. So when your teacher interprets your asking permission as your asking about your ability to form bodily functions, s/he's not taking into account that you are behaving rationally and cooperatively. You wouldn't randomly ask your teacher if you have the ability to take a shit in the middle of class because you're behaving rationally and cooperatively. So obviously there's an extra meaning behind "Can I go to the bathroom?" and that extra meaning is you're asking permission.
The speaker's meaning depends on the context of use. For example, if you just woke up from a major surgery on your vertebral column, when you ask your surgeon if you can go to the bathroom, you probably mean "Do I still have control over my bowel movements?" But in the classroom context, it's obvious to all your classmates (and should be obvious to your teacher) that you're asking permission to go to the bathroom.
So next time your teacher replies, "I sure hope so!" you can tell them "It's not like I just risked becoming paralyzed, so you just misinterpreted the meaning of that question given the context of use! Not to mention you completely violated the Cooperative Principle!"
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2 comments:
Haha that's soooo funny cause when I came home, IIIIII had to ask that same question! "Can I go to the Bathrooom?"
You know what I can't stand? When I ask "Can I go to the bathroom?"
And the other person goes. "I don't know, Can you?"
Expecting you to say May I, except what I do is, go "Yeah I Can," and leave to go to the bathroom, because to me they're being smart allacs, so haha so by me asking them permission and them shooting that back, I pretend to assume that that means I don't even have to ask ^_^
"I don't know can you?" is the cousin of "I sure hope so!"
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