Imagine a pretty simple sentence like "Who's the guy in
the tank top?" Now let's think about how it might be interpreted in
the following two contexts:
There are two guys standing nearby; one is wearing a T-shirt and one
is wearing a tank top.
You have been waiting outside the library for your friend to meet you
and go get lunch with you. While you're waiting, you notice your
friend chatting with a hot sexy guy who's wearing a tank top. There
is no other guy around.
What I'm particularly interested in is how we interpret
the modifier "in the tank top". In context #1, it would probably
be used to specify which guy you're asking about: you are asking who the
tank-top guy is and you are not asking who the T-shirt guy is (maybe you
already know who he is, or maybe you just don't care who he is). This is
what we call a restrictive modifier: it restricts which
person or thing we are talking about.
On the other hand, in context #2, it's just extra information.
It's not used to specify which guy you're talking about, it's just additional
description. This is what we call a non-restrictive modifier.
In English, modifiers are often ambiguous between restrictive
and non-restrictive interpretations. An exception is certain relative clauses
in a certain register of English; in prescriptive high-school grammar sorts
of classes you may have been taught that you should use "that" for
restrictive relative clauses and "which" for non-restrictive
relative clauses. In many styles of English, though, this distinction is
no longer observed.
Is it an insult?
I find that many expressions or utterances may seem insulting
or not insulting, depending on whether a modifier in the expression is
understood as non-restrictive or restrictive. For example:
During the protests
in Hong Kong in 2019, when we weren't busy being tear gassed and shot with
rubber bullets and pepper balls, a lot of protesters would shout "黑警"
("evil cop") at the cops. This is widely considered a derogatory term for cops;
if someone calls a cop a "黑警", this seems to usually get interpreted
as meaning something like "you are a cop, and cops are evil". This is clearly a
non-restrictive interpretation of the modifier.
To see that this is non-restrictive, we can imagine what this same
expression would mean if it were interpreted as having a restrictive modifier
instead. A protester yelling at a cop and calling them a "黑警"
could be intending to mean something like, "You are a bad cop
(as opposed to a good cop, which is a kind of person I have no problem with)."
Perhaps some people did mean it that way
(this protest movement included people from a lot of political orientations,
so there certainly was a mix of people who believe the institution of
policing is fundamentally wrong / people who believe acab,
and more conservative people who support the police in general but are just
upset at the "bad" ones; the question is whether any of the people shouting
"黑警" were in the latter group).
We can see a pretty much identical ambiguity in English as
well, although in American English the corresponding term seems to be more
commonly interpreted as restrictive rather than non-restrictive. That is,
if I say "He's a dirty cop", this would often be interpreted as
meaning that the person in question is a particular kind of cop (a corrupt
one who uses his position to personally enrich himself, like a character
out of The
Shield), without necessarily suggesting that I find cops in general
dirty. It could, however, be interpreted non-restrictively, as
something like "He's a cop, and cops are dirty." (I feel that the intonation
is slightly different if I say the sentence with this intention; with the restrictive
meaning I would put more stress on dirty and with the non-restrictive
meaning I would put more stress on cop.) Note that my intuitions
here are pretty much the opposite for Cantonese "黑警" (evil cop)
and English "dirty cop"; this may be due to context (since my experience
with this term in Cantonese is mostly limited to a particular moment in history
when the attention was on the actions of the police force as a whole, unlike
in the somewhat-corresponding American context where media narratives still
tend to focus on the actions of individual "bad apple" cops [despite the
efforts of many organizers and activists to change the focus to the institution
of policing in general]).
Non-restrictive interpretations and implicatures
Enjoy this classic scene from The Lord of the Rings: The
Two Towers:
While this scene might make you nostalgic for
a certain artifact of
early-aughts Internet culture (at least if you are old like me), what
I'm more interested in here is Gollum's utterance at the very end of the scene,
"You keep nasty chips!". Let's analyze this a little.
First off, let me cheat a little to simplify our lives some.
Gollum's statement is not a declarative statement, it's an imperative: i.e.,
"keep your nasty chips (because I don't want them)!". But later in this
analysis I'm going to want us to look at truth-values a bit, and doing
that with imperative sentences is a bit tricky. So, to make things easier,
let's just imagine Gollum had instead said "I hate nasty chips!",
and we'll analyze that instead. (Unfortunately this is in keeping with much
of the tradition in semantics and philosophy of language, which mostly
focuses on declarative sentences, despite decades of being criticized for
that [Austin, Levinson, and Lycan all raise this criticism of traditional
philosophy of language]. Anyway, if you want a fun extra challenge,
once you've understood our analysis of this easier sentence then you can
try to redo it with the imperative sentence!)
So imagine Gollum says "I hate nasty chips!". As
we have seen above, this could be interpreted in a restrictive and non-offensive
way (e.g., some chips are yummy and some are nasty, and Gollum hates the nasty
kind but is not expressing any judgment about the other kinds), or it could
be interpreted in a non-restrictive way that is offensive to chips lovers (e.g.,
chips are nasty and Gollum hates them).
To me, the non-restrictive and offensive interpretation seems
more natural and more likely to emerge, at least in whatever context we are
assuming for this example. If Gollum uttered this and then Sam criticized him
for insulting the dignity of the noble chip, and then Gollum tried to weasel his way
out by saying "Hey, I didn't say I hate all chips, I only hate ones that happen
to also be nasty!", that would probably sound pretty disingenuous (which, come
to think of it, would be pretty in character for Gollum!). So, the restrictive
interpretation does not seem like the intended or most natural interpretation
in this example.
Let's use some of our formal pragmatics concepts to examine
these different interpretations.
I think we could say that the
restrictive interpretation involves a conversational implicature
(specifically, a quantity implicature), and non-restrictive interpretations
involve presuppositions or conventional implicatures. If I say "I hate
nasty chips" and mean to convey that I only hate nasty
chips and not yummy ones, this seems to be based on
interpreting "nasty chips" through what semanticists call
"intersective modification" or "subsective modification" (e.g., nasty
chips is the intersection of the set of things that are nasty
and the set of things that are chips), and then ruling out all
the other kinds of chips via a conversational implicature. This
implicature is comparable to the ad-hoc implicatures we saw in the
"What's a stronger alternative?"
module, where e.g. "I have lived in the USA and UAE" can implicate
that I haven't lived anywhere else. (But it's not so clear that the example
with which we began this module, "Who's the guy in the tank top?",
can also be explained in this way, since the restrictive interpretation
also seems kind of related to a presupposition associated with the definite
noun phrase the guy in the tank top—specifically, a definite
expression like this presupposes that there is one unique "guy in a tank top"
identifiable in this context.)
On the other hand, the non-restrictive interpretation seems
to involve a conventional implicature or presupposition. We could paraphrase
"I hate nasty chips" as "I hate chips, which are nasty".
The grammatical structure "X, which is Y" has traditionally
been analyzed as conventionally implicating, without literally
(truth-conditionally) entailing, that X is Y. (The suggested in-class
activity for this module will consider other possible ways of explaining
this interpretation.)
So we've got two interpretations of "I hate nasty
chips." The non-restrictive one suggests that all chips are nasty,
and does this via what looks like a conventional implicature. The
restrictive one is just a statement about chips that happen to be
nasty (and, furthermore, an additional conversational implicature
can be made to suggest that there are other chips that are not
nasty). The question is, how does a listener choose which way to
interpret it? And why does a listener like me have the intuition,
mentioned above, that the non-restrictive interpretation is more
natural and more likely to arise here?
I would like to suggest that this decision is also
pragmatic. Specifically, it seems to me like it uses the maxim of
relation.
If I just wanted to say that I hate nasty things, I wouldn't have
needed to specify "chips". (Indeed, under a restrictive interpretation,
"I hate nasty chips" would seem to not only elicit a
quantity implicature that I don't hate non-nasty chips, but also
a quantity implicature that I don't hate nasty non-chips—e.g.,
I don't hate nasty fries, I don't hate nasty crisps, I don't
hate nasty biscuits, etc. This latter implicature does not seem
to arise, though.) I could have just said that I hate nasty
things.
Thus, if I say "I hate nasty chips" and
the listener and I can mutually assume that I am observing the
conversational maxim of relation, then they must assume that
I had a reason to point out chips specifically. Presumably that
reason is because there is some connection between chips and
nastiness.
Or perhaps a better explanation, based on the
maxim of quantity, is available. We saw above that the restrictive
interpretation also involves a quantity implicature (specifically,
an ad-hoc implicature), but the quantity implicature I have in
mind here is an entirely different one, not based on "alternatives"
at all. Recall that the maxim of quantity
means that we shouldn't say too much or too little, relative to
what's needed for the conversation at hand. In this case,
using restrictive modification to specify that I hate nasty
chips (as opposed to yummy chips) is probably unnecessary information
to express. This is because it's already obvious from the literal
meaning: of course I don't like nasty things, because they're nasty!
So, if I say "I hate nasty chips" the restrictive
interpretation violates the maxim of quantity: I'm saying something
that doesn't need to be said because it's already obvious. So,
a listener who hears that will likely search for another
interpretation, one that actually is appropriately informative.
The non-restrictive interpretation satisfies that need, since it actually
communicates something new (the conventional implicature
that I think chips are nasty—and perhaps also a
suggestion that this is the reason I hate them). This
explanation based on the maxim of quantity would also explain why
I feel like a non-restrictive interpretation is less likely to
arise (relative to a restrictive interpretation) for an utterance
like "I hate salty chips", where the fact that I hate
salty things is not already obvious from the literal meaning
of the word.
Anyway, you should take this all with a grain of
salt, because I don't have any references for it; I haven't
read any literature about the semantics and pragmatics of
non-restrictive modification, so I'm not sure if there are
better explanations available or if someone has already
discussed and disproved the explanations I'm suggesting
here. It's just an interesting idea for you to think about.
Video summary
In-class activities
As discussed in the module, we might paraphrase the non-restrictive interpretation
of "I hate nasty chips" in one of the following ways:
I hate chips, which are nasty.
I hate chips, and chips are nasty.
In the first paraphrase, "Chips are nasty" is a conventional implicature
(or perhaps presupposition) of the utterance, whereas in the second paraphrase,
it's an entailment (part of the literal, truth-conditional meaning). Have
students figure out which is a better paraphrase of the original utterance
(assuming the original utterance is interpreted non-restrictively). Hint:
they can review the "Types of implicatures
and their diagnostics" module to see how to test whether something is
an entailment or a conventional implicature. (Further hint: if I say
"I hate nasty chips" when chips are actually not nasty, would you
consider the sentence to be false or just weird?)
If they figure this out and determine that #1 is the better paraphrase (i.e.,
that the "Chips are nasty" interpretation is not an entailment), then
have them try to figure out whether it's a conventional implicature or
a presupposition. Hint: recall that, as we saw in the
"Presupposition" module, presuppositions
and conventional implicatures have a lot in common, but it might be
possible to distinguish them based on cancellability. On the other
hand, presuppositions and conventional implicatures also might differ in
terms of given-ness (presuppositions tend to be about information that
is already consistent with the common ground, or they can be used to
"slip" some information into the common ground while acting like it's
uncontroversial); in this case, "nastiness" is kind of a new topic to
the conversation but Gollum seems to be using his utterance to add
the idea "Chips are nasty" into the common ground without explicitly
saying it. (So, by the cancellability test, "Chips are nasty" seems
more like a conventional implicature here, but by the given-ness test
it perhaps seems more like a presupposition?).