Logical Entailment and Conversational Implication: A Discourse-Pragmatic Account of Taiwanese Toh and Ciah

Author: Cherry Ing Li(Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University)

Vol.&No.：Vol. 42 (New Version)
Date：October 1997
Pages：55-70
DOI：10.6210/JNTNULL.1997.42.05

Abstract：

Taiwanese toh (就) and ciah (才), which are often considered as forming an antonymous pair, show significant difference in their distribution and functions. A corpus of 4-hour recording shows as many as 275 toh occurrences, while ciah is used only 51 times. The difference in their frequency rates is due to their different basic meanings: ciah, meaning 'only, just', intrinsically involves size and quantity, and thus has to co-occur with a scalar term; while toh; meaning 'precisely', does not show such a re-striction. Their different core meanings, when used in the context of conversation, interact with the Maxims in the Cooperative Principle as proposed by Grice (1975) and derive their various interpreta-tions. The emphatic tone that toh may carry and its function to mark a less-demanding situation both arise as conversational implicatures from the interaction of its basic meaning, its logical inference en-tailed by the proposition, and the Maxims of Manner, Relevance, and Quantity. Ciah's function of ex-pectation-denying and marking of a more-demanding condition may also be accounted for in terms of pragmatic implicature, though it may have already been conventionalized.

Keywords：pragmatics, discourse analysis, Taiwanese grammar, adverbs, conversational implicature, logical entailment

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