Understanding what is meant from what is said: A study in conversationally conveyed requests

Abstract

For a sentence such as Must you open the door?, how does the listener come to construe it in its intended sense ("Please don't open the door") instead of its literal sense ("Is it necessary for you to open the door?")? It was proposed that the listener constructs the literal meaning, checks the context for its plausibility, and if it is implausible, applies a rule of conversation to derive the conveyed meaning. In a test of this theory 23 subjects were timed as they drew simple deductions from 10 different pairs of conversationally conveyed requests (for example, Can you open the door? and Must you open the door?). The first member of each pair conveyed a positive request, and the second, a negative one. Consistent with the theory, those sentences conveying positive requests behaved as if they were positive, even when they were negative in literal meaning (for example, Why not open the door?); those conveying negative requests behaved as if they were explicitly negative, even when they were positive in literal meaning (for example, Why open the door?). Some evidence was found for the notion that the listener constructs the literal meaning before the conveyed meaning.