Identifying Non-Conventionalised Indirect Directives: The Problem of Non-Prototypicality

Abstract

While direct directives (DDs) and conventionalised indirect directives (CIDs) are inherently bound by form, non-conventionalised indirect directives (NCIDs) identify with a non-conventional context-dependent directive in the form of a hint. That all indirect directives constitute a sub-type of conversational implicatures stipulates that they comply with the same requirements as well as felicity and success conditions. To determine the identificatory and inherent properties of NCIDs, a manual utterance-by-utterance search of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English was conducted to find samples of them analysis of which yielded that NCIDs need to pass the requirements of particularised conversational implicatures in addition to the two pre-requisites of replaceability and succeedability by a DD of differing semantic content. The analysis also showed that not all NCIDs meet all the requirements. It is possible for certain of the suggested requirements to be violated or only partially met, resulting in non-prototypical NCIDs. In particular, non-prototypicality was found to be rooted in the violation of succeedability or partial fulfillment of paraphrasability. Moreover, it was revealed that the number of the unfulfilled requirements involved in the generation of non-prototypicality is limited to one since unfulfillment of multiple requirements would invalidate the identity of NCIDs as conversational implicatures. The results of the analysis also warned against context-dependency and replaceability requirements leading to potential misconceptions on account of the rarity of alternative directive-cancelling context and selective synonymity, respectively.