80 A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse
memories of deriving information from the environment. Individuals’
previous experiences and memories are shaped by their community
membership; these experiences in turn shape their perspectives of the
society they operate in. This indicates that even though the social aspect
of S&W’s theory is sadly neglected, the theory itself is compatible with the
view that language not only represents reality but also construes it.
Despite the problems raised with S&W’s description of the communicative
process, their principle of relevance along with Grice’s pioneering work
demonstrates clearly the cooperative nature of speech and provides a
theoretical framework which allows discourse analysts to explore speech
as a purposeful cooperative happening. To conclude, the premises that
used language is purposeful and cooperative are both well supported.
3.6 Existential Values
Brazil (1995: 35) argues that speakers select lexical items^32 with commun-
icative values which are negotiated by the participants as the discourse
unfolds. The lexical item selected by the speaker has a communicative value
equal to the sum of the values excluded by the lexical items it opposes in a
paradigmatic sense set. An example taken from Levinson (2000: 99)
demonstrates:
(40) John can climb hills.Levinson argues that can opposes cannot and so instantiates the meaning not
cannot, similarly hills opposes mountains and so may instantiate the meaning
not mountains and according to Levinson, results in an implicature that John
cannot climb mountains.
The view described above is radically different from the intuitive view
that lexical items refer to referents in the real world. When speakers utter
the word tree they apparently refer to a physical object or to a member of
a natural class of objects. Yet there are problems with this common sense
view (Carter 1987: 15–16). It is possible to refer to a physical object by
employing a periphrasic lexical item such as whatsisname which has no
unique reference. Eco (2000: 289–90) shows that it is possible to coin a
lexical item with no referent which refers to a non-existent object.^33
Furthermore more than one lexical item may refer to a unique referent
(Frege 1999). While the evening star is the morning star it hardly makes
sense to argue that the evening star and the morning star realize an identical