2024 Entries

April 3, 2024

Grocery day. As I walked inside the store, I noticed someone pushing a stroller with a seated child (henceforth referred to as Person A) in front of me. Shortly after, another individual (Person B) entered my field of vision with a box of diapers in hand, headed towards the exit behind us.

"Congratulations!" Person A exclaimed.

After a brief pause (presumably due to being caught off guard?), Person B replied, "Thanks, it's actually my second*."

By this point, I've long walked past both A and B, and my attention was turned to finding an available grocery basket. Thanks to the interaction however, I was reminded of the Principles of Relevance and Informativeness as I had read about from Kearns (2011, pp. 12-15) earlier in the week.
  1. Principle of Relevance: Speaker's speech should be relevant to the present matter; hearer should assume speech as relevant and draw inferences accordingly.
  2. Principle of Informativeness: Give as much information as required (no more, no less).
* Though I inferred Person B mentioning "second" to establish having prior experience with raising a child, maybe it was instead in reference to the number of diaper boxes they own... ( °ヮ° ) ?

References

Kearns, K. (2011). Semantics (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.