A Critical Study Of The Validity Of The Horn Scale

The Horn Scale was intended to serve as an effective means of inferring the Generalized Quantity Implicatures by Levinson in the 1980s, but many linguists or pragmatists cast doubt upon its universality ever since its appearance in the Neo-Gricean pragmatic apparatus; and what is more, Huang Yan even rejects it in his own study of anaphora though Levinson mainly depends on it to study the same subject.Generally speaking, there are about three representative viewpoints on the Horn Scale, namely, that of the Anglo-American pragmatists, that of the Continental pragmatists and that of the Chinese pragmatists. The Anglo-American pragmatists propose that the Horn Scale can help interpret the Conventional or Generalized Quantity Implicatures of utterances in that the vocabulary of a language usually is the grammaticalization of certain stereotypical relations in the daily life of human beings. As for the Continental pragmatists, they also hold the view that there must be some "regularity" in people's communication with each other, but the Horn scale is too normative or rational to catch this regularity. Mey insists on the notion of quantity as an explanation of the Communicative Principle; on the other hand, Jef Verschueren firmly believes in conversationalists' active choice of strategies in any speaking event. In China, Xu Shenghuan is the first pragmatist who draws our attention to the Horn Scale and Levinson's three principles. Through his ten articles, among others, Xu not only explains the apparatus of Levinson's three principles, but also expands on the Horn Scale. However, several other pragmatists disagree with him, and they suggest that the Horn Scale is reasonable or scientific to some extent, but it lacks validity and applicability.In order to test the validity of the Horn Scale, the writer of this paper designs a questionnaire and has tested it among 70 students. The result of the experiment suggests that the original hypothesis of the paper is correct, that is, the factor of gender does influence the operation of the Horn Scale though the degree of theinfluence may vary according to different registers. Then the paper centers upon the so-called Conventional Implicatures put forward by Levinson. It is obvious that if we take the three factors, viz. the speaker's intention, the recipients' interpretations and particular circumstances into account, the conventional implicatures can not be inferred simply through the operation of the Horn Scale.This paper focuses on the limited applicability of the Horn Scale out of consideration for different notions of different speech communities towards 'quantity' contained in the scale terms. There are totally six chapters included in this paper. Chapter One is a brief introduction of the notion of the Horn Scale. Chapter Two is a general survey of three viewpoints on the Horn Scale, namely, that of the Anglo-American pragmatists, that of the Continental pragmatists and that of the Chinese pragmatists. Chapter Three mainly focuses on an experiment conducted among eighty-one college students, and the analysis of the result proves that gender differences influence the interpretation of certain Horn Scale terms. Then the writer goes on to illustrate that the so-called Conventional Implicatures inferred from the Quantity Principle do not hold valid. Chapter Four focuses on the reanalysis of some examples cited by Professor Xu Shenghuan, who is the first pragmatist that systematically introduces the Neo-Gricean Principles and the Horn Scale to China. In this chapter, the writer casts doubts upon the over-detailed stipulations of the Horn Scale, pointing out that these stipulations actually ruin the validity of the Horn Scale. Chapter Five aims at providing an illustration of the influence from the Politeness Principle on the operation of the Horn Scale. The writer tries to prove that the Politeness Principle works in a certain way so that people can not refer to the Horn Scale as an inference apparatus all the time. Chapter Six is the conclusion of the paper, claiming that various pragmatic factors prevent the Horn Scale, as a pragmatic inference apparatus, from being valid.