EL4204 Assignment 1

Legend
… Indicates slight pause
- Indicates that the word was cut off
Capitalised letters Indicates that the syllable was significantly stressed

Transcription of the dinner scene from “The Incredibles”

1 Helen: Do you HAVE to read at the table?

2 Bob: (looking at the newspaper in a daze, clearly wasn’t listening) Yeah…

3 Helen: (sees Dash trying to tear his steak apart with his bare teeth) Smaller bites,
Dash, yikes! Bob, could you help the carnivore cut his meat?

(Bob sighs and proceeds to do so)

4 Helen: Dash, you have something you wanna tell your father about school?

5 Dash: Uh… Hmm… Well! We dissected a frog.

6 Helen: Dash got sent to the office again.

7 Bob: (Cutting Dash’s steak, still in a daze) Good, good…

8 Helen: No Bob, that’s bad.

9 Bob: What?

10 Helen: Dash got sent to the office again!

[skipped over some turns here]

11 Helen: He put a tack on the teacher’s chair. (glares at Dash) DUring class.

12 Dash: Nobody saw me… You could barely see it on the tape.
 “The Incredibles” is an animated movie about a family of superheroes who, while

trying to lead a quiet suburban life, are forced into action to save the world (The Incredibles

(2004) - Plot - IMDb, n.d.). The family consists of Mr. Incredible (AKA Bob) and Mrs.

Incredible (AKA Helen), along with their son, Dash, and daughter, Violet, who isn’t featured

in this scene. The part of the movie from which I transcribed is early in the plot where they

are trying to appear as normal human beings, which of course would involve them not using

their powers in public. Dash, being a mischievous kid, had earlier decided to use his powers

of super speed to pull a prank on his teacher and was (barely) caught on tape. They discuss

this fiasco in this dinner scene in a manner that contains many interesting pragmatic features

which I will be analysing in relation to the book “Pragmatics in English” by Kate Scott.

The scene begins with a rhetorical question posed by Helen towards her husband

when she sees him immersed in reading the newspaper at the dinner table (turn 1). On the

surface, the illocutionary act performed seems to be a directive – a category of illocutionary

act termed by Searle discussed in chapter 3 of Scott’s book on Speech Act Theory (Scott,

2022b, pp. 44–63) – by Helen towards Bob to give her information on the necessity of

reading the newspaper during dinner. However, that would not be accurate since if Bob

simply replied with either a “yes” or a “no”, it would indicate that he did not pick up on what

Helen was trying to do with her question – express her disapproval towards him reading the

newspaper at the dinner table. According to Searle (Scott, 2022b, pp. 44–63), there would be

two levels of illocutionary act here: the primary illocutionary act is expressing disapproval,

and the secondary illocutionary act is a directive one by Helen towards Bob to give her

information about the necessity of reading during dinner. What I find interesting about this

and what Searle does not explain is how we are able (and Bob is expected) to deduce that the

primary illocutionary act here is an expressive rather than a directive to give a “yes or “no”. It

is not like the secondary illocutionary act could never be the primary one in the utterance “Do
you have to read at the table?”. For instance, in a situation where Helen knows that Bob has

an emergency work meeting to attend after dinner for which he has not done his readings and

she wishes to make it as conducive as possible for him if needed, she could ask that very

same question and a “yes” or “no” as a reply would be completely valid. I think the key lies

in the fact that it is very logically accessible to reject the implication that Helen does not

know whether reading the newspaper at the dinner table is necessary and consequently has to

direct Bob to give her that information. This is because it is widely known that reading the

newspaper is a leisurely activity and there cannot be a necessity for a leisurely activity to be

done at a particular time (e.g., during dinner). Of course, there is also the presence of emotion

in the utterance that can greatly help us decipher the speaker’s meaning, which Scott very

briefly talks about in the second chapter of her book, describing the process as “complicated

and [a] broad field of study” (Scott, 2022a, pp. 25–43). We can see this description to be true

because it is not so simple of a process to conclude that the primary illocutionary act of an

utterance is an expressive just because there is the presence of emotion; if that were the case,

then every utterance expressing an emotion would limit its primary illocutionary act to an

expressive. Evidently, this is not the case, as exemplified in the utterance “Smaller bites,

Dash, yikes!” in turn 3 – despite clearly expressing shock and disgust, its primary

illocutionary act is not to express an emotion, but instead is to direct Dash to take smaller

bites out of his food (i.e., a directive rather than an expressive).

Another pragmatically interesting part of this scene is at turn 5 where Dash evades his

mother’s request for him to confess to his father regarding getting sent to the office again for

pulling a prank on his teacher. Looking at his utterance through the lens of Grice’s maxim of

quality (or truthfulness), it does seem to appear that he was being truthful. Scott introduces

this maxim as consisting of “a supermaxim: try to make your contribution one that is true”

which can be dismantled into the submaxims “do not say what you believe to be false” and
“do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence” (Scott, 2022c, pp. 64–87) – all of

which seem to be plausibly fulfilled in Dash’s utterance (assuming he did indeed dissect a

frog that day and could prove it). Yet we (and his mother) can tell that he was not being

truthful since he did not perform the act of confession and his mother had to divulge his

wrongdoing for him in turn 6. To me, this reveals that Grice’s maxim of quality is insufficient

in defining truthfulness and what differentiates following the maxim verses breaking it;

clearly, the truthfulness of an utterance isn’t fully encapsulated by Grice’s proposed maxim of

quality. There is, though, one saving grace in that the maxim of quantity helps to cover for

this insufficiency in the maxim of quality: Scott describes the first half of it as to “make your

contribution as informative as required (as for the current purposes of the exchange)” (Scott,

2022c, pp. 64–87, emphasis mine). The purpose of exchange in turns 4-5 was to evoke a

confession by Dash and so this maxim is at least seen to be broken in place of the maxim of

quality since he did not provide enough information for the confession to be successfully

evoked. However, it does still paint Grice’s maxims in a negative light since the boundaries

between his maxims of quantity and quality are so unclear, as presented in this example.

Lastly, after much has been said about Gricean pragmatics, it is also worth analysing

turn 11 outside of that realm – specifically, with regards to Levinson’s M Principle. Scott

presents the M Principle as “[guiding] interpretation in cases where a marked or abnormal

expression is used” where “if the speaker says something in an abnormal way, then the hearer

can infer that something unusual or marked was intended” (Scott, 2022d, pp. 88–110). In turn

11, we can see this principle coming into play: the utterance “He put a tack on the teacher’s

chair” on its own would have been sufficient for exposing Dash as having done something

wrong in school and clarifying the reason for Helen’s utterance in turn 4. However, there is

the intriguing addition of the adverbial phrase “during class” that, as the M Principle

describes, adds a whole new layer to the implicature made by Helen’s utterance in turn 11:
the audience, along with Bob, now pauses to logically consider the reason for that unusually

added detail, and would come to realise that Helen was trying to implicate that Dash had used

his superpowers (of super speed) in class, since it would otherwise be impossible to place a

tack on the teacher’s chair while they are present without them noticing you immediately.

This would of course raise the severity of Dash’s prank to a much higher level as he was not

just caught pulling a prank but was also caught possessing superpowers, possibly

undermining his family’s efforts to remain undercover and appear as normal human beings.

All in all, the conversations occurring in the dinner scene of “The Incredibles” can

certainly be seen as pragmatically enriched with various features that Speech Act Theory,

Gricean Pragmatics and Pragmatics as a whole has provided us with lenses to appreciate

more comprehensively. Though each of them may have their areas of insufficiency, utilising

them together in pragmatic analysis can help to mitigate those gaps and still form a strong

foundation for further, more refined concepts to be built for the advancement of pragmatic

studies. Credit should also be given to Scott, who has made these concepts accessible in an

organized manner in her book “Pragmatics in English”, which is sure to play an influential

role in expediting said advancements for the years to come.

(1429 Words)
 References

Scott, K. (2022a). Pragmatics in English (pp. 25–43). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108870047

Scott, K. (2022b). Pragmatics in English (pp. 44–63). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108870047

Scott, K. (2022c). Pragmatics in English (pp. 64–87). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108870047

Scott, K. (2022d). Pragmatics in English (pp. 88–110). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108870047

The Incredibles (2004) - Plot - IMDb. (n.d.). Www.imdb.com.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317705/plotsummary/