“Those are Your Words, Not Mine!” Defence Strategies for Denying Speaker Commitment

Grice used the term conventional implicature, as opposed to conversational implicature, for those elements of utterance interpretation that are clearly attached to a specific form but that do not, in his view, contribute to the truth-conditional content of the utterance. Since Grice restricted his notion of “what is said” to truth-conditional meaning, such aspects in his account need to be treated as implicatures. Grice’s own example concerns the interpretation of therefore in He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave. On this example, Grice (1975, p. 44) explicitly comments that the speaker has “certainly committed” himself to the implicature that being English necessarily means being brave. In fact, as opposed to conversational implicatures, conventional implicatures cannot be cancelled and, in this respect, they behave like the explicit contents of an utterance. This is also true for denial, as is illustrated in (6), where the Dutch comedian Richard Groenendijk is denying commitment to a conventional implicature.

[audience laughs]

No, I did not mean that!

(Richard Groenendijk in his show Met de mantel der liefde, broadcast by RTL4 on January 4 2019)

In the first utterance, Groenendijk, by using so, communicates that having children typically makes people unhappy. This implicature is clearly what the audience picks up on when it starts laughing (representing step 2 in our scenario in Fig. 2) and it is what Groenendijk refers to with that in his second utterance (step 3). However, being a conventional implicature of the connector so, it cannot be denied as simply as that. If the speaker did not “mean that”, then they should not have used the word so. In our approach, the speaker may deny commitment to conventional implicatures, but to do so they will need to use the strategies of scenario 1 (denying literal meaning) rather than scenario 2 (denying implicature).¹⁰

Like a conventional implicature, a generalized conversational implicature (GCI) is triggered by specific linguistic elements in an utterance.¹¹ This was illustrated by means of the utterance in (2), where two (sons) is, by default, interpreted as implicating not more than two (sons). The difference between GCI’s on the one hand and conventional implicatures and explicit meaning on the other hand is that in the case of GCI’s, speakers may try to get away with accepting commitment only for the explicit content of what they said, since in these cases there actually is such a layer of “literal” meaning to be distinguished from the implicature. In fact, this is what your colleague tried to do in (5). Also, the defence of the non-directive reading of Trump’s words in (1) would be a case in point. By claiming that Trump was only expressing a personal feeling of hope, the Republican defence is neglecting the fact that explicitly stating the sincerity condition of a directive speech act is a conventionalized way to indirectly perform a directive speech act (Searle 1975, p. 65) and, certainly in situations in which the speaker has authority over the hearer, this reading of (1) may thus well be regarded as a GCI.¹² However, since the literal reading of such utterances is still accessible, arguers may appeal to this layer of explicit meaning in defence of an accusation, which is exactly what some Republicans did. This is not unreasonable a priori since, after all, conventionalization is a matter of degree and it is difficult to determine at which point exactly such an implicature is, or has become, a “generalized” or even a “conventional” one.

If an implicature is not by default attached to a specific linguistic form but entirely dependent on the context, we are dealing with a particularized conversational implicature. In such cases there is, so to speak, less linguistic evidence for the implicature in the utterance itself. This, however, does not mean that a particularized implicature is necessarily easier to deny than a conventional or a generalized one.

As an example, we may consider the interpretation of the noun phrase kwetsbare informatie (‘delicate information’) as it was used by MP Ard van der Steur in commenting on a draft letter of the then Minister of Safety and Justice to inform parliament about a financial deal with a drug criminal. In January 2017, use of these words constituted one of the reasons why van der Steur, who had by then become Minister of Safety and Justice himself, resigned following a debate in parliament about the drug deal. The information in the letter that van der Steur had characterized as kwetsbaar (‘delicate’) concerned the amount of money that was paid to the drug criminal in exchange for his testimony. This information never made it to the final version of the letter and parliament would remain ignorant about the number for years to come. When the draft letter, including the comments, finally surfaced, it was claimed that van der Steur, by pointing out that the information was delicate, not only asserted that this was the case but had actually suggested to remove it from the letter. This clearly counts as a particularized implicature since there is no context independent connection between information being delicate and information being removed from a letter. (In other contexts, it might be advised for delicate information to be shared.) In fact, van der Steur himself denied that this is what he had meant and defended himself by claiming that if this were his intention, then he “would have said so explicitly”. The reasonableness of this defence is hard to assess: given that “remove” is at best a particularized implicature of the word delicate in specific contexts, van der Steur could deny that it was his intention to have the information removed from the letter, and we cannot exclude the possibility that he was being sincere about this. One should, however, also allow for the possibility that such an implicature could be a conventional way of speaking in specific activity types or within a certain community, in the sense that the intended readership of van der Steur’s original comments, the department of Justice and specifically the then Minister Opstelten, could have understood that this was in fact an intended implicature.

Thus, as the case studies in Sect. 3 will confirm, for each individual case the original context of step 1 needs to be reconstructed in quite some detail, in order to determine if the accusation in step 2 and/or the denial in step 3 make sense. This involves assessing whether the hearer’s interpretation of the speaker’s original utterance is cooperative given the conventional meaning of the words,¹³ their more or less conventionalized implicatures, and the specific context in which they were used (cf. Morency et al. 2008, p. 213).

Our first case illustrates the first strategy of a blunt denial of even having uttered the alleged words, followed by a strategy of the second category after the denial had been counterfeited with evidence. These strategies were used by Donald Trump when being accused of calling British Royal Princess Megan Markle “nasty”. The accusation followed an interview with Trump in The Sun prior to his State Visit to the United Kingdom in June 2019. When the interviewer told Trump about negative remarks that Markle had made about him in 2016, Trump insisted he had not heard these remarks before: “I didn’t know that. What can I say? I didn’t know that she was nasty”, a quote that had subsequently been made public.¹⁴ When being accused of having called the Princess “nasty”, Trump initially denied that he had said so—“I never called Meghan Markle ‘nasty’”¹⁵—and blamed it on the “fake media”. He continued denying it even after The Sun had posted the audio recordings, which confirmed the accusation, but Trump responded by telling the public not to believe what they had just heard.¹⁶

Just before returning home, however, Trump took back his denial on British television. He admitted that he had used the word nasty and took recourse to an alternative defence, by providing an alternative reading of what he had literally said—an instantiation of our second category—boiling down to calling Markle’s remarks nasty instead of labelling her personality. As such, Trump argues that he used the word nasty as a stage-level rather than an individual-level predicate in the sense of Carlson (1977). Since different sources provide different quotes, we mention here two of them¹⁷: A White House official told ABC News that the President had not specifically said that Markle was nasty, that he had also said some very nice things about her and that the media had taken the quote out of context.¹⁸ At least in this case, this “out of context” strategy seems a reasonable defence considering the fact that Trump had only been responding to the information provided by the interviewer. This is also how the interviewer himself had taken Trumps words, as he later explained: The appeal to ellipsis in (9) shows that the argument here is one at the level of pragmatic enrichment of linguistically encoded meaning, or disambiguation, rather than one at the level of implicatures,²⁰ thus providing a clear example of the “interpretation space” and negotiability of explicit content mentioned above.

In our second example case, Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Stef Blok had been accused of racism and misrepresenting the political situation in Surinam. At a private meeting in The Hague on xenophobia and immigration problems in July 2018 Blok said not knowing of any country where people with different cultural backgrounds live together peacefully. When one of the attendants objected that Surinam is an example of such a country, Blok laughed and replied: Blok’s performance had been filmed by a participant and ended up on Dutch television. The broadcast caused a lot of commotion and even Blok’s political friends asked for an explanation. In an initial response to the news programme, Blok acknowledged that he had used words that might have come through in the public debate in an infelicitous way, but he claimed that he had wanted to provoke discussion and stimulate an open exchange of ideas. This strategy of “overstating” the case may be compared to the Cambridge Analytica appeal to hyperbole mentioned in the introduction to this paper. In both cases, commitment to the literal meaning is denied by admitting that the literal meaning may be exaggerated compared to the actual state of affairs (strategy 3). However, in either case, it may be questioned if this was really a speaker-intended implicature that the hearer was supposed to pick up on at the time of the original utterance. Indeed, Blok’s defence seemed insufficiently convincing and he had to come up with a much more elaborate defence.²² To this end, Blok sent a letter to Parliament in which he apologized and “regretted” his “sharp words”. But he also added that he had not referred to the usual international definition of a failed state. Instead, he claimed that these words were supposed to mean that it is a weakness of the Surinam political system that its political conditions are highly determined by ethnic groups²³: The latter defence, which we qualify as providing an alternative meaning (category 2), seems hardly plausible as it is rather unusual for a Minister to neglect an accepted standard definition. Having used a term in a particular, unusual sense without having indicated that beforehand, does not constitute a convincing argument. Blok’s defence does fit in a list of other well-known examples of people coming up with idiosyncratic definitions, usually not shared by anybody else. A notorious example is former US president Bill Clinton’s denial of having had sex with Monica Lewinsky. This denial could only be true if sex was to include only sexual intercourse and to exclude other sexual activities (such as oral sex). Naturally, Clinton’s strict definition could not convince many people. Be that as it may, both Dutch parliament and Surinam accepted Blok’s explanations, which may have been rather a case of political pragmatism than of actually believing the defence to have been convincing.

Like the appeal to hyperbole, two other cases concern the third category of appealing to a non-literal interpretation, more specifically to the use of two other figures of style. In these defences the alternative interpretation is in fact an implicature of the utterance and therefore it constitutes the exact mirror image of scenario 2, where commitment to an alleged implicature is denied by taking recourse to the literal interpretation.

The first of these concerns a column written by by Naema Tahir in the Dutch newspaper Trouw. Tahir is Pakistani by birth and wrote about her struggle with the Dutch language. Because her 6-year old daughter always corrects her when she is using the wrong articles, she called for getting rid of the Dutch neuter article het and stick to de for all nouns irrespective of their gender.²⁵ Her argument was full of exclamation marks, rhetorical questions and simplifications and she referred to the class of immigrants to which she herself belongs with the term allochtoontjes (≈ ‘little immigrants’), i.e. a slightly outdated term denoting people with roots outside the Netherlands in combination with a diminutive, which in this case has a denigrating effect (Bakema et al. 1993): The way this text is formulated offers more than enough clues for a non-literal reading. Although there were enough people who got the irony, there were also many who did not get it and who overloaded Tahir with huge piles of verbal abuse. In her next column, Tahir reported about the name-calling and made explicit that her former column should not have been taken literally²⁷:

The other example of appealing to a non-literal reading (strategy 3) concerns an appeal to metaphor. In 2011, the Dutch politician Raymond de Roon was accused of calling Turkish president Erdogan “an Islamic ape”. The accusation came up when he had created his own variant of a Dutch proverb literally saying “The ape comes out of the sleeve”, which means that finally things have become clear (like English “The cat is out of the bag”). More specifically, after having called Erdogan’s language towards Israel “warlike rhetoric” that should be condemned by the Dutch government, he said: Political opponents accused de Roon of having called Erdogan an ape and demanded that the Minister of Foreign Affairs would distance himself from this qualification, which he did by calling it an inappropriate metaphor.³⁰ De Roon himself acknowledged having used a figure of style and claimed that he had used the imagery to make clear that Erdogan “had shown his real nature”.

De Roon’s explanation got support from some respectable newspapers, but also met with doubt.³¹ In our view, one can sincerely doubt the figurative explanation of the phrase “Islamic ape”. Whereas it is true that de Roon used a Dutch proverb that by definition cannot be taken literally, ambivalence has been created by inserting an adjective in the fixed phrase, attributing a religion to the “ape”, and then giving it a name in the following sentence. In the proverb meaning, the ape is the truth that finally comes out. This interpretation gets a strange twist if the ape (referred to with his in the following sentence) is supposed to refer to a person at the same time. The utterance is at least ambiguous, whereas at worst this is a case of “calculated ambivalence” (Engel and Wodak 2013; Hatakka et al. 2017) or “double speak” (Bull and Vandenbergen 2014), i.e. a case in which one can deny a possible interpretation while at the same time conveying exactly that message for those who are happy to receive it (see also Walton 1996; Lee and Pinker 2010, who speak of “plausible deniability”).

As for the fourth and final strategy, a brief discussion will suffice. This strategy of coming up with excuses amounts to, for instance, saying that the utterance was just a slip of the tongue, or by claiming inebriation, or even a hack of one’s email or twitter account. For instance, a claim of drunkenness came from Leiden University students after having been accused of using plain racist language against members of “Kick out Zwarte Piet”.³² And when abusive language had been sent from Dutch comedian Erik van Muiswinkel’s twitter account in the direction of Zwarte Piet supporters, van Muiswinkel claimed that his account had been hacked.³³ It is not necessary to study all these cases in much detail, because assessing the reasonableness of this category of defences does not really depend on an analysis of step 1 and step 2, i.e. on the way the alleged utterance has been phrased and the way it could reasonably be interpreted. The excuses that we found can be put forward in all kinds of cases: they do not bear on an interpretation of what has been said and, in fact, the accused is not denying having said it anyway. Possessing some knowledge of the speaker might help to assess the plausibility of the excuse, for instance knowing if the arguer uses alcohol at all and how much, what their political views are, etc. But if one does not have this knowledge, the claims falling within this category cannot be checked and thus not be assessed. Arguers making use of this category of defence are therefore often to be “taken for their words”. On the one hand, this arguably makes the defence a rather weak one, but from the perspective of effectiveness it may function as an immunization technique (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1992, p. 119), since questioning the excuse boils down to calling the accused a liar.

We will conclude this section with a rather hilarious example of the fourth defence strategy concerning Trump’s rectification of his words—at a summit in Helsinki—making use of the excuse of a slip of the tongue. At a press conference held together with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, Trump said, in response to a question, that he did not see any reason why Russia would have been involved in meddling with the American elections of 2016: Only when even prominent Republicans were critical about this statement for its total contradiction with all findings of American intelligence service, Trump declared that he had misspoken, i.e. that it had been his intention to include a negation in the sentence. After berating reporters for not understanding he had meant the exact opposite of what he had said, Trump clarified his position on Russian meddling in the election on his return to Washington: The British newspaper The Guardian called Trump’s retraction “an extraordinary attempt to walk back remarks”. Although, in the first place, Trump’s personality makes it hard to believe his excuses, what made the denial in this case even more incredible was his initial response to the criticisms, that had started immediately after the press conference. In another tweet sent from his airplane that would bring him home, he more or less explained his earlier betrayal of the US Intelligence Services: It was therefore not surprising that Trump’s claim of having misspoken was met with incredulity and evoked many hilarious responses on the internet.³⁷

Our first case study illustrates a blunt denial of an alleged implicature. In 2013, the then Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Frans Timmermans, was faced with criticism concerning a post on his Facebook page. Timmermans had posted a link to a Youtube video in which Édith Piaf performs her famous song Non, je ne regrette rien (‘No, I don’t regret anything’): At the time Timmermans posted his message, 9 October 2013, the Netherlands and Russia were engaged in a serious diplomatic conflict. The cause of this conflict was the apprehension of a Russian diplomat, Dmitri Borodin, in The Hague a few days earlier. According to the Dutch police, Borodin had been arrested because of drunkenness and because he was suspected of mistreating his children. Since embassy staff members have diplomatic immunity according to the Vienna Convention, Russia demanded prosecution of the police officers involved as well as official apologies from the Dutch government. Although the police officers were not brought to account, Timmermans did indeed apologize officially in name of the Dutch government on October 8. One day later, Timmermans posted the message in (18). Journalists and people on social media interpreted Timmermans’ Facebook post as an implicit banter towards Russia, the implicature being that he did not actually regret Borodin’s apprehension. However, when being confronted with this accusation, Timmermans denied the implicature by simply saying: “This really has nothing to do with Russia”, and “It is truly complete nonsense to attach a political intention to this”.

Timmermans’ blunt denial turned out to be not very convincing as people continued saying that his message was politically motivated. Timmermans defended himself subsequently by posting the text in (19) on Facebook, which boils down to once again bluntly denying the implicature and claiming that the literal meaning was in fact the only intended message (“Not more, and not less”). In this reading, the fact that Timmermans’ Facebook message coincided with the diplomatic conflict, should then just be seen as a(n) (un)lucky chance. Timmermans’ explanation does not seem unreasonable: at the time of the Piaf-message, he was very active on social media, posting not only politically related messages but also more “personal” ones about his passions, including music. Claiming that he was just commemorating could therefore not easily be discarded by his critics. However, choosing this particular song (instead of another famous song by Piaf, like La vie en rose) enabled him at the same time to evoke a particular conversational implicature bringing across how Timmermans really thought about the diplomatic fuss—without being accountable for that implied message. Thus, Timmermans’ post might be seen as another example of “double speak” or “calculated ambivalence” (cf. the “islamic ape” case in Sect. 3.1).³⁹

In some cases, denying commitment to an implicature comes with additional argumentation to make clear that the alleged implicated reading is not plausible. An example of this we saw in van der Steur’s denial that he used the phrase kwetsbare informatie (‘delicate information’) to suggest removing information from a letter to parliament (Sect. 2.2). Van der Steur defended himself by claiming that if this were his intention, then he “would have said so explicitly”. A similar kind of e contrario argument was used by Trump’s son to deny that the utterance in (1) had a directive reading (cf. Sect. 1): every time his father issued an order, he did so explicitly and since (1) is not an explicit order, it does not constitute an order at all.⁴⁰

Another example of supporting the plausibility of commitment denial concerns the way in which BBC journalist Danny Baker defended himself against accusations of racism with regard to the new-born baby in the British Royal family. Baker had posted a monkey wearing a human outfit and holding the hand of a woman, accompanied with the text “Royal baby leaves hospital”. In response to the public indignation, he apologized and defended himself among other things with the following tweet: In this tweet Baker acknowledges that his message could be interpreted as racist. However, at the same time he maintains that this interpretation had never occurred to him at the moment of writing since, allegedly, his “mind [is] not diseased”. His support therefore consists of an appeal to ethos, i.e. to being a right-minded person who is alien to racist thoughts. It could be true that Baker did not have a racist intent, although one must have been living under a stone if one did not foresee the racist layer of the message. Be that as it may, it is doubtful whether Baker’s defence convinced his critics as it is based on the counter-charge that reading a racist message in his tweet presupposes having a diseased mind.

In a later series of tweets Baker explained that he selected this specific picture quite randomly for another aim: “attempting to lampoon privilege and news cycle”. This defence boils down to appealing to another implicature (strategy 2). For the BBC, it didn’t really matter whether Baker’s explanation was reasonable or not: he was fired, since Baker, being a journalist, should have realized that the picture in the given context would evoke a racist interpretation.⁴¹

The previous examples illustrated ways in which a denial of an alleged implicature can be supported with reasons attacking the plausibility of the implicated reading. Our next case illustrates how an accused person provides reasons supporting his own interpretation of his utterance, i.e. reasons meant to increase the plausibility of an appeal to another implicature. This example case focuses, again, on Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump had to defend himself against accusations of inciting violence against Hillary Clinton after remarks he made in a campaign rally speech in Wilmington, North Carolina (Time 2016). In this speech, Trump warned his audience that it would be “a horrible day” if Hillary Clinton would become the new president, since, according to Trump, she would supposedly abolish the Second Amendment, protecting the right to keep and bear arms. This is what Trump said: Completing the italicized sentence as “Although [for] the Second Amendment people, maybe there is [something that can be done]”, Trump’s political opponents read into these words a call for violence against Hillary Clinton.⁴² However, in interviews with CBS and Fox News Trump fiercely denied commitment to such an implicature by appealing to another one: he claimed that he was only mobilizing gun rights supporters to vote against Clinton—which is an implicature of another kind. Trump supported this appeal to another implicature by saying: “There can be no other interpretation [than that I was mobilizing gun rights supporters to vote against Clinton]. Even reporters told me—I mean, give me a break.” This appeal to what reporters told Trump can be interpreted as an ad populum argument (“I am right since many people, even reporters, agree with this standpoint”) or an appeal to authority as one takes into account the fact that reporters are usually said to criticise Trump, which makes them a trustworthy source when they say something in favour of him. In both interpretations, Trump provides a supporting reason to increase the plausibility of the alternative implicature he appeals to in order to defend himself.

One can doubt if Trump’s defence is a reasonable one: in the audience sitting behind Trump, several people looked shocked or laughed out loud after Trump uttered the words in (21) showing that his own supporters immediately picked up on the alleged implicature. And although fellow party member Jeff Sessions, who was United States Attorney General at the time in Trump’s Cabinet, denied the implicature (“I don’t believe that’s true. I don’t believe that’s at all what he meant”) he admitted that “[i]t may have been awkwardly phrased”.⁴³ Still, this does not automatically mean that Trump is actually committed to the implicature since the alternative reading is also a plausible one. It therefore remains hard to assess what Trump actually wanted to say with his controversial wordings.⁴⁴

The case of the Second Amendment remark cited in (21) is interesting for another reason as well. After Trump had been accused of inciting violence against Hillary Clinton, fellow party member Paul Ryan defended Trump using another strategy. Ryan stated that Trump’s remarks sounded “like a bad joke”, adding: “You should never joke about that. I hope he clears it up quickly.” Ryan thus seemed to agree with Trump’s critics that Trump’s wordings implicated a call for violence, but he suggested that the implicature should not be taken seriously but rather as a form of inappropriate humour. This defence looks like the irony defence in scenario 1 (discussed in Sect. 3.1), but while the latter consists in denying a literal reading by claiming an implicated reading (i.e. the ironic reading), in the case discussed here it is the implicature itself that is supposed to be funny.⁴⁵ Ryan’s comment thus presupposes the implicature as part of the intended meaning of the utterance, but also in such a case a speaker may still deny commitment to it, i.e. by using one of the ways in which literal meaning can be denied such as appealing to a humorous interpretation (as an additional implicature). This interpretation seems to be in line with how some people in the audience perceived Trumps remarks: the response of some people sitting behind Trump laughing after he made his controversial claim.

As a third, and final strategy, denials of implicatures may also invoke external circumstances, such as the excuses illustrated in Sect. 3.1.5 (“I was drunk”, “It was a slip of the tongue”, etc.). Characteristic for this strategy is that arguers accept commitment to the implicature they are being accused of to the extent that they admit that the implicated reading was intended (at the time). An interesting defense from this category was offered by a lecturer of the University of Utrecht, used after elections for the Provincial States in the Netherlands, in which Thierry Baudet, leader of the populist party Forum for Democracy was the surprising winner. The lecturer tweeted “Volkert, where are you?”—referring to Volkert van der Graaf, the man who killed the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002. When the lecturer was accused of inciting violence against Baudet, he apologized for his tweet, stating: Paradoxically, by saying that he did not mean his comment “literally”, the lecturer is not distancing himself from the literal question (“Volkert, where are you?”), but, instead, from the alleged implicature of calling for violence against Baudet. But this makes even more clear that he acknowledges the implicature he is being accused of as part of the communicated meaning. As a defense strategy he then chooses to appeal to external circumstances by claiming that he posted his controversial message “in the heat of the moment”.⁴⁶