At around the eighteen-minute mark in episode 2, this exchange takes place on the train:1
Mai: “Can you see me?”
Sakuta: “I can.”
Mai: “Can you hear me?”
Sakuta: “Loud and clear.”
Mai: “Do you still remember me?”
Sakuta: “Mai Sakurajima. Third-year student at Kanagawa Prefectural Minegahara High School. Made her show-business debut as a child actor and has been active in a range of fields. Twisted personality. Not straightforward with people.”
Mai: “What’s so twisted about me?”
Sakuta: “You’re clearly anxious, but you keep it hidden.”
Notice what happens here:
When Mai asks, “Can you hear me?” Sakuta answers not “I can” but “Loud and clear.” When she asks, “Do you still remember me?” he goes further, answering beside the point with a recital of her biography. Yet from the perspective of pragmatics, these replies offer her greater reassurance.
While watching Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai, you often see the screen fill with comments saying, “Master, accept your disciple’s bow!” Most of the time, it is Sakuta’s astonishing verbal skill that prompts them. So I hope to use some simple theories from pragmatics to explain why certain ways of speaking succeed in winning girls over while others do not—and what we need to work on in our speech if we hope to reach Sakuta’s exalted level of attainment. I’ve only recently begun studying pragmatics and still know relatively little about it, so there may be plenty of things I’ve missed. Please feel free to point them out in the comments.
Both “Loud and clear” and the lengthy passage from “Mai Sakurajima” to “straightforward with people” break the maxim of Quantity within the Cooperative Principle governing language use.
The “Cooperative Principle” was first proposed by Grice in 1967: “Both participants in verbal communication share a wish: that what they say should be mutually intelligible and coordinated.” It comprises four categories, each containing a maxim and several submaxims. Here is a brief account:
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Maxim of Quantity: Supply the information the exchange requires—no more and no less.
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Maxim of Quality: The information conveyed should be true, with sufficient evidence to establish its truth.
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Maxim of Relation: The information supplied should be relevant or related to the matter at hand.
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Maxim of Manner: Present information clearly. (Avoid obscurity and ambiguity; be brief and orderly.)
Grice’s theory primarily concerned language; Green (1996) extended it to nonverbal communication. Debate over Grice’s theory and the validity of the Cooperative Principle continued throughout that period and afterward, but I won’t go into that here.
Clearly, Mai asks, “Can you hear me?” while “Loud and clear” supplies more information than the exchange requires. It therefore does not conform to the maxim of Quantity. The subsequent reply beginning “Mai Sakurajima” is an even more glaring mismatch between question and answer.
But if we begin with Mai’s purpose in asking, we can understand why Sakuta answers this way:
At this point, Mai faces the danger of being forgotten by everyone, including her own mother. Before long, there may be no one in the world who can see her. Her dominant feeling is fear, and she wants “to be reassured.” But concern for face prevents her from saying so directly; she can only hint at her feelings in restrained ways.
Out of ordinary consideration for her, Sakuta simply cannot answer “I can’t” when Mai asks, “Can you hear me?” Ordinary interpersonal communication involves a “Politeness Principle” (Leech), which includes an “Agreement Maxim” and a “Sympathy Maxim”: speakers should minimize opposition to the other person’s views and feelings as far as possible, especially when that person is in need and seeking help. Mai is actually asking something she already knows the answer to. She presupposes that Sakuta will give an affirmative reply. The question’s communicative function (seeking reassurance through an affirmative reply) outweighs its practical function (seeking a factual answer). (Here Mai asks Sakuta, “Do you still remember me?” If she instead asked, “Will you forget me?” his standard answer would be “I won’t.” But this would break the maxim of Quality: by the account given above, Sakuta cannot substantiate his answer. So what does Sakuta do later on? Stay tuned for the next installment.)
If Sakuta answered each question mechanically, he would only be giving Mai the answers she already expected. This would offer very little reassurance and seem perfunctory. He breaks the Cooperative Principle’s maxim of Quantity to gain a greater communicative payoff:
Outside the “Cooperative Principle,” there is a “theory of conversational implicature”: a speaker deliberately fails to observe one of the Cooperative Principle’s maxims, but trusts that the hearer will notice this and regard the speaker as still cooperating. The hearer, too, knows that the speaker is not trying to deceive them.
Much of the information conveyed in communication is not expressed directly, but remains implicit or indirect. Such implicit information is the pragmatic meaning studied in pragmatics. Unlike an utterance’s literal or context-independent meaning (that is, “meaning”), it consists of the communicative intentions of speakers and other participants.
When a speaker utters P, they imply Q if:
- (a) The hearer believes that the speaker is at least observing the Cooperative Principle;
- (b) To reconcile the speaker’s utterance P with condition (a), the hearer must believe that the speaker believes Q;
- (c) The speaker also hopes the hearer will grasp condition (b) intuitively or work it out by inference.
Sakuta’s “excess information” confirms Mai’s existence to her through a wealth of conclusive evidence. This reassures her more effectively than a perfunctory affirmative answer.
In the latter half of the exchange, Sakuta takes full account of Mai’s need to save face while also expressing his own worry. Let’s revisit that part:
“Mai Sakurajima. Third-year student at Kanagawa Prefectural Minegahara High School. Made her show-business debut as a child actor and has been active in a range of fields. Twisted personality. Not straightforward with people.”
“What’s so twisted about me?”
“You’re clearly anxious, but you keep it hidden.”
We can see that:
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When Mai asks, “What’s so twisted about me?” she is expressing disagreement in the form of a question—a protest, not a request for an answer.
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Even without Mai’s interjection, “What’s so twisted about me?” Sakuta’s speech would still be coherent. And the shots in the anime show that he is indeed following a continuous train of thought, rather than devising an answer specifically for Mai.
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Sakuta does not directly answer “What’s so twisted about me?” or give a full account of what is “twisted” about her. Instead, he uses her question as an opening to continue his own point.
Mai and Sakuta’s exchange closely resembles the conversational strategy of the penggen, the supporting “straight man” in xiangsheng, Chinese comic dialogue. The penggen’s technique emphasizes single-sentence turns and frequent use of question words. (“What’s so twisted about me?”)
Xiangsheng differs from ordinary conversation: although the questioner—the penggen—takes the initiating turn and the other performer takes the responding turn, it is often the latter who takes the initiative.
In context, the actual effect of Mai’s words is much like “feeding Sakuta a line,” though she has no intention of doing so. Sakuta picks up on her words in a way that both answers her question and continues his original point. Mai’s psychological conflict is that, emotionally, she wants Sakuta to lay bare her fear, but her temperament makes it hard for her to speak of it and prevents her from showing weakness. The best way for Sakuta to handle this is not to barge into the subject, but to work with the opening the conversation offers. This is what makes his handling of the exchange so skillful. He is not offering an answer; he is making his position clear—in effect, “I know perfectly well that you’re anxious.”
To sum up, in this short exchange Sakuta manages to:
- Show full consideration for Mai’s feelings and her need to save face;
- Soothe the panic she is holding back;
- Show that he cares about her and is worried about her.
And that’s why they’re holding hands right afterward.
Finally, there are differing views on whether pragmatics can offer practical guidance. But if it really can, why don’t I have a girlfriend yet?