This seems so different from all your other examples that I’m surprised you don’t comment on it. It seems to be trying to impose a rule. You might say that most of the claims are trying to promote a preference, too, but I don’t think you did.
One reason: because I’d assess such an utterance very differently based on who the speaker and what the context was, unlike the other two statements you cited.
Depending on the context, this could be a threat, or an informative statement regarding a policy, and so on. If you’re a guest in somebody’s home and hear this from your host as they see you pick up a pricey vase, you might interpret it differently than if you hear at a shop from the shop’s owner, or from your friend who’s shopping with you (in this latter case, it might be an empirical claim, that you’d counter with “no, in this state shops must carry insurance and customers are not liable for unintended breakage”).
I’d also disagree with you on the characterization of utterances of the “that was uncalled for” family, and might suggest that the linguistics you deploy in your post is too impoverished to account for them properly. I have only a passing familiarity with speech act theory, Gricean linguistics or relevance theory, but they strike me as better equipped to dissolve the puzzlement you seem to experience on encountering speech of that sort.
I’m not sure what I was thinking, but now I would divide most of the examples from the social rule examples and put this yet farther off. The social rule examples seem much more clearly promoting the rules than the preference examples are promoting the preferences.
But “You break it, you buy it” is not a social rule. The speaker is not saying that of course everyone knows this is the rule, but saying that he has the right to set rules in this shop and that this is his rule. Of course, his right to legislate, and the reasonableness of this particular rule is itself a social rule, promoted by the statement, but that is not the main point.
The difference I see is that it contains a description of the rule that it is promoting. It’s similar to the “if you didn’t vote, you can’t complain.” sentence in that; it doesn’t stand out so much to me though.
This seems so different from all your other examples that I’m surprised you don’t comment on it. It seems to be trying to impose a rule. You might say that most of the claims are trying to promote a preference, too, but I don’t think you did.
Why did that example seem to stand out from the claims in the social rules section?
One reason: because I’d assess such an utterance very differently based on who the speaker and what the context was, unlike the other two statements you cited.
Depending on the context, this could be a threat, or an informative statement regarding a policy, and so on. If you’re a guest in somebody’s home and hear this from your host as they see you pick up a pricey vase, you might interpret it differently than if you hear at a shop from the shop’s owner, or from your friend who’s shopping with you (in this latter case, it might be an empirical claim, that you’d counter with “no, in this state shops must carry insurance and customers are not liable for unintended breakage”).
I’d also disagree with you on the characterization of utterances of the “that was uncalled for” family, and might suggest that the linguistics you deploy in your post is too impoverished to account for them properly. I have only a passing familiarity with speech act theory, Gricean linguistics or relevance theory, but they strike me as better equipped to dissolve the puzzlement you seem to experience on encountering speech of that sort.
I’m not sure what I was thinking, but now I would divide most of the examples from the social rule examples and put this yet farther off. The social rule examples seem much more clearly promoting the rules than the preference examples are promoting the preferences.
But “You break it, you buy it” is not a social rule. The speaker is not saying that of course everyone knows this is the rule, but saying that he has the right to set rules in this shop and that this is his rule. Of course, his right to legislate, and the reasonableness of this particular rule is itself a social rule, promoted by the statement, but that is not the main point.
The difference I see is that it contains a description of the rule that it is promoting. It’s similar to the “if you didn’t vote, you can’t complain.” sentence in that; it doesn’t stand out so much to me though.