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Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice ๐.
An elliptical response is a concise utterance that omits words or phrases that are already understood from the context. It relies on the listener or reader to fill in the missing information.
https://exercisepick.com/what-are-elliptical-responses/
I'm not sure about orthogonal responses.
I thought it was more eccentric but elliptical is something else i prefer to do to boil down a more complex response's points inwant based on that so good to know ๐ฌ
In this case it might mean they've been consuming too much media and need to chill.
What if all those things are synonamous?
Elliptical answers (where most stuff is clipped, except a few words) usually mean what you'd expect, with the omitted info being usually inferrable by context.
The full answer would be "Yes, I saw your notebook. It is over the desk". That's only implied, by Bob mentioning the location; not explicitly said. But Alice can easily infer "this is the location of the notebook", and that if Bob knows its location then yes, he saw it.
This pops up due to the co-operative principle, specially the maxims of relevance and clarity.
Now, orthogonal answers (where the "answer" doesn't answer the question, like in your example) are a bloody mess. I think they're mostly caused by a mismatch between context (shared by the participants of the conversation) vs. individual info (exclusive to one of the participants). I could see them happening fairly often in the situation from your example, where the "individual info" is the strain of thought one of the participants followed.
[Warning: take this with a grain of salt, this has a sample size of one] I'm also predicting they happen fairly often when one (but not both) of the speech participants is autistic. Autists in general don't rely as much on implicatures as neurotypical people do, so one side starts seeing implicatures where there's none, and the other doesn't catch them up. Re-using that example above:
From personal experience, it drives both sides of the conversation crazy, until they backtrack to re-find the context. It helps a bit if you know the other side is autistic, though. (Sorry, I felt like rambling about this. It happened with me today.)
