What is pragmatics?
What is the focus of pragmatics?
Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning, as communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener.
The focus of pragmatics is on what people mean by their utterances rather by what the phrases mean by themselves.
Pragmatics also explores how listeners make differences about what is said and what remains unsaid is recognized as part of what is being uncommunicated.
Who is the modern usage of the term attributed to?
The philisopher Charles Morris in 1938.
The dimensions
- The study of speaker meaning
- The study of contextual meaning
- The study of how more gets communicated than it’s said
- The study of the expression of relative closeness
What does deixis refer to?
Deixis refers to such words and phrases that cannot be fully understood without any contextual information, such as:
- Who the speaker is
- The time or place of speaking
- The gesture of the speaker
- The current location in the discourse
- The topic of the discourse
Types of deixis
- Personal deixis= concerns the persons involved in an utterance, such as:
- The persons directly involved (the speaker and the listener, I, you…),
- The persons not directly involved (He, she, they…)
- The persons mentioned in the utterance (3rd person) - Spatial (place) deixis= the relative locations of people and things
- (proximal, near to the speaker= this, these, here, come, bring..)
- (distal, far away from the speaker= there, that, those, go, take..) - Temporal (time) deixis= it concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in an utterance
(proximal: now, today, tonight..)
(distal: then..) - Social deixis= concerns itself with the aspects of sentences which reflect certain realities of participants or the social situation in which the speech events occurs
- absolute social deixis= your highness, mr. president)
- relational social deixis= my husband, teacher, cousin…) - Discourse deixis= it refers to the use of expressions in an utterance
so, but therefore
The term implicature.
The term implicature accounts from what the speaker may imply, suggest or mean as distant from what the speaker may literally say.
What is the study of implicature justified by?
a) It offers significant functional explanations of linguistic facts.
b) It provides explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than is said.
c) Seems to affect simplifications in both the structure and the content of semantic descriptions.
Grice’s theory of implicature
Grice’s theory of implicature is an attempt at explaining how a hearer or listener gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning. His suggestion is that there is a set of assumptions guiding the conduct of conversation. He introduced 4 conversational maxims and a cooperative principle.
The cooperative principle + who
Paul Grice
The cooperative principle runs as follows:
- Make your contribution, such as is required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
(The listener presumes that the speaker is being cooperative and is speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly and exactly)
The 4 conversational maxims are:
- The maxim of quantity: say just as much as necessary, not more or less, make your contribution as informative as is required.
- The maxim of quality: tell the truth, do not say what you believe is false, don’t say that for which you lack evidence.
- The maxim of relation: make your contribution relevant.
- The maxim of manner: avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief and be orderly.
What are hatches?
When making a statement, certain expressions can be used to indicate the degree of certainty concerning the information given. These expressions are called hatches.
5 ways of failing to observe a maxim + who?
Grice identified 5 ways of failing to observe a maxim:
1. Floating a maxim- a float occurs when a speaker fails to observe a maxim on the level of what is said, with the intention of generating an implicature.
Ex.: What an amazing basketball player John is!
2. Violating a maxim- unostentatious non-observance of a maxim.
3. Infringing a maxim- non-observance of a maxim due to imperfect linguistic performance.
4. Opting out of a maxim- a speaker cannot, for legal or ethical reasons, reply in a way normally expected.
5. Suspending a maxim- when there is no expectation from the part of participants in conversation.
What is reference & referring expressions?
Reference is an act in which a speaker or a writer uses linguistic forms to enable a listener or a reader to identify something.
These linguistic expressions are called referring expressions, which can be:
1. Proper nouns (Denisa, Shakespeare…)
2. Nouns phrases- definite (the author, the writer, the cook) or – indefinite (an author, a writer, a cook)
3. Pronouns (he, she, it…)
What is inference?
Since there is no direct relationship between entities and words, the listeners’ task is to infer which entity the speaker intends to identify by using a particular expression.
The process where additional information is needed to connect what is said to what is meant is called inference.
Types of reference
The physical environment or context has a powerful impact on how referring expressions are to be interpreted.
Anaphoric reference= a reference to an already introduced reference.
Cataphoric reference= reference to reference that will be introduced later.
What is entailment?
Entailment= relationship between two sentences, such that the first is true, the second must also be true. Sentences, not speakers, have entailments.
What is presupposition?
Presupposition= is something that the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. Speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions.
Types of pressupositions
- Existential p.= entities named by the speaker and assumed to be present
The cold war has ended.- There was a cold war. - Factive p.= the assumption that something is true, identified by the presence of some verbs (now, to know, realize, be glad, be sorry)
In using one word, a speaker can act as if another meaning will be understood.
Mary stopped running= she used to run - Non-factive p.= it is an assumption referred to something that is not true (verbs- dream, imagine, pretend…)
I dreamed that I was rich.- I am not rich - Lexical p.= is the assumption that, in using one word, the speaker can act as the another meaning will be understood.
Mary stopped running.- She used to run - Structural p.= it is the assumption associated with the use of certain structures (wh-question structures).
When did she travel to the USA?- She travelled to the USA at some point. - Counterfactual p.= the assumption that what is presupposed is not only untrue, but is the opposite of what is true.
If you were my daughter, I would not allow you to do this. = You are not my daughter.
What is a speech act?
Speech act= an action performed by means of language/utterances (apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, request).
What are speech events?
Speech events= The speaker normally expects that the hearer will recognize their communicative intention when producing an utterance.Both speaker and hearer are usually helped in this process by the circumstances surrounding the utterance. These circumstances, including the other utterances, are called speech events.
Locutionary, illocutionary & perlocutionary acts.
Locutionary act= the act of performing words into utterances that make sense in a language with correct grammar and pronounciation.
Illocutionary act= an intended communicative action by the speaker, bound to certain circumstances.
Perlocutionary act= the effect that the utterance has on the thoughts, feelings or attitude of a listener.
Locution, illocution & perlocution.
What we say= locution
What we mean when we say (offer, explanation, etc)= illocution
What we accomplish by saying it= perlocution
Who distunguishes types of illucutionary acts, and how many?
John Searle distinguishes 5 types of illocutionary acts:
- Declaratives- are speech acts that change the world via utterance.
- Representatives- are speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not, such as statements of facts, assertions, conclusions, descriptions.
- Expressives- are speech acts that state what the speaker feels. They express psychological states and can be statements of pleasure, pain, likes, dislikes, joy, sorrow.
- Directives- are speech acts that the speaker use to get someone else to do something. They express what the speaker wants and may be commands, orders, requests, suggestions, and can be positive or negative.
- Comissives- are speech acts that speaker use to commit themselves to some future action. They express what the speaker intends and may be promises, threats, refusals, pledges, and can be performed by the speaker alone, or by the speaker as a member of a group.
What is conversation analysis?
Conversation analysis is an analysis of natural conversation to reveal what the linguistic feature of conversation is and how conversation is used in ordinary life.
