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WHAT IS PRAGMATICS?
We explore the different meanings of meaning and the kinds of issues which are dealt with by semantics and pragmatics.
What do these children still need to learn about using language?
A little boy comes in the front door.
| Mother: | Wipe your feet, please. |
He removes his muddy shoes and socks and carefully wipes his clean feet on the doormat.
A father is trying to get his 3-year-old daughter to stop lifting up her dress to display her new underwear to the assembled guests.
| Father: | We donāt DO that. |
| Daughter: | I KNOW, Daddy. You donāt WEAR dresses. |
The childrenās knowledge of vocabulary and grammar does not appear to be the problem. When the little boyās mother asked him to wipe his feet, that is exactly what he did. The little girl explained why her father was not participating in the underwear show with perfect grammar and quite impeccable logic. The problem is that the children appear to have understood what the words meant but not what their parents meant. As adults, we usually arrive at the speakerās meaning so effortlessly that we tend to be unaware of the considerable amount of skill and knowledge that we used to accomplish this.
Semantics
Pragmatics
Semantics and pragmatics are the two main areas of linguistic study that look at the knowledge we use both to extract meaning when we hear or read, and to convey meaning when we speak or write. Within linguistics itself, the dividing line between these two disciplines is still under considerable debate. However, generally speaking, SEMANTICS concentrates on meaning that comes from purely linguistic knowledge, while PRAGMATICS concentrates on those aspects of meaning that cannot be predicted by linguistic knowledge alone and takes into account knowledge about the physical and social world. As you work through the exercises in this unit, you should be able to fill out these preliminary definitions a bit more and get a feel for what pragmatic analysis involves.
If you were counting, you will have noticed that the words mean and meaning have appeared 11 times so far and with several different meanings (12!). We will start our study of pragmatics by exploring the meaning (13!) of meaning (14!).
EXERCISE 1.1 First write down your own definition of meaning and underline what you felt were the key words in your definition. Then look up the definition given for meaning in a good dictionary.
Comment
Did you get very far? Was the dictionary any help when it provided you with purpose, significance, signification, intention and sense! Letās try to break the task down into more manageable chunks. We will start with an important kind of knowledge for successfully interpreting languageāword meaning.
EXERCISE 1.2 (a) What does cat mean? (b) What does cream mean? (c) What does to drink mean?
Comment
You probably found this fairly easy. My answers were: (a) cat a domestic feline; (b) cream the liquid fat of milk; (c) drink to consume liquid.
Lexical semantics
By providing definitions for individual words, you were analysing the kind of meaning that is the focus of LEXICAL SEMANTICS. Did you notice how you had to resort to the meanings of other words in the language in order to construct your definitions? Of course, providing word meanings is not always an easy task, nor is teaching them for that matter. An American high school teacher asked her students what dogmatic meant and received the following answer: A machine powered by dogs.
EXERCISE 1.3 What does Cats drink cream mean?
Comment
Paraphrase
This was a bit more complicated, but still pretty manageable. When asked what a sentence means, people usually provide another sentence that has virtually the same meaning, a PARAPHRASE. There are a variety of ways that you could paraphrase Cats drink cream. You could change (a) individual words (b) the sentence structure, or (c) both the individual words and the sentence structure. Here are some possible paraphrases for our sentence:
Domestic felines consume the liquid fat of milk.
Cream is drunk by cats.
The liquid fat of milk is drunk by domestic felines.
Sentence semantics
In this exercise you were carrying out the kind of analysis that is the focus of SENTENCE SEMANTICS. To provide a paraphrase you used your knowledge of the meanings of the individual words but you also used your knowledge of English grammar. For example, word order is very important for establishing sentence meaning in English. The sentences Cats chase mice and Mice chase cats contain the same words but have entirely different meanings.
EXERCISE 1.4 Mike, Annie and Mikeās cat, Felix, are in Mikeās kitchen. What did Annie mean?
| Mike: | What happened to that bowl of cream? |
| Annie: | Cats drink cream. |
Comment
Now things have become considerably more complicated. We are no longer talking simply about what words or sentences mean, but what a person means as well. We have entered the realm of pragmatics and yet another meaning of meaning. It seems to me that in addition to saying that cream is drunk by cats, Annie is also accusing Felix of the crime. I would imagine that you came up with a similar answer. We can make these layers of meaning explicit by providing separate paraphrases for the semantic meaning (a semantic paraphrase or SP) and the pragmatic meaning (a pragmatic paraphrase or PP):
Cats drink cream
| SP: | Domestic felines consume the liquid fat of milk. |
| PP: | Felix probably drank the cream. |
Did you notice that when we are talking about what a particular speaker means, our paraphrases can be rather different from the literal meaning of the sentence that was uttered?
Sentence Utterance
Linguists often make the distinction between a SENTENCE and an UTTERANCE. This distinction can be useful for two reasons. First, pragmatics analyses language in use and many of the utterances we use do not consist of full sentences...
