Pragmatics: The Basics

Billy Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138193857
• eBook ISBN: 9781000423921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Pragmatics: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introduction to the study of verbal and nonverbal communication in context.

Including nine chapters on the history of pragmatics, current theories, the application of pragmatics, and possible future developments in the field, this book:

• Offers a comprehensive overview of key ideas in contemporary pragmatics and how these have developed from and beyond the pioneering work of the philosopher Paul Grice;
• Draws on real-world examples such as political campaign posters and song lyrics to demonstrate how we convey and understand direct and indirect meanings;
• Explains the effects of verbal, nonverbal, and multimodal communication and how the same words or behaviour can mean different things in different contexts, including what makes utterances more or less polite;
• Highlights key terms and concepts throughout and provides chapter-end study questions, further reading suggestions, and a glossary.

Written by an experienced researcher and teacher, this book will be an essential introduction to this topic for all beginning students of English Language and Linguistics.

1 Introduction

The Very Basics

DOI: 10.4324/9781003197263-1

This chapter discusses what pragmatics is and what it aims to explain. The term ‘pragmatics’ has been used in many ways and to cover a very wide range of things. This book focuses on pragmatics understood as being about how we work out (or ‘infer’) what to say, write, sign (in sign languages), and do when communicating, and how we work out (‘infer’) what others are intending to communicate to us. The chapter looks at some things (not everything) which pragmatic theories have attempted to explain. We begin to consider possible explanations in Chapter 2.

Communicating and Understanding

Have you ever misunderstood something? Or been misunderstood? Have you ever wondered why some interactions make you feel happy or frustrated? Maybe you notice that you always feel good after you’ve had a conversation with one friend and not so good after you’ve spoken to another? Or maybe that you sometimes annoy or offend somebody without meaning to? Have you ever noticed that some people have a knack for getting what they want from other people in everyday interactions or in workplace contexts? Or that things often go wrong for somebody else? Understanding these things usually involves some consideration of pragmatics. This is because pragmatics is about what we do when we communicate and how we respond to other people’s communicative acts.

There are many approaches to pragmatics, and they focus on a very wide range of topics. Pragmatics as understood in this book aims to account for how we produce and understand acts of verbal and nonverbal communication. Most current work on pragmatics developed from work on language which focused initially on how contextual factors affect the interpretation of linguistic utterances. In particular, the focus was on how we work out or ‘infer’ meanings in specific contexts. Later work broadened the discussion to consider a wider range of aspects of verbal and non-verbal communication and to production and interaction as well as interpretation.

We infer, or ‘make inferences’, all the time. I made several today. I saw bright light in the window and inferred that it was a sunny day. I heard the letterbox open and close and inferred that the post had arrived. I saw a flattened empty cereal packet and inferred that the cereal was finished. And I made many more inferences as I went about my day.

We also make inferences when communicating. Here is an example to illustrate this (the part in italics represents some contextual information):

• (1) A man (Adam) walks into a room where a TV is switched on. He picks up the remote and turns the TV off. He then turns around and sees a woman (Bella) sitting in an armchair.
  Bella:I was watching that!

What happens next? A reasonable guess is that Adam might turn the TV on again and (probably) apologise, maybe also saying something intended as an explanation (e.g. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you.’)

How do we explain what happened in (1)? At first glance, this probably seems straightforward. Bella is upset that Adam turned the TV off and makes this clear by pointing out that she was watching it.

However, what I have just written does not explain things. It just describes them using different words. An explanation would need to tell us more about what both Adam and Bella did, including how they decided what to do and say, and how they each understood what the other had said and done. A full account of what happened would involve a large number of things, including accounts of:

• (2) a.what Adam thought (and inferred) when he entered the room
• b. how Adam decided to turn off the TV
• c. what Bella thought when Adam turned the TV off
• d. how Bella decided what to say
• e. how Adam worked out what Bella intended

If we stayed in the room, we’d have more to consider, including how Adam decides what to do next (e.g. realising his mistake and offering an explanation), and so on.

Pragmatics usually focuses on the last of these, i.e. on (2e). More specifically, it usually focuses on how Adam got from the linguistic meaning of what Bella said to an understanding of what she intended in this context, i.e. on how Bella’s utterance led Adam to work out that Bella was saying (directly) that she was watching the TV programme and (indirectly) that she was upset that Adam had turned it off and that she would like it turned back on again. When we list what we need to explain, it’s quite a long list. We might summarise by saying that it aims to explain how Adam recognises the following things (among others):

• (3) Understanding I was watching that:
• a. linguistic form
• I was watching that
• b. linguistic meaning
• The person referred to as I was watching the thing referred to as that at some point before the time when she said it
• c. contextual assumptions
• Bella is the speaker
• Adam has turned off the TV in the room he just came into
• Bella was sitting opposite the TV Adam turned off
• d. directly communicates
• Bella was watching the programme which was showing on the TV which Adam has just turned off
• e. indirectly communicates
• Bella is not happy about what Adam has done
• Bella would like the TV turned on again

An account of how utterances are understood in this way has been at the core of pragmatics since it took off as an area of study in the mid to late twentieth century.

More recently, there has been increased focus on how we decide what to say or do when we produce communicative acts as well as on how we interpret them. There has also been increased interest in the notion that what is communicated involves communicators working together to ‘co-create’ or ‘negotiate’ what is communicated. On this view, the overall meaning of this interaction is constructed by Adam and Bella working together rather than just Adam thinking about what Bella has (done and) said. This also involves not simply treating each turn in an interaction separately but instead considering how communication extends across all of the interactive behaviour and, for some approaches, beyond this.

We will see also that pragmatics now also focuses on other things, including on nonverbal communication and on ‘prosody’, which is about the way utterances sound or are signed when they’re produced, including pitch movements, rhythm, pace, volume, voice quality, duration of signs, use of signing space, and so on. In this example, Bella might, for example, produce an utterance which gets louder and more high-pitched towards the end. Or she might say it in a more monotone way. There are lots of possibilities, and these would affect how Adam understands her. There are also things Bella might have done other than speaking which affect Adam’s understanding, e.g. raising her eyebrows, opening her eyes wide, or raising her hands outwards to her side.

The rest of this book considers some of the ways in which pragmatic theorists have tried to explain how we communicate and understand each other, including in nonverbal as well as verbal communication. This rest of this chapter considers a number of questions (not all) about Bella’s utterance and the wider interaction which we might expect pragmatic theories to provide answers for. We might evaluate pragmatic theories by considering to what extent they provide answers to each of these.

What Pragmatics Aims to Explain

Pragmatics can be understood as being about things which are communicated beyond the meanings of linguistic expressions used. Early work focused mainly on what’s communicated indirectly (e.g. that Bella is upset with Adam in the example we just discussed). There is more to explain than this, including how we work out what is directly communicated (that Bella was watching the TV in this example). Later work has recognised that we need to make inferences to work this out as well. Most theorists also now assume that pragmatics should say something about what communicators do. This section mentions some but not all of the things which pragmatic theories should aim to explain.

What Is Bella Communicating Directly?

Adam needs to work out what Bella is communicating directly by her utterance, i.e. what exactly the words I was watching that ‘mean’ here. More technically, we might say that Adam needs to work out what proposition Bella is representing here. Roughly, this means what statement her utterance represents. In semantics and pragmatics, a proposition is something that can be evaluated to see whether it’s true or false. It might seem obvious what proposition Bella is expressing here, partly because we have some idea of the context in which she said it. Imagine, though, that somebody asked you whether ‘I was watching that’ is true right now without letting you know who said it when, where, and who they were talking to. You wouldn’t be able to answer until you knew at least who the word I referred to and what the word that referred to. In fact, you’d also need to know something about the time or circumstances in which the watching took place. Here are rough characterisations of some things it could mean in different contexts:

• (4) a. Bella was watching the TV Adam turned off at the time when he pressed the off button.
• b. Calum was watching the 2020 Emmy Awards ceremony when Zendaya won the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.
• c. Dani was watching the TV series Euphoria when it was first broadcast in 2019.
• d. Ed was watching when his daughter sneaked a chip from her brother’s plate while they were eating together.

In order to work out what is directly communicated, we need at least to work out what is being referred to by any of the referring expressions (including personal pronouns like I and demonstrative pronouns like that) and decide at what time or situation the event referred to is seen as taking place. Referring expressions also include proper names like Adam, Bella, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Conventions
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The very basics
• 2 Meaning more than we say: Grice’s suggestion
• 3 Adjusting the maxims: neo-Gricean pragmatics
• 4 Principles and heuristics: relevance theory
• 5 Managing interaction: (im)politeness
• 6 What words can do: speech acts
• 7 Beyond words: prosody
• 8 Beyond words: nonverbal and multimodal communication
• 9 The future: developing pragmatic theories
• Glossary
• References
• Index