Pragmatics

12 Key excerpts on "Pragmatics"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics

  • Keith Allan(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Pragmatics

  Language use in context 1

  Yan Huang

  13.1 What is Pragmatics?

  Pragmatics is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. In recent years, it has also increasingly become a central topic in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, informatics, neuroscience, language pathology, anthropology and sociology. But what is Pragmatics? Pragmatics can be broadly defined as in (1).

  (1) Pragmatics is the study of language use in context.

  However, though perhaps sufficient for the current purposes, such a definition may be too general and too vague to be of much use. This is because Pragmatics is a particularly complex subject with all kinds of disciplinary influence, and few, if any, clear boundaries. In §13.3 I shall provide two different, though more detailed, definitions of Pragmatics from two different theoretical points of view.

  13.2 Why Pragmatics?

  There are many reasons for including Pragmatics in an integrated theory of linguistics. Here, let me just discuss one or two of them.

  13.2.1 Context dependence

  Many, if not most, linguistic expressions of a language are context-sensitive in the sense that what they express is context-dependent. Consider (2)–(7).

  (2) I like smoked salmon.

  (3) You and you, but not you, stand up.

  (4) It is raining.

  (5) John is looking for his glasses. a. John is looking for his spectacles. b. John is looking for his drinking vessels.

  (6) They are cooking apples. a. X: What are they doing in the kitchen? Y: They are cooking apples. b. X: What kind of apples are those? Y: They are cooking apples.

  (7) The table is covered with books.

  The interpretation of I in (2) and you in (3) – called a ‘deictic’ expression in linguistics and an ‘indexical’ expression in the philosophy of language – clearly relies on context. The reference of I (what the American philosopher David Kaplan called content ) is essentially fixed by the contextual parameter determined by the stable meaning of I (what Kaplan called character ). In other words, I is almost always used to refer to its user in a given context, thus called an ‘automatic indexical’ by the American philosopher John Perry. This has the consequence that the same linguistic expression I can be utilised to pick up different referents in different contexts. The three uses of you in (3) can be properly interpreted only by a direct, moment by moment monitoring of the physical aspects of the speech event in which the sentence is uttered. Unlike I , you is considered to be a ‘discretionary indexical’ because it involves the speaker’s intention. (4) contains a meteorological predicate rain . When it rains (at a given time), it usually rains at a particular place typically where the speaker is. Consequently, at least in some contexts (4) needs to be made location-specific. Next, (5) is a case of lexical ambiguity and (6), a case of syntactic ambiguity. In disambiguating them, contextual knowledge is often needed to select the reading the speaker has intended. For example, in (6), it is the relative linguistic context that distinguishes (6a) from (6b). Finally, the table

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  A Concise Introduction to Linguistics

  • Bruce M. Rowe, Diane P. Levine(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7 Pragmatics: how language is used and the effect of context on meaning

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003268369-7

  LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  • Explain the meaning of the term Pragmatics.
  • List and define the various kinds of speech acts.
  • Discuss politeness theory and the concept of “face” as it relates to politeness theory.
  • Expand on the statement: “Discourse analysis is the process of discovering the rules of communication events.”
  • Explain why presupposition is necessary in human communication.
  • Explain the following statement and name the process being described: “Some words and expressions refer to their referents by ‘pointing’ to them as in an index.”
  • Describe the concept of the maxims of conversation.
  • Analyze the relationship of implicature to maxims of conversation.
  • Provide examples of how maxims of conversation differ cross-culturally.

  In the last chapter, we talked about the meaning of words and word combinations. But sometimes the meaning of a word is totally dependent upon the context in which it is used. Pragmatics is the study of the effect of context on meaning. In fact, as the name suggests, it is about the practical use of language. It includes the study of how people use language to perform speech acts with performative sentences, establish their identities through social meaning, express their emotions through affective meaning, and carry on conversations with others. Linguistic anthropologist Alessandro Duranti described the use of language as a cultural force that “is crucial for the constitution of particular social activities and at the same time cannot be understood outside of those activities.”1

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  Foundations of Pragmatics

  • Wolfram Bublitz, Neal R. Norrick, Wolfram Bublitz, Neal R. Norrick(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  For a thorough investigation of meaning, we need to examine how things are done with words, and how conversational contributions are structured to achieve par-ticularized goals in context. This is done in linguistic Pragmatics, where general-pragmatic principles and pragmatic universals undergo language- and culture-spe-cific modification. 4. Linguistic Pragmatics Linguistic Pragmatics is defined as the science of language use, and “[i]n the same way as human actions change existing reality, linguistic actions also change the world” (Marmaridou 2000: 22). Linguistic Pragmatics and general Pragmatics share almost identical goals: general Pragmatics examines pragmatic principles, mechanisms and universals in the context of action theory, rationality and inten-tionality, while linguistic Pragmatics focuses on their instantiation in language and language use. Hence linguistic Pragmatics overlaps with general Pragmatics, shar-ing its generalized principles, mechanisms and universals, and departs from the generalized framework by concentrating on language as a general construct and on languages as particularized instantiations. In linguistics, language tends to be examined in its own right, accounting for language use, but not for the model user. The language system comprises the con-stitutive subsystems of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. These may be assigned the status of autonomous modules, as is the case in the formal para-digms, they may be conceived of as connected subsystems, as is the case in sys-temic functional grammar (Halliday 1994), or as dialectically connected subsys-tems with fuzzy boundaries, as for instance the cognitive paradigm (Givón 1993, 2005), where language use is connected dialectically with the language system and Pragmatics as a linguistic concept 39 the model user.

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  Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures

  • Anna Trosborg(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  7. Exploring the Pragmatics of interlanguage Pragmatics: Definition by design Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig 1. Definitions of interlanguage Pragmatics In this handbook series, Pragmatics is understood in a broad sense as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behavior. These aspects include patterns of lin-guistic action, language functions, types of inferences, principles of communi-cation, frames of knowledge, attitude, and belief, as well as organizational prin-ciples of text and discourse. Pragmatics deals with meaning-in-context, which for analytical purposes can be viewed from different perspectives (the speaker’s, re-cipient’s, analyst’s, etc.). It bridges the gap between the system side of language and the use side, and relates both of them at the same time. Interlanguage Pragmatics brings the study of acquisition to this mix of struc-ture and use. 1 The principle participants are learners or speakers of second or foreign languages. 2 Interlanguage Pragmatics is often defined as the study of non-native speakers’ use and acquisition of L2 Pragmatics knowledge (Kasper 1996: 145). However, the study of interlanguage Pragmatics has not typically been as broad as the areas outlined by the definition of Pragmatics used in the hand-book. The study of Pragmatics has not always been conceptualized as broadly, either. Levinson (1983) observed that the study of Pragmatics traditionally encompassed at least five main areas: Deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. Within second language studies, work in prag-matics has often been narrower than in the field of Pragmatics at large, including the investigation of speech acts and to a lesser extent conversational structure and conversational implicature. It is also broader, investigating areas traditionally con-sidered to be sociolinguistics, such as address terms, for example (Stalnaker 1972).

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

  • Keith Allan, Kasia M. Jaszczolt(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Continental European school of thought, on the other hand, takes Pragmatics to have a much wider range of tasks. In fact, it is not seen as a particular component of linguistics on a par with other components, but as a specific perspective for studying language in general. Verschueren (1999: 1) provides a typical definition: [P]ragmatics can be defined as the study of language use, or, to employ a somewhat more complicated phrasing, the study of linguistic phenomena from the point of view of their usage properties and processes. [Sic.] He adds explicitly that “Pragmatics does not constitute an additional compo- nent of a theory of language, but it offers a different perspective” (Verschueren 1999: 2, italics original). This school of thought, therefore, is also called the perspective view. Mey (2001: 6) proposes an equally wide view of Pragmatics: Communication in society happens chiefly by means of language. How- ever, the users of language, as social beings, communicate and use lan- guage on society’s premises; society controls their access to linguistic and communicative means. Pragmatics, as the study of the way humans use their language in communication, bases itself on a study of those premises and determines how they affect, and effectualize, human language use. Hence: Pragmatics studies the use of language in human communication as deter- mined by the conditions of society. [Sic.] Mey’s textbook is split into two parts, entitled “microPragmatics” and “macroPragmatics.” MicroPragmatics deals with context, implicature, refer- ence, pragmatic principles, speech acts, and conversation analysis and thus coincides more or less with the research interests of Anglo-American prag- matics, while the part entitled macroPragmatics adds a range of topics that are only part of Continental European but not Anglo-American Pragmatics, such as literary Pragmatics, intercultural Pragmatics, and the social aspects of Pragmatics.

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  Language Files

  Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 13th Edition

  • Department of Linguistics(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Ohio State University Press

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 7 Pragmatics © 2015 by Julia Porter Papke 284 F I L E 7.0 What Is Pragmatics? In Chapter 6, semantics was defined as the study of meaning. Given such a definition, it is tempting to suspect that once we understand the semantics of a language, we will automatically understand the meaning of any utterance in that language. In fact, how- ever, identifying the semantic contribution of words and sentences gets us only partway to understanding what an utterance means. Why? The context in which a sentence is uttered may critically affect the meaning that the speaker intends! Pragmatics is the study of the ways people use language in actual conversations. Prag- maticists study both how context helps to determine whether a particular utterance is appropriate or inappropriate and how changes to context alter sentences’ meanings. Contents 7.1 Language in Context Explores several ways in which context can affect the meaning of utterances, and introduces the idea of felicity, or the appropriateness of an utterance in discourse. 7.2 Rules of Conversation Discusses why conversation needs to follow rules, and introduces Grice’s maxims for cooperative conversation. 7.3 Drawing Conclusions Builds on File 7.2, showing ways in which language users may employ context to convey or derive meaning that is not part of an utterance’s entailed meaning. 7.4 Speech Acts Outlines many of the jobs that speakers accomplish with language and the ways in which they accomplish them. 7.5 Presupposition Discusses another precondition for felicity. 7.6 Practice Provides exercises, discussion questions, activities, and further readings related to Pragmatics.

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  Experimental Pragmatics

  The Making of a Cognitive Science

  • Ira Noveck(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  As Korta and Perry (2015) write: Pragmatics involves perception augmented by some species of “ampliative” inference – induction, inference to the best explanation, Bayesian reasoning, or perhaps some spe- cial application of general principles special to communication. . .a sort of reasoning that goes beyond the application of rules, and makes inferences beyond what is established by the basic facts about what expressions are used and their meanings. The speaker’s words, according to the Ordinary Language school, are just part of the communication picture. In fact, as will be underlined later, there are all kinds of communication that can take place, even without words. The 12 Defining Pragmatics words in the sentence cannot be idealized away in order to simply determine whether its meaning is true or false. According to the Ordinary Language school, the words are a starting point to understand the speaker’s intended meaning. Where Do We Go from Here? This brief introduction depicts Pragmatics as a discipline that is concerned with the interpretation of everyday utterances. While it could be, and is often, considered a subdiscipline of linguistics, it is unlike its fellow subdisciplines in that it is necessarily interdisciplinary in at least three ways. First, its emer- gence as a field is owed, at least in part, to a philosophical cleavage that initi- ated discussions between those who aimed to account for meaning through a logical analysis of the speaker’s words (the Ideal Language school) and those who say that a speaker’s words are only part of a listener’s effort to get at the speaker’s intended meaning (the Ordinary Language school). According to the latter, the gap can only be bridged through nonlinguistic abilities (through some form of inference); the words uttered are but evidence that can help the listener come up with a hypothesis about the speaker’s intention.

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  Language in Use

  Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives on Language and Language Learning

  • Andrea E. Tyler, Mari Takada, Yiyoung Kim, Diana Marinova, Andrea E. Tyler, Mari Takada, Yiyoung Kim, Diana Marinova(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Georgetown University Press

    (Publisher)

  I begin with a section of definitions that are crucial to this endeavor, reviewing the terms Pragmatics , interlanguage Pragmatics , communication , and communica-tive competence. The succeeding section provides a brief sketch of Schmidt’s (1983) study as a model for current and future work in this area. After laying the ground-work, I devote the bulk of the chapter to showing what we can learn about interlanguage Pragmatics through an investigation of the intersection of pragmatic competence with the other components of Canale’s (1983) construct of communica-tive competence—namely, grammatical, discourse, and strategic competence. Definitions Pragmatics Traditionally, the study of Pragmatics is considered to encompass at least five main areas: deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversa-tional structure (Levinson 1983). In addition, L2 Pragmatics traditionally investigates 65 areas considered to be in the realm of sociolinguistics, such as choice of address forms (Kasper and Dahl 1991; Stalnaker 1972; Serra et al. 2000). An even greater move toward sociolinguistics is evident in the introduction to Rose and Kasper (2001), who characterize Pragmatics “as interpersonal rhetoric—the way speakers and writers accomplish goals as social actors who do not just need to get things done but must attend to their interpersonal relationships with other participants at the same time” (Rose and Kasper 2001, 2). In the intersection of second-language studies and Pragmatics, research is best characterized by Stalnaker’s definition (1972, 383) of Pragmatics as “the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed” (where “contexts” often have been interpreted as scenarios created by researchers). Within this intersection, the most-studied areas (in order of decreasing attention) are speech acts, conversational management, and conversational implicature.

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  Pragmatics

  • Chris Cummins(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  Rather, we have to think about the speaker’s intention every WHAT IS Pragmatics ? 5 time, so that we can distinguish the cases where they mean something extra from the cases in which they don’t. If we’re not just relying upon the words that the speaker uses, and their meanings, what else goes into helping us understand what the speaker intends to convey? The very general answer is: context . As hearers, we take into account the circumstances under which an utterance is made – including such things as who is speaking, what the interaction is about, what has already happened in the interaction, what the speaker knows, and so on – in order to better understand what the speaker means. As we’ve also seen, speakers can exploit this tendency in order to communicate more efficiently – they know how their words will likely be interpreted in the specific context in which they are uttered. The discipline of Pragmatics is concerned with meanings that go beyond those that are usually – semantically – associated with the sig-nals that are being used in communication. In linguistic terms, this means that it is concerned with the meanings of linguistic signals that are not simply part of their semantic meaning. We are interested in how speakers convey these meanings and hearers recover them. And for the reasons discussed in the preceding paragraph, Pragmatics is concerned with meaning in context. But in order to be more precise about this, it will be helpful to introduce some definitions. 1.1 Definitions First, we need to distinguish between sentences and utterances. A sen-tence is an abstract linguistic object, whereas an utterance is a unit of speech, produced by a particular speaker on a particular occasion. Note on terminology For convenience, I’ll adopt the convention of referring to the individual who produces a linguistic utterance as the speaker and the one who interprets it as the hearer , whichever mode of communication we’re dealing with.

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  Cyberpragmatics : Internet-mediated Communication In Context

  • Francisco Yus(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • John Benjamins Publishing Company

    (Publisher)

  chapter 1 Pragmatics, context and relevance 1. Pragmatics and the use of language Since prehistoric times, we humans have been fascinated by our ability to use words and transfer our thoughts to other people. In an attempt to understand the special qualities of this gif of language, compared to the sounds produced by animals, 1 we have always refected on language, how it is learned, which part of the brain is in charge of producing and interpreting language, and so on. But it was not until the 20th century when this interest in language, now called linguistics, acquired a truly scientifc status. Saussure’s pioneering research that gave birth to Structuralism and Chomsky’s GenerativeGrammar placed lin-guistics on the right track towards the maturity that it exhibits nowadays. Regardless of this label of science that linguistics deserves, it should be stressed that human language is such a complex phenomenon that in the development of linguistics a number of branches, schools, or perspectives have appeared, which deal with diferent aspects of language, and ofen overlap to some extent. Hence, utterance (1) would arouse the interest of linguists according to their diferent linguistic perspectives, who would draw diferent conclusions: (1) Te cat is on the mat. Among many other approaches inside linguistics, a lexicologist would analyse the semantic felds of cat and mat and their intersections or overlappings with similar terms like lynx, rug, feline or carpet. By contrast, a linguist specializing in semantics would be more interested in sentence organization, the referents of the words and how they provide a context-free sense to the whole sentence 1. Indeed, the linguist Charles Hockett proposed in 1960 to restrict the term “human lan-guage” only to vocal signs with an arbitrary relationship with their referents (i.e. words), leaving aside nonverbal behaviour such as paralanguage of kinesics.

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  Studying Language

  English in Action

  • Urszula Clark(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2 Pragmatics and Discourse ❙ 2.1 Introduction This chapter examines Pragmatics and discourse: that is, the way in which linguistics interactions shape linguistic structures, and how communication involves more than the words that are actually spoken. Traditionally linguists have concentrated on the formal structure and properties of what we hear as sound or see as words on a page; that is, the visible or aural aspects of lan-guage. Language and word structure are described in terms of syntax, mor-phology and phonology, and the field of semantics is concerned with the meaning of individual words (for details see Jeffries, 2006). Studies of varia-tions in language use, as discussed in Chapter 1, have also concentrated on these structures, especially phonology, as well as their history and changes over time. Another dimension of the study of language is its use as a tool for communication between people in everyday settings. The desire of linguistics to define how communication, as opposed to language, works has resulted in the development of new branches of linguistics, as discussed below. Discourse analysis and conversation analysis are concerned with the structure and management of discourse and conversation, whilst Pragmatics is concerned with unspoken or implicit meanings in language. Another field, interactional sociolinguistics, focuses on cultural variations in the ways peo-ple use and interpret discourse. However these fields overlap in a number of ways, particularly in respect of the context in which speech occurs, how it is made meaningful and its purpose or function. Hence these fields of language analysis go beyond the study of the linguistic structure of utterances and look more closely at, for example, how the structure of a conversation can be as meaningful as its content, as well as the social force of what is said and how the assumptions and world-views of speakers are encoded or embedded in 50

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  Handbook of Language and Social Interaction

  • Kristine L. Fitch, Robert E. Sanders, Kristine L. Fitch, Robert E. Sanders(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  53; cf. Schiffrin, 1987, p. 383). The common focus on participants' use of language suggests strongly that research in language Pragmatics should inform research in LSI, and so it has. The full potential of this contribution has yet to be realized, however, given that much research in Pragmatics thus far has focused on the individual, psychological bases of language use, ignoring the moment-to-moment interaction among users in which social life is constituted. This chapter considers past and current contributions to the study of Language and Social Interaction that derive from one of the central theories in language Pragmatics: Grice's (1967, 1989) theory of conversational implicature. Cooren's chapter in this section addresses contributions stemming from another key pragmatic theory: Searle's (1969) conceptualization of speech acts. More broadly, this chapter examines not only what LSI researchers have already learned and what they can gain from research in language Pragmatics stemming from Grice's contributions, but also what LSI research can contribute to work in language Pragmatics given the insights it has provided on language use in ordinary conversation. Levinson's 1983 book, Pragmatics, is not only the first major text in that field, but also the first to include the study of conversational interaction among the traditional concerns of researchers in language Pragmatics. Levinson provides an excellent overview of the methods and basic findings of conversation analysis that the essays by Drew, Heritage, and Pomerantz and Mandelbaum (this volume) examine more carefully and build on. As Schiffrin (1987) indicates, however, Levinson's overview is important beyond its value as a integrative summary: It is also basic to his concern with shifting research in language Pragmatics toward grounding in empirical observation and away from justification using rational, philosophical argument

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