Semantics vs. Pragmatics

10 Key excerpts on "Semantics vs. Pragmatics"

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  English as a Lingua Franca

  The Pragmatic Perspective

  • Istvan Kecskes(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  We shall start with the review of the issues concerning the semantics–pragmatics distinction. 6.2 The Relationship of Semantics and Pragmatics 6.2.1 Semantic Underdeterminacy In the socio-cognitive approach, semantics is tied mainly to prior experience while pragmatics is tied to actual situational experience of interlocutors (Kecskes 2010a, 2014). Semantics and pragmatics as separate fields of inquiry are both about meaning so they have both developed sophisticated methods of analysis of meaning. As a consequence, their separation into different disci- plines has caused lots of discussions and debates in linguistics, language philosophy, as well as theoretical pragmatics. But this is the first time, at least to my knowledge, that the issue is raised in relation to intercultural commu- nication, specifically to ELF. The need for revisiting this issue is warranted by the nature of ELF communication where there seems to be a dominance of semantics rather than pragmatics. Or, in other words, could we say that semantics seems to grow into pragmatics in ELF. I shall come back to this matter shortly. The Gricean modular view divides the interpretation process into two stages: what is said and what is implicated. It is, however, overlooked that the division between what is said and what is implicated was made for the sake of utterance interpretation, and for the sake of distinguishing the semantic meaning from the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. Traditionally, semantics has been respon- sible for compositionally construed sentence meaning, in which the meanings of lexical items and the structures in which they occur are combined. Pragmatics has been regarded as a study of utterance meaning, and hence meaning in context, and is therefore an enterprise with a different object of study. However, the boundary between them has never been clear, especially 138 The Semantics–Pragmatics Interface

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  Linguistics for Language Teachers

  Lessons for Classroom Practice

  • Sunny Park-Johnson, Sarah J. Shin(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6  Semantics and Pragmatics

  The Study of Meanings

  6.1 Introduction

  In the last several chapters, we have been building up language from the smallest component all the way to complex sentences. We have learned how to structure sounds and words, phrases, and clauses. However, what is structure without meaning? To explore this question, let us consider a famous sentence in (1).

  • (1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

  While the sentence is structurally sound and grammatically correct, there are some problems with the meaning. We might point out that something colorless cannot also be green, that ideas cannot be colored, that ideas do not sleep, and that sleeping cannot be done furiously. This sentence demonstrates that even if you follow all the phrase structure rules of a language—in fact, you can probably diagram this sentence after reading Chapter 5 —it can still yield a meaningless utterance. Thus, it is not enough that a language learner acquire the structures in the target language; the learner must also understand (1) meanings of individual words, (2) how words function together in phrases and clauses to make meaning, and (3) how the speaker and listener make sense of this through context, norms, and other non-linguistics elements. Semantics is the layer of language that provides this understanding.

  In this chapter, we will begin by discussing lexical semantics, or how meaning is created within and between words. Next, we will describe how meaning is derived from phrases and sentences. This chapter also discusses how non-grammatical factors such as speaker attitudes and situational context contribute to meaning. It explains how meaning is communicated in conversation and shows that what people say and how they say things are culturally conditioned (cross-cultural pragmatics). Finally, we will provide some strategies for helping learners to use language in culturally appropriate ways.

  6.2 Lexical Semantics

  6.2.1 Sense and Reference

  Let us begin with a single word. Meaning can be constructed in many ways, but at the word level, it comes down to two things: sense and reference. Sense is defined as the concept or mental representation of a word. If you hear the word bird

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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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  Linguistics for Everyone

  An Introduction

  • Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Our knowledge of syntax and semantics includes not only the thematic roles that a verb assigns but also principles and rules that determine the syntactic categories and positions of those arguments. This concludes our discussion of sentence meaning. In the following section, we turn to meaning in context, or pragmatics. Just as semantics and syntax overlap, we’ll see that there is some overlap between semantics and pragmatics and that both contribute to how we understand and use language. Pragmatics: How Context Shapes Meaning If you were to hear an urgent, adult voice utter “A train is coming!” while you were standing on a railroad track not paying much attention to the proximity of trains, you would, under typical circumstances, quickly move off the track to safety. The meaning of this utterance is bound up with the context in which you hear it—where you are, what you are doing, who says it, what kind of experiences you’ve had, your cultural expectations, and so on. It’s a warning. Now consider a different scenario. You are on the train track again. A child comes up with her mother and, laughing, says, “A train is coming!” You don’t flinch; you smile benignly and remain where you are. In this case, the meaning of the utterance is quite different. You know from the situation that there is no danger (the parent, for example, doesn’t seem concerned about you getting off the track), and the speaker is a laughing child whose intention is not to warn but to amuse. So, the social context within which a sentence is uttered can affect its meaning (here, what is a warning under certain circumstances becomes a joke under others), as can the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s interpretation. How speaker inten-tion and hearer interpretation affect meaning is the subject of pragmatics, the study of utterance meaning , or how the meanings of the things we say argument structure set or arguments of a verb and their syntactic categories RPE 10.6 Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning.

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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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  Foundations of Pragmatics

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

    (Publisher)

  They examine what is lexically and grammatically available for a speaker to ac-complish a communicative goal, and at the same time explore the ways in which the linguistic potential is realized in a specific social context. Since the arsenal of language forms and the catalogue of social embeddings in which these forms are used in communication are virtually infinite and heterogen-eous, ‘pragmatic’ scholarship naturally draws upon a number of diverse disciplines in linguistics (and beyond). It is generated collectively by phonologists, morphol-ogists, syntacticians, discourse analysts – but also psychologists, sociologists and other scientists in the Humanities – as long as their work has a functional-com-municative bent. Pragmatics is thus defined by its perspective more than by a set number of its objects of investigation. 2 It offers explanations which apply to dif-ferent lexical and structural levels of language – word, phrase, sentence, discourse. 3. Context The conception of pragmatics as a (functional) perspective foregrounds and en-dorses its preoccupation with context . Different types of context are naturally sa-lient at different levels of communication (utterance, series of utterances, dis-course, genre) but there are also manifestations of different aspects of context at any specific level. Hence, context is a fundamental concept to account for in de-scribing the micro-macro dialogue in pragmatic studies. In a nutshell (cf. e.g. Bazzanella 2002), one can speak of a ‘static’ and a ‘dy-namic’ conception of context. The static view (cf. e.g. Halliday and Hasan 2000; Cummings 2005) sees context as a set of variables (linguistic, cognitive, social) that ‘surround’ strips of text. They constitute an a priori, static infrastructure of re-sources which are there for interlocutors to determine the meaning of utterances at hand.

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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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  A Companion to Chomsky

  • Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal, Georges Rey, Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal, Georges Rey(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  2017 ).

  The central problem for pragmatics is that what is communicated by an utterance may depart from, or go well beyond, the linguistically encoded meaning of the sentence uttered. As Chomsky (1995 , p. 29) puts it, “If intuition is any guide, there seems to be a considerable gap between the semantic resources of language literally interpreted and thoughts expressed using them.” Pragmatic processes crucially rely on background or contextual information supplied by the hearer, which may significantly affect the outcome of the comprehension process.

  Since the pioneering work of Grice (1957 , 1967 , 1989), a main focus of pragmatics has been on how the hearer identifies implicitly communicated propositions, or implicatures (Allott 2018 ); however, in recent years there has been increasing interest in pragmatic contributions to explicit truth‐conditional content, via disambiguation, reference resolution, adjustment (or modulation) of lexical senses, identification of ‘unarticulated constituents’, and so on (see Carston 2002 ; Horn and Ward 2004 ; Recanati 2004 , 2010 , and references therein). Despite the complexity of the tasks involved and the fact that required contextual information is generally not explicitly spelled out, successful comprehension typically takes place almost instantaneously. The central goal of pragmatics is to explain how it is achieved.

  Grice (1957 ) proposed a definition of speaker's meaning2 based on the overt expression and inferential recognition of intentions. Although his own goals were largely philosophical, his ideas have inspired attempts to develop a cognitively plausible, empirically testable theory of overt intentional communication (see Wilson and Sperber 2012 , Chapter 1 , for an overview). Construed as a branch of cognitive psychology, pragmatics is the study of the cognitive systems apart from the I‐language (on which see Allott, Lohndal and Rey introduction, Chapter 1 of this volume) and the parser (Kush and Dillon, Chapter 19

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics

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

    (Publisher)

  2 Semantic competence belongs to the language faculty, Borg says; it is an aspect of our ‘knowledge of language’. Pragmatic competence has more to do with the so-called ‘theory of mind’, that faculty in virtue of which human subjects are able to explain other people’s behaviour by ascribing intentions to them and reading their mind. The modular picture I have just described has started to lose grip in recent years. Nearly everybody nowadays acknowledges the fact that the reference of indexicals and, more generally, the semantic value of context-sensitive expressions cannot be determined without appealing to full-fledged prag- matic factors (e.g. speaker’s intentions). The semantic value of a context- sensitive expression varies from occurrence to occurrence, yet it often varies not as a function of some objective feature of the context but as a function of what the speaker means. Pragmatic competence, therefore, is required not only to determine what the speaker means on the basis of what she says, but also to determine what is said in the first place. That means that we have to give up the modular view, and accept that pragmatics and semantics do mix in fixing truth-conditional content. Of course, if one wants to maintain a semantics pure of pragmatic intru- sion, one can, but then one has to construe the goal of semantics differ- ently than it is on the standard conception. Pure semantics will no longer deliver truth conditions, but it will deliver, say, conditional truth conditions, or schemata, or characters, or propositional radicals, or whatever. To get full-blown truth-conditional content, pragmatics will be needed. This non- modular approach to truth-conditional content is one of the key ingredients of contemporary Contextualism. 7.2 The ‘extent of context-sensitivity’ issue According to most contemporary theorists, context-sensitivity is pervasive in natural language.

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  Some Aspects of Text Grammars

  A Study in Theoretical Linguistics and Poetics

  • Teun A. van Dijk(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  9 CONTEXT, PERFORMANCE, PRAGMATICS 1. LINGUISTIC THEORY AND THE STATUS OF PRAGMATICS 1.1. There is a persistent tendency in current linguistic theory to consider a grammar as a theory of a language. This view is correct only in a very restricted sense, and probably only applies to grammars of formal languages. One of the first tasks of this final chapter will be that of providing some arguments for a further extension of the grammar, viz. with a PRAGMATIC component. We will argue that a great part of the linguistic phenomena normally left for a so-called theory of performance belong to this component. Finally, we want to show that any theory of verbal performance or communication has to include a generative grammar extended with a set of pragmatic rules and categories. In addition, as was demonstrated earlier, this grammar must be a text grammar. Our very informal text grammar sketched in Part I must therefore be completed, for purely formal reasons also, with a pragmatic component. Only then does it provide a sound basis for psycho- and sociolinguistic theories of verbal performance and interaction, and only then can an adequate theory of literature be based or modelled on it. The different issues involved here have intricate methodological and meta-theoretical implications. The whole question about the relations between competence and performance is only one aspect of them. In fact, we are dealing here with the problem of the empirical scope of linguistic theories and grammars. It is clear that only some aspects of this issue can be treated, especially with respect to a future completion of text grammars. Furthermore, our discussion will have a very schematic character in order to distinguish different aspects of the various theories involved at this level of linguistic description and explanation. 1.2. Let us briefly recall some tasks and aims of traditional generative S-grammars.

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