Pragmatics Intro

Meaning…again!• the war

• the war with the English

• communicative intentions of speakers

• refer to something not expected

• Communication recognizing what speakers mean by their utterances

Meaning• The study of what speakers mean, or “speaker

meaning,” is called pragmatics.

• shared assumptions and

• a sign may allow many interpretations

• meanings = words, the context, and some pre-existing knowledge = reasonable interpretation of producer of the sign intended it to convey

• the “meaning” of the sign is not based solely on the words, but on what we think the writer intended to communicate.

• Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context dependent on the intentions of participants in a conversational exchange.

• Not the meaning of single words as we saw in semantics, but the intended meaning of whole exchanges.

• Context , intentions and shared knowledge are the keywords. Also cultural implications play an important role.

• Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context dependent on the intentions of participants in a conversational exchange.

• Not the meaning of single words as we saw in semantics, but the intended meaning of whole exchanges.

• Context , intentions and shared knowledge are the keywords. Also cultural implications play an important role.

• A.: I have a 14 year old son

• B.: Well that’s right

• A.: I also have a dog

• B.: Oh, I’m sorry

• Can you understand the meaning of this exchange?

Semantics

Context considered Context unconsidered

Pragmatics Traditional semantics

3.  Context

! "

Speaker A Speaker B

Knowledge of language

What has been said before

Knowledge about the world

Knowledge about the situation

Knowledge about each other

Today is Sunday.

• IMPLICATURE

• Pragmatics is concerned with the notion of implicature, i.e. implied meaning as opposed to the mere lexical meaning expressed (Grice, 1968)

Two women discussing their children:

A: How is Tom going at school? B: Ah, well ... you know what they say: boys will be boys. A: Yeah, but girls are no easier ... you know what Jess did the other day? …

(Adapted from Wierzbicka 1991, p. 391)

On being disturbed by the next-door neighbor's lawnmower early on Sunday morning:

A: Great way to wake up! B: (grumpily) Sure is.

If we don’t have a context or some knowledge about a situation, the meaning can be ‘invisible’ as in the previous example. Or

- have you seen Sam?

- the black car is over there.

Here are some real examples of promotional signs:

1) We do not tear your clothing with machinery; we do it carefully by hand.

2) Heated attendant parking

3) Baby & Toddler Sale

They may sound ambiguous:

Does not mean that people working at that laundry tear your clothing by hand.

Does not mean that we heat an attendant and then we can park him/her somewhere.

Does not mean that we sell young children.

What do they mean?

"My friends were poor, but honest.“

'but' carries the implicature that what follows runs counter to expectations.

What is the “counter to expectation” or simply “expectation?

We’ll will return to implicature later!!

Cross Cultural Pragmatics

• "Pragmatic errors are the result of an interactant imposing the social rules of one culture on his communicative behaviour in a situation where the social rules of another culture would be more appropriate" (Riley 1989: 234).

• According to Liebe-Harkort (1989) difficulties in intra-cultural communication are potentially compounded further, if one of the speakers is monolingual and cannot imagine that the intentions of their speaking partner may be different than his or her own would be if s/he were to use a form or expression the other uses.

• Clearly, communicative competence must include pragmalinguistic competence (i.e., choosing appropriate form) and sociopragmatic competence (i.e., choosing appropriate meaning) if inter-cultural pragmatic problems are to be avoided (Trosborg, 1994, p. 10)

Context or co-textWe have different ‘contexts’:

The linguistic context also called co-text is the set of other words used in the same sentence:

We know that the word ‘pupil’ is a homonym. How do we know which meaning is intended? Usually by means of the linguistic context:

If it is used in a sentence with words like ‘teacher’, ‘classmates’ etc. we understand that pupil here means ?

If it is used in a sentence with words like ‘eye’, ‘dilatation’ or ‘iris’ we know that here it means ?

Another type, is the physical context.

If you see a sign like this near a school: SLOW DOWN. PUPILS CROSSING THE STREET.

It does not mean that you have to slow down because you could run over eye-pupils and reduce them to a pulp.

Context or co-text

• Bank and bank…again!

• Our understanding of much of what we read and hear is tied to this processing of aspects of the physical context, particularly the time and place, in which we encounter linguistic expressions.

Two more examples:

A. Do you understand this question?

B. Amazingly, he already loves he

• A: Oh no, … … … … … …. …. .. ..

• B: Don’t panic, I’ll take you to the bank

• Can you think of two completely different ways to complete A?

• They should exemplify the two different meanings of bank.

Deixis

Examples:

You’ll have to bring them back by tomorrow, because they aren’t here now and they need them.

• Deixis (/daɪktɪk/)

• comes from Greek and it means ‘pointing’ by means of language.

• We can have: person deixis, place deixis, time deixis.

This means that language is used to act. By means of language, in terms of requests, commands, asking questions or information, we perform actions, that are called ‘speech acts’.

‘are you married?’, ‘can they play tennis?’, ‘do you know anything about what happened?’ are forms used to ask for information and they are called ‘direct speech acts’.

In questions like ‘Can you pass the wine?’ you don’t want to know if the person is able to pass the wine, but you want the wine. These are called ‘indirect speech acts’.