Pragmatics

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Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics concerned with speech acts, and how communication is achieved in a given instance of language use; it studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on.[1] In this respect, pragmatics is the study of how the meaning of a sentence (or other linguistic unit) changes depending on how and where it is expressed, or on the structural ambiguity in language.[2] The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic.

Another perspective is that pragmatics deals with the way in which we reach our goals in communication. Suppose a person wanted to ask someone to stop smoking. This could be achieved by using several utterances. The person could simply say, "Stop smoking, please!" which is a direct method and has clear semantic meaning. Alternatively, the person could say, "Whew, this room could use an air purifier" which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning.

Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of language learning, and comes only through experience.

Contents

[edit] Structural ambiguity

The sentence "You have a green light" is ambiguous. Without knowing the context, the identity of the speaker, and their intent, it is not possible to infer the meaning with confidence. For example:

  • It could mean you are holding a green light bulb.
  • Or that you have a green light to drive your car.
  • Or it could be indicating that you can go ahead with the project.

Similarly, the sentence "Sherlock saw the man holding binoculars" could mean that Sherlock observed the man by using binoculars; or it could mean that Sherlock observed a man who was holding binoculars. The meaning of the sentence depends on an understanding of the context and the speaker's intent.[3] As defined in linguistics, a sentence is an abstract entity — a string of words divorced from non-linguistic context — as opposed to an utterance, which is a concrete example of a speech act in a specific context. The cat sat on the mat is a sentence of English; if you say to your sister on Tuesday afternoon: "The cat sat on the mat", this is an example of an utterance. Thus, there is no such thing as a sentence with a single true meaning; it is underspecified (which cat sat on which mat?) and potentially ambiguous. The meaning of an utterance, on the other hand, is inferred based on linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the non-linguistic context of the utterance (which may or may not be sufficient to resolve ambiguity).

[edit] Origins

Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure. In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being.

While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics, pragmatics continues its tradition. Also influential were Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.

[edit] Areas of interest

  • The study of the speaker's meaning, or not focusing on the phonetic or grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what the speaker's intentions and beliefs are.
  • The study of the meaning in context, and the influence that a given context can have on the message. It requires knowledge of the speaker's identities, and the place and time of the utterance.
  • The study of implicatures, i.e. the things that are communicated even though they are not explicitly expressed.
  • The study of relative distance, both social and physical, between speakers in order to understand what determines the choice of what is said and what is not said.

[edit] Referential uses of language

When we speak of the referential uses of language we are talking about how we use signs to refer to certain items. A sign may be identified as the link or relationship between a signified and the signifier. The signified would be some entity or even a concept in the world while the signifier represents it.

Example

Signified: an actual physical cat
 Signifier: the word 'cat'"

An attempt to define this relationship is the Peircean Trichotomy, referring to C.S. Peirce which defines three different types of linkage between the signified and signifier. They are the following:

1. Icon: the signified resembles the signifier (signified: a dog's barking noise, signifier: bow-wow)
2. Index: the signified and signifier are linked by proximity or the signifier has meaning only because it is pointing to the signified
3. Symbol: the signified and signifier are arbitrarily linked (signified: a cat, signifier: the word cat)

This relationship can be further explained by considering what we mean by meaning. In pragmatics, there are two different types of meaning to consider: semantico-referential meaning and indexical meaning. Semantico-referential meaning refers to the aspect of meaning, which describes events in the world that are independent of the circumstance in which it is uttered. An example would be propositions such as:

"Santa Claus eats cookies."

Santa Claus eating cookies can have occurred tomorrow, next week, yesterday, et cetera. Semantic-referential meaning can also be described using meta-semantical statements such as:

Tiger: omnivorous, a mammal

Omnivorous and mammal do not change the definition of what a tiger is. In contrast, indexical meaning is dependent on the context of the utterance and has rules of use. By rules of use, it is meant that indexicals can tell you when they are used, but not what they actually mean.

Example: "I"

Whom "I" refers to depends on the context and the person uttering it.

This leads into another method of defining signs. There are signs that are referential indexical signs, also called "shifters," and pure indexical signs. Referential indexical signs are called shifters because the meaning shifts depending on the context; 'I' would be considered a referential indexical sign. The referential aspect would be '1st person singular while the indexical aspect would be the person who is speaking. Another example would be:

"This"
Referential: singular count
Indexical: Close by

A pure indexical sign does not contribute to the meaning of the propositions at all. It is an example of a ""non-referential use of language"".

[edit] Non-referential uses of language

[edit] Jakobson's Six Functions of Language

Roman Jakobson, expanding on the work of Karl Bühler, described six functions of language, only one of which was reference. Each of these functions corresponds to one of a parallel six "constitutive factors" of a speech event:

The Six Constitutive Factors of a Speech Event

Context
Message

Addresser---------------------Addressee

Contact
Code


The Six Functions of Language

Referential
Poetic

Emotive-----------------------Conative

Phatic
Metalingual

  • The Referential Function corresponds to the factor of Context and describes a situation, object or mental state. The descriptive statements of the referential function can consist of both definite descriptions and deictic words, e.g. "The autumn leaves have all fallen now."
  • The Expressive (alternatively called "emotive" or "affective") Function relates to the Addresser and is best exemplified by interjections and other sound changes that do not alter the denotative meaning of an utterance but do add information about the Addresser's (speaker's) internal state, e.g. "Wow, what a view!"
  • The Conative Function engages the Addressee directly and is best illustrated by vocatives and imperatives, e.g. "Tom! Come inside and eat!"
  • The Poetic Function focuses on 'the message for its own sake'[4] and is the operative function in poetry as well as slogans.
  • The Phatic Function is language for the sake of interaction and is therefore associated with the Contact factor. The Phatic Function can be observed in greetings and casual discussions of the weather, particularly with strangers.
  • The Metalingual (alternatively called "metalinguistic" or "reflexive") Function is the use of language (what Jakobson calls 'Code') to discuss or describe itself.

[edit] Silverstein's "Pure" Indexes

Michael Silverstein has argued that "nonreferential" or "pure" indexes do not contribute to an utterance's referential meaning but instead "signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables."[5] Although nonreferential indexes are devoid of semantico-referential meaning, they do encode "pragmatic" meaning.

The sorts of contexts that such indexes can mark are varied. Examples include:

  • Sex indexes are affixes or inflections that index the sex of the speaker, e.g. the verb forms of female Koasati speakers take the suffix "-s".
  • Deference indexes are words that signal social differences (usually related to status or age) between the speaker and the addressee. The most common example of a deference index is the T-V distinction, the widespread phenomenon in which a language has multiple second-person pronouns that correspond to the addressee's relative status or familiarity to the speaker. Honorifics are another common form of deference index and demonstrate the speaker's respect or esteem for the addressee via special forms of address and/or self-humbling first-person pronouns.
  • An Affinal taboo index is an example of avoidance speech and produces and reinforces sociological distance, as seen in the Aboriginal Dyirbal language of Australia. In this language and some others, there was a social taboo against the use of the everyday lexicon in the presence of certain relatives (mother-in-law, child-in-law, paternal aunt's child, and maternal uncle's child). If any of those relatives were present, a Dyirbal speaker would have to switch to a completely separate lexicon reserved for that purpose.

In all of these cases, the semantico-referential meaning of the utterances is unchanged from that of the other possible (but often impermissible) forms, but the pragmatic meaning is vastly different.

[edit] Related fields

There is a considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community. However, sociolinguists tend to be more oriented towards variations within such communities.

Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social phenomena; it thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology. Because pragmatics describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts. For example, the study of code switching directly relates to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force.[6]

According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas to which a word refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships among signs. Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied meaning of the given idea.

Speech Act Theory, pioneered by J.L. Austin and further developed by John Searle, centers around the idea of the performative, a type of utterance that performs the very action it describes. Speech Act Theory's examination of Illocutionary Acts has many of the same goals as pragmatics, as outlined above.

Suzette Haden Elgin has also written a number of books known of as the Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense series, where she extensively outlines structured methods like those surveyed in pragmatics to defend against the use of pejoratives in various common situations, drawing parallels between applied linguistics and martial arts techniques.


[edit] Pragmatics in philosophy

Émile Benveniste argued that the pronouns "I" and "you" are fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject.

Jaques Derrida remarked that some work done under Pragmatics aligned well with the program he outlined in his book Of Grammatology.

Pragmatics (more specifically, Speech Act Theory's notion of the performative) underpins Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. In Gender Trouble, she claims that gender and sex are not natural categories, but roles performed through discourse.

In Excitable Speech she extends her theory of performativity to hate speech, arguing that the designation of certain utterances as "hate speech" affects their pragmatic function.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics"). They draw three conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative utterance doesn't communicate information about an act second-hand—it does the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) The distinction between language and speech is untenable. This last conclusion attempts to refute Saussure's division between langue and parole and Chomsky's distinction between surface structure and deep structure simultaneously. [7]

[edit] Significant works

[edit] See also

Linguistics portal

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Shaozhong, Liu. "What is pragmatics?" (html). http://www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu/definition.html. Retrieved on 18 March 2009. 
  2. ^ http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosophy/24-903Spring-2005/CourseHome/
  3. ^ http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosophy/24-903Spring-2005/CourseHome/
  4. ^ Duranti 1997
  5. ^ Silverstein 1976
  6. ^ Duranti 1997
  7. ^ Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987) [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press.

[edit] References

  • Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford University Press.
  • Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. (1978) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
  • Carston, Robyn (2002) Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Clark, Herbert H. (1996) "Using Language". Cambridge University Press.
  • Cole, Peter, ed.. (1978) Pragmatics. (Syntax and Semantics, 9). New York: Academic Press.
  • Dijk, Teun A. van. (1977) Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman.
  • Grice, H. Paul. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
  • Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward. (2005) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell.
  • Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
  • Levinson, Stephen C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press.
  • Mey, Jacob L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).
  • Kepa Korta and John Perry. (2006) Pragmatics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Potts, Christopher. (2005) The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. (2005) Pragmatics. In F. Jackson and M. Smith (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. OUP, Oxford, 468-501. (Also available here.)
  • Thomas, Jenny (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Longman.
  • Verschueren, Jef. (1999) Understanding Pragmatics. London, New York: Arnold Publishers.
  • Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, eds. (1995) Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York: Norton.
  • Wierzbicka, Anna (1991) Cross-cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Yule, George (1996) Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study). Oxford University Press.
  • Silverstein, Michael. 1976. "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description," in Meaning and Anthropology, Basso and Selby, eds. New York: Harper & Row
  • Mey, Jacob. (2001). "Pragmatics: An Introduction". Blackwell.
  • Wardhaugh, Ronald. (2006). "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics". Blackwell.
  • Duranti, Alessandro. (1997). "Linguistic Anthropology". Cambridge University Press.
  • Carbaugh, Donal. (1990). "Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact." LEA.


[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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