Applied linguistics,Session 13

Pragmatics (part 1):Schmitt (2002), chapter 5: PragmaticsJ. Thomas (1995). Meaning in interaction: An introduction to pragmatics. Harlow, Essex: Longman.

The British philosopher, John L. Austin, whose collection of papers (How to do things with words) was published in 1962, is regarded as the ‘father of Pragmatics’. He was able to demonstrate that people do not use language just to make statements about the world; they also use language to perform actions, actions which affect or change the world in some way. The effect, however, may be very small (A offers to make B a cup of tea) or it may be cataclysmic فاجعه بار)) (country A declares war on country B). The effect of Austin’s insight revolutionized the way people look at language and led directly to the development of pragmatics as an area of linguistic investigation.

“Pragmatics is the discipline which studies the knowledge and procedures which enable people to understand each other’s words” (Cook, 2003, p. 51).

Stalnaker (1972) has defined pragmatics as ‘the study of the purposes for which sentences are used’. Thomas (1995, p. 22) defines pragmatics as ‘meaning in interaction’, where making meaning is considered a dynamic process between the speaker and hearer.

According to Charles Morris (1938, p. 30), pragmatics is the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters. In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the interrelationship between language form, (communicated) messages and language users.

Pragmatics explores questions such as the following:

How do people communicate more than what the words or phrases of their utterances might mean by themselves, and how do people make these interpretations?

Why do people choose to say and/or interpret something in one way rather than another?

How do people’s perceptions of contextual factors (for example, who the interlocutors are, what their relationship is, and what circumstances they are communicating in) influence the process of producing and interpreting language?

Modern approaches to pragmatics recognize that human communication largely exploits a code (that is, a natural language such as English, German or Japanese), but they also point to the fact that human communicative behavior relies heavily on people’s capacity to engage in reasoning about each other’s intention, exploiting not only the evidence presented by the signals in the language code but also evidence from other sources, including perception and general world knowledge.

The main concern of pragmatics is not the literal meaning ( واژگانی but what the speakers intend to do with their ,(معنایwords and what it is which makes this intention clear. For instance, ‘What time is it?’ can take different meanings, depending on the context of utterance (complaint, request, annoyance, etc.).

The task of ‘semantics’ is to describe and explain linguistic meaning: what an utterance means based on the words used and the ways they are put together, whereas ‘pragmatics’ is concerned with the meaning that linguistic expressions receive in use. It explains how participants in a dialogue move from the decontextualized (linguistically encoded) meanings of the words and phrases to a grasp of their meaning in context. This process involves different aspects:

The assignment of reference in context; The assignment of sense in context; The interpretation of illocutionary force, or the

communicative purpose, the speaker’s intention; The interpretation of implicated meaning (معنای ضمنی),

or what has been communicated indirectly by hinting.

Abstract meaning is concerned with what a word, phrase, sentence, etc. could mean (i.e., the dictionary meanings of words or phrases). In most dictionaries, for example, ‘cat’ is shown as having two abstract meanings: a small four-legged animal with soft fur and a more recently-acquired meaning, an additional meaning—catalytic convertor ( مبدل کاتالیزوری، در اگزوز which belongs to another domain of—(خود روهاdiscourse (سپهر گفتمانی), that of cars or air pollution: Modern cars are supplied with ‘cats’.

If a hearer is in the ‘wrong’ domain of discourse, if, for example, he thinks you are talking about ‘pets’ when you are actually talking about ‘cars’, the possibility of assigning sense wrongly is greater.

When people are engaged in conversations, they intuitively look for contextual sense (i.e., the sense in which the speaker/writer is using a word). In general, only one utterance meaning (also called contextual meaning) is intended by the speaker/writer, but there are exceptions, the most obvious being in literary discourse (particularly, poetry) or in jokes.

Assigning the correct or intended sense to polysemous words (words with several closely related meanings, e.g., ‘hand’: a part of the body; ‘hand’: a part of clock or watch) or homonymous lexical items (words with different and completely unrelated meanings, e.g., ‘bat’: in cricketچوگان ; ‘bat’: vampire خفاش) can be especially problematic for non-native speakers of a language; nevertheless, such words may appear in literary discourse or in discourse of humor as figures of speech .(صنايع بديعي يا آرايه هاي ادبي)

Edwin told his girlfriend that if she didn’t marry him, he’d get a rope and hang himself right in front of her home.

“Oh, please don’t do it, Edwin,” she said. “You know, father doesn’t want you hanging around here.”

Sometimes the process of identifying pragmatic meaning (that is, contextually determined aspects of utterance meaning) involves interpreting ambiguous and vague linguistic expressions in order to assign them sense in context.

When you are in a known domain of discourse or when you know about the social (سپهر/فضای گفتمان)status of your interactants(طرفهای گفتگو) , you will probably have little difficulty in assigning the correct sense to an ambiguous lexical item. So when a student asks her professor to give her ‘a handout’ she requests for lecture notes, while ,(دست برگ، جزوه)a beggar who asks for ‘a handout’ (صدقه، اعانه) certainly does not.

In order to understand an utterance, we not only have to assign sense to words, but also to assign reference (i.e., to determine in context who or what is being referred to).

Therefore, a listener needs to assign reference to the words that a speaker uses and since there is no direct relationship between entities (objects or persons referred to) and words, the listener typically has to make inferences as to what the speaker intends to identify. If this inferencing process is too difficult, communication will falter (will not proceed smoothly), and so to be co-operative, a speaker needs to anticipate how much information the listener will need (Schmitt, 2002, p. 77).

As Yule (1996) points out: Reference is not simply a relationship between the

meaning of a word or phrase and an object or person in the world. It is a social act; the speaker assumes that the word or phrase … will be interpreted by the hearer as the speaker intended.

Thus, a notice which said: Danger! Do not touch! could be understood to some extent by all literate members of a community. But the notice could only fulfill its warning function properly if it was clear to the reader precisely what was being referred to—i.e., what must not be touched, what is its reference.

The process of assigning reference also involves the interpretation of ‘deictic expressions’ .( عبارتهای نمایه These are linguistic items that point to (گونcontextually salient referents without naming them explicitly. There are several types of them: person deictics (such as the personal pronouns I, you, it, etc.), time deictics (now, then), and place deictics (there, here). These expressions in context refer to particular people or things, places and moments in time, but on different occasions they pick out different referents. For example, when Sharon (in the dialogue) says I may have been there, the deictic ‘there’ refers to the particular club in London.

‘Illocutionary force’ or ‘force’ refers to the speaker’s communicative intention. ‘Force’, a concept introduced by the philosopher, J. L. Austin, is the second component of speaker meaning, the first being ‘utterance meaning’. Austin originally (1960) used the term ‘speech act’ to refer to an utterance and the total situation in which the utterance is issued. Today, the term may be used to mean the same thing as do the terms ‘illocutionary force’ or ‘pragmatic force’.

Austin, in fact, made a three-fold distinction: Locution The actual words utteredIllocution The force or intention behind the wordsPerlocution The effect of the illocution on the

hearer