PRAGMATICS

Language functions

Language as a tool

FORM

phonological

semantic

syntactic

Language as an actFUNCTION

„the pragmatic uses that speakers put language to in communication”

Language functions

social bonding

and maintenance

(„phatic communication”)

expression of identity

‘informative’ communication

collective memory

Language functions by Halliday (1973)

instrumental I pronounce you husband and wife.

regulatory You’ll be the doctor and I’ll be the patient, right?

heuristic When was Shakespeare born?

imaginative The little pony shook and suddenly turned into a beautiful princess.

representational

We all long to be loved.interactional (‘phatic function’)

How are you today?personal

I hate being bullied.

Speech Act Theory by Austin (1962)and Searle (1972)

Locution IllocutionPerlocutionFelicity conditions

- Oh, what a lovely bike!- I’ll lend it to you if you give me a

chewing gum, all right?

direct

(Stop teasing the dog!)

and indirect speech acts

(You’ll stop teasing the dog.

Would you stop teasing the dog?

I wish you would stop teasing the dog.)

Illocutionary act= the basic unit of communication (Searle, 1969, 1972)

representativesWe’re going to the cinema tonight.

directivesPlease, come and help me lay the table!

commissives I promise to help you next time.

expressives I say, it was a nasty job!

declarativesI hereby name this ship ‘Liberty’.

Grice’s Communication Theory

Communicative situations are rather limited:

rely on shared knowledge, common goals and mutual interests,

do not convey a large amount of new info,do not attempt to bring about a complete

change of view or behaviour,based on agreed processes of adjustment

and accommodation.

Grice’s Interaction Theory (1975)

Maxims of

Quality

Quantity

Relevance

Manner

Other elements of cooperative communicative acts

conversational implicature (implied but unstated meanings)

Questioner: Where is your husband?Speaker: He is in the living room or in the kitchen.

Implication: The speaker does not know which room he is in.

presupposition (what is assumed or taken for granted that is why unstated)

Sam has stopped beating his wife.

Sam hasn’t stopped beating his wife.

Presupposition: Sam was beating his wife.

Food – 3 milesGood Food – 30 miles

Daily Grill – In Palm Desert at El Paso

“I never read The Economist”Management Trainee, Age 42

shared assumptions and agreement on how specific encounters are to be regulated in terms of

turn-taking (taking the floor)

exchange

silence

Pragmatic differences across cultures

Deborah Tannen

level of indirectness tolerated

paralinguistic signals of different speech acts

different cultural expectations - stereotypes (the pushy New Yorker, the stony American Indian, the inscrutable Chinese)

Example 1:

TAKING THE FLOOR

Indian English (by raising volume)

British English (by repeating the introductory phrase)

Example 2: ‘Thanksgiving dinner’ situation

A: In fact one of my students told me for the first time, I taught her for over a year, that she was adopted. And then I thought – uh – THAT explains SO many things.

B: What. That she was –A: Cause she’s so different from her motherB: smarter than she

should have been? Or stupider than she should’ve been.

A: It wasn’t smart or stupid, Actually, it was just she was so different. Just different.

B: [hm]

Anna Wierzbicka

Ethnocentric view of speech acts Cross-cultural differences in directness

Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Sit! Will/Won’t/Would you sit down?Please, have a little more! You must! Would you like to have some more? How about a beer?What’s the time? You wouldn’t happen to have the correct time, would you?

Indirectness and politenessYou are to get off. Not to show oneself to

me here!

Why don’t you bloody get off? Get off, will you.

Underlying beliefs

individualism

collectivism

„compromise”

Michael Clyne Should you not make your utterance more informative

than required? (How are you?) Should you always be truthful? (I’m fine thanks) Should you always be relevant and straightforward?

(Arab business, collectivism)

Goals of a pragmatic theory produce a classification of speech acts, analyse and define speech acts, specify the various uses of expressions, relate literary and direct language use to

linguistic structure, the structure of the communicative situation, the social institutions, speaker-meaning, implication, presupposition and

understanding.

Communicative competence

„An aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meaning interpersonally within specific contexts” (Dell Hymes , 1967)

CALP and BICS

Canale & Swain (1980)

Grammatical competenceDiscourse competenceSociolinguistic competenceStrategic competence

Bachman, 1990

Language competence

Organisational Pragmatic

Grammatical Textual llocutionary Sociolinguistic- Vocab - Cohesion - Ideational - Dialect- Morphology - Rhetoric - Manipulative - Register- Syntax - Heuristic - Naturalness- Phonology - Imaginative - Cultural

/Graphology references & figures of speech

Communicative language ability (Bachman, 1990)

Knowledge structures Language competence

Strategic competence

Psychophysiological

mechanisms

Context of situation