Pragmatics

Over the past 30 years or so, pragmatics has grown into a well-established, secure, discipline in institution terms.

Pragmatic Perspectives on Language Use

This section use a brief dialogue in order to introduce some important terms and concepts in modern pragmatics and to illustrate briefly the sorts of phoneme that pragmatics needs to account for.

Pragmatic Meaning

Semantic is to describe and explain linguistics meaning, whereas pragmatics is concerned with the study of the meaning that linguistic expressions receive in use. Pragmatics is to explain how participant in a dialogue such as the one above move from the decontextualized meanings of the words and phrases to a grasp of their meaning in context. 

Assigning Reference in Context

Sometimes the process of identifying pragmatic meaning involves interpreting ambiguous and vague linguistic expression in order to assign them sense context. Pragmatics plays a role in explaining how the thought expressed by a given utterance on a given occasion is recovered by the addressee.

Inferring Illocutionary Force

 Another element to the working out of pragmatics involves interpreting the illocutionary force of utterances. The philosopher John Austin and developed by another philosopher John Searle, views language as a form of action.

Austin´s initial insight was that people do not simply make statements that can be judge as true or false; rather, they use language to perform actions that have an impact in some way on the world. Both he and Searle tried to classify speech acts into different categories, and to identify the felicity condition that enable speech act to performed successfully.

Working Out Implicated Meaning

The main import of n utterance may, in fact, easily lie not with the thought expressed by the utterance (that is the communicated directly) but rather with the thought(s) that the hearer assumes the speaker intends to suggest or hint at.

He most influential solution to this problem was developed in the mid-1960s by the Oxford philosopher Paul Grice. He argued that people are disposed to presume that communicative behavior is guided by set of principal and norms, which he called the Co-operative Principle and maxims of conversation.

Deriving an interpretation that satisfies the Co-operative Principle is effected through four maxims which the communicator is presumed to abide by: Truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and style.

The challenge of describing and explaining the reasoning process involved in communication has also been taken up by cognitive approaches to pragmatics, such as Sperber and Wilson´s relevance theory, which maintains that the reasoning process involved in communication are constrained by a single principle: the principle of relevance, making the Co-operative Principle and the maxims of quality, quality and manner redundant.

Explaining the Impact of Social Factors 

Grice´s theory of conversation, and in particular his view that conversation is governed by a set of norms, pointed to the importance of investigating the social regularities which arise though and are reflected in communicative interaction.

Leech also suggests that language use involves a pragmalinguistic perspective.

One of the most influential models that tries to explain the impact of social factors on people´s use of language is Brown and Levinson´s face model of politeness. Brown and Levinson define face as the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself and they draw a distinction between positive face and negative face.

Positive face reflects every person´s need that his or her self-image is appreciated and approved of, and negative face reflects every person´s basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction- that is, to freedom of action and freedom from imposition.

Conversational Patterns and Structure

Conversation proceeds through ordered pairs of utterances, called adjacency pairs. The utterances in a pair are ordered, in that the first member of a pair requires a second member.

Conversation analysis is really an approach to discourse analysis; however, patterns such as insertion sequences may also be analyzed from a pragmatic perspective, in which case factors such as face are included to try and explain why such patterns occur. On the other hand, pragmatists working within other framework s, such as Sperber and Wilson´s cognitive-psychological approach, would argue that the patterns observed by conversation analysis follow from general principle of human cognition and communication.

The Role Context

Context plays a major role in the communication process, and so an important task for pragmatic theory is to elucidate this process. In social pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the following feature of the situational context have a particularly crucial influence on people´s use of language: the participant, the message content and the communicative activity.       

Context is sometimes taken to be concrete aspects of the environment in which an exchange takes place and that have a bearing on the communication process.

Pragmatics Research: Pragmatics and Methods

There are two broad approaches to pragmatics, a cognitive-psychological approach and a social-psychological approach. Cognitive pragmatics are primarily interested in exploring the relation between the decontextualized, linguistic meaning of utterance.

 Social pragmatics, on the other hand, tend to focus on the ways in which particular communicative exchanges between individuals are embedded in and constrained by social, cultural and other contextual factors.

The Importance of Context

Context is a crucial factor in pragmatic analysis. When designing language teaching materials and language learning activities, it is vital to clearly identify relevant contextual information such as the following: the roles, the number of people and what the communicative event is and what the goals are.

The Complexity of Meaning Construction

This process of construction meaning involves the use of all kinds of background knowledge, and so this means that the less background knowledge people have in common, the more difficult the process of communicating will be. This has major implications for foreign language teachers, both in terms of how they appraise the level of difficult of texts and also in terms of their own use of language.

The Impact of Speech Act Theory

It has a had a crucial impact on foreign language teaching, s it played a major role in the emergence of the functional perspective on language learning and teaching in the 1970s.

 Wilkins, in his analysis of the communicative meanings that language learners need to understand and express, described two types of meanings: national categories and functional categories. 

The Possibility (or Likelihood) of Pragmatic Transfer

 It is widely acknowledged that people´s use of a second language can be influenced by the characteristics of their first language.

Naturally, there can be pragmatics differences between languages, just as there can be phonological or syntactic differences. Some of these differences can be relatively grammatical.

During the last 20 years or so, pragmaticians have carried out contrastive research into many different pragmatic features in a very wide range of language. This area of research is known as cross-cultural pragmatics.


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