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PRAGMATICS

1) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context


contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory,
conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language
behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics.[1] 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.[2] In this respect, pragmatics explains
how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning
relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance. [1] The ability to understand
another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. An
utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic.
Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of
language learning, and comes only through experience.

2) Source:
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsPrag
matics.htm

Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are
dependent on the speaker, the addressee and other features of the context
of utterance, such as the following:

• The effect that the following have on the speaker’s choice of expression
and the addressee’s interpretation of an utterance:

o Context of utterance

o Generally observed principles of communication

o The goals of the speaker

• Programmatic concerns, such as

A. the treatment of given versus new information (a distinction


between information that is assumed or supplied by
the speaker and that which is presented for the first time),
including presupposition

B. deixis

C. speech acts, especially illocutionary acts

D. implicature, and
E. the relations of meaning or function between portions of
discourse (see interpropositional relation) or turns of conversation
(see conversation analysis).

Meaning and pragmatic function is a general heading under which terminology


relating to the various areas of study of language use and interpretation is
collected.

A. Given versus new information is a distinction between information


that is assumed or supplied by the speaker and that which is presented
for the first time. The distinction between given and new information
may affect the structure of clauses, sentences, and discourses. Here are
some kinds of given versus new information:

 What is given information?

Given information is information that is assumed by the speaker to


be known to, assumed by, or inferable by the addressee at the time
of the speaker's utterance, because it is

• common knowledge

• part of the extralinguistic context, or

• previously established in the discourse.

Given information often is

• placed early in a sentence, and

• spoken with a low amount of stress.

Here are some kinds of given information:

• What is an evoked entity?

• What is an inferable entity?

• What is predictable information?

• What is salient information?

 What is new information?

New information is information that is assumed by the speaker not


to be known to or assumed by the addressee, or previously
established in the discourse. New information typically : is placed
late in the sentence, and has a high amount of stress placed on the
words representing it. In the following exchange, the stressed words
are new information:

A: Do you know where my SHOES are?


B: I put them in the CLOSET.

A presupposition is background belief, relating to an utterance, that:

• must be mutually known or assumed by


the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered
appropriate in context

• generally will remain a necessary assumption whether the


utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question,
and

• can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or


grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance.

The utterance John regrets that he stopped doing linguistics before he


left Cambridge has the following presuppositions:

• There is someone uniquely identifiable to speaker and


addressee as John.

• John stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.

• John was doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.

• John left Cambridge.

• John had been at Cambridge

B. A deictic expression is an expression that has a deictic usage as its basic


usage, though it may also have nondeictic usages. Deixis is reference by
means of an expression whose interpretation is relative to the (usually)
extralinguistic context of the utterance, such as :

• who is speaking

• The time or place of speaking

• the gestures of the speaker, or

• the current location in the discourse


Here are examples of deictic expressions:

•I

• You

• Now

• There

• That

• The following

• Tenses

C. A speech act is an act that a speaker performs when making an utterance,


including the following:

• A general act (illocutionary act) that a speaker performs, analyzable as


including

o the uttering of words (utterance acts)

o making reference and predicating (propositional acts), and

o a particular intention in making the utterance (illocutionary force)

• An act involved in the illocutionary act, including utterance acts and


propositional acts

• The production of a particular effect in the addressee (perlocutionary act)

An illocutionary act is a complete speech act, made in a typical utterance,


that consists of the delivery of the propositional content of the utterance
(including references and a predicate), and a particular illocutionary force,
whereby the speaker

o asserts

o suggests

o demands

o promises, or

o vows.

D. An implicature is anything that is inferred from an utterance but that is not


a condition for the truth of the utterance. Example: The expression Some of
the boys were at the party implicates in most contexts Not all of the boys
were at the party.

3) Source: http://www.ling.gu.se/~biljana/st1-97/pragmalect1.html

Pragmatics is a field of linguistics studying comunication. It is concentrated on


the dynamic aspect of meaning in context.
It is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are dependent
on the speaker, addressee, and other features of the context of
utterance;including the study, on one hand, of the effect that context of
utterance, generally observed principles of communication, and the goals of the
speaker have on the choice of means of expression, and on the other hand, the
effect such factors have on the interpretation made of an utterance, by the
addressee.

One main interest of pragmatics is defining the principles for the determination
of intended meaning. This meaning may be transmited verbally or non-verbally.

The main components of current pragmatic inquiry are:

• deixis • irony

• implicature (implicit • types of metaphors


communicative content)
• context
• speech acts (make a search on
'speech act' using this link) • intention

• discourse structure • agency

• language understanding and • relation between utterance


competence and sentence or speaker
meaning/sentence meaning.

One way of exemplifying the pragmatic aspect of an utterance is to determine


the type of defect it contains, if any. For example:

Pragmatic defect:

The sun is big but I don't think so.

I don't regret lying.

I hereby play.

Come there!

Metaphoric defect:

Max Svensson is a pig. (and Max is, e.g., really fat, and/or eats too much)

Ironic defect:
Max Svensson is a pig. ( and Max is, e.g., really small and eats almost nothing)

Grammatical defect:

Max on sitting the chair.

Max are sitting on the chair.

Semantic defect:

I broke the dress.

The metaphor and the irony cases are one the main concerns of early
pragmatics, cf. Grice nad Searle. From the above cases one may say that the
grammatical defects may not be defects in other languages than English but the
pragmatical defects may be defects in all languages. The semantic defect is also
dependent on the semantic definition of a dress and of the verb of breaking in
the concrete language we are studying. So, here we can see that the purpose of
syntactic analysis is to define what is a well-formed sentence and are there
syntactic forms which are defective in all languages. If we can find that there are
such sentences we may study why are they universally defective, that is, is there
an underlying cognitive reason for these defects. What regards the pragmatic
and semantic defects it is not so clear if they could be explained only
by semantics (if you follow this link, make a search on "meaning theories") or
pragmatics. Thus one needs to settle the definitions of these two aspects of
linguistic structure. Today, with the growth of interest in cognitive linguistics it is
getting more and more typical to consider pragmtics and semantics as
inseparable. The cognitive implication of the chosen definition will be that either
there is a separate cognitive module for analysis of semantic aspects of linguistic
expressions or that this module and the module of pragmatic analysis are one.
Clearly, most theorists agree that syntax and sematics are two separate
cognitive entities.

One may say that there is a continuum of defintions relating sematics and
pragmatics the two extremes of which are:

truth-conditional semantics ------------------ Cognitive semantics and pragmatics

(homogeneous) (hyper hetergeneous)

In the first case, semantics is rigidly defined as the study of meaning in linguistic
expressions, apart from consideration of the effect that pragmatic factors such
as features of the context, conventions of language use, and the goals of the
speaker have on the meaning of language in use (cf. Crystal, 1985:274; Leech,
1983:5-6; Lyons, 1981:136,163-4; Levinson, 1983:5-34). Phenomena such as
implicatures, deixis, speech acts, intentions may be left to pragmatics. In the
second case, there is no rigid distinction between the goals and the tasks of the
two disciplines. Jackendoff's article, which will be discussed in the second part of
the course defends this second view on pragmatics and semantics.

4) Source: http://www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu/definition.html
Definition

A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how


people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a
concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation (hence *conversation
analysis). It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or
communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the
sentence meaning, and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning
(Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and produce
a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper, 1997)
which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social status
between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness, and
the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.

Focus and content

Some of the aspects of language studied in pragmatics include:


--Deixis: meaning 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication however,
deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in
its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given
speech context.
--Presupposition: referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings
logically associated with or entailed by a sentence.
--Performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only says
something but also does certain things: giving information, stating a fact or
hinting an attitude. The study of performatives led to the hypothesis of Speech
Act Theory that holds that a speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary
act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969).
--Implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived
from context that is not present from its conventional use.
Pragmaticians are also keen on exploring why interlocutors can successfully
converse with one another in a conversation. A basic idea is that interlocutors
obey certain principles in their participation so as to sustain the conversation.
One such principle is the Cooperative Principle which assumes that interactants
cooperate in the conversation by contributing to the ongoing speech event
(Grice, 1975). Another assumption is the Politeness Principle (Leech, 1983) that
maintains interlocutors behave politely to one another, since people respect
each other's face (Brown & Levinson 1978). A cognitive explanation to social
interactive speech events was provided by Sperber and Wilson (1986) who hold
that in verbal communication people try to be relevant to what they intend to
say and to whom an utterance is intended.
The pragmatic principles people abide by in one language are often different in
another. Thus there has been a growing interest in how people in different
languages observe a certain pragmatic principle. Cross-linguistic and cross-
cultural studies reported what is considered polite in one language is sometimes
not polite in another. Contrastive pragmatics, however, is not confined to the
study of a certain pragmatic principles. Cultural breakdowns, pragmatic failure,
among other things, are also components of cross-cultural pragmatics.
Another focus of research in pragmatics is learner language or *interlanguage.
This interest eventually evolved into interlanguage pragmatics, a branch of
pragmatics which specifically discusses how non-native speakers comprehend
and produce a speech act in a target language and how their pragmatic
competence develops over time (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Kasper, 1995). To
date, a handful of cross-sectional, longitudinal and theoretical studies on
classroom basis have been conducted and the potentials along the interface of
pragmatics with SLA research have been widely felt. Topics of immediate
interest to which language teachers at large may contribute seem just
numerous. What are some of the pragmatic universals underlying L2 acquisition?
What influences L1 exerts on the learner's L2 acquisition? How shall we measure
the learner's pragmatic performance with a native pragmatic norm? These are
but a few of the interesting ones and for more discussions see Kasper & Schmidt
(1996), Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford (1996), Takahashi (1996), House (1996) and
Cohen (1996).

5) Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/pragmaticsterm.htm

A branch of linguistics concerned with the use of language in social contexts and
the ways in which people produce and comprehend meanings through
language.

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