Using and Understanding language

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Introduction

Pragmatics: explaining how we produce and understand such everyday but apparently rather peculiar uses of language.

Atkinson, Kilby and Roca: "The distinction between what a speaker's words mean and what the speaker might mean by his words.

Features important to Pragmatics:

Appropriateness (appropiate ways of using language to get business done), appropiateness of language in relation to those who use it and those they address. Utterances must be appropiate to the contexts in which they occur.

Non-literal or indirect meaning, the literal (or stated) meaning is only one aspect of the meaning conveyed in an utterance and is not all the speaker intends it to convey. Sometimes the literal meaning is very far removed from the indirect meaning. We are remarkably clever at interpreting indirectness, get from a string of words that appears to have literal meaning to an understanding of its indirect meaning; draw inferences or come to conclusions as to what the speaker is intending to convey, as to what is conveyed beyond what is stated.

Inference

Indeterminacy

Context

Relevance

Accommodation

Reflexivity

Misfires

Introduction

properties of everyday language