Defining Pragmatics

Defining Pragmatics

1. Important Terms

   • Competance
     • The knowledge of the Ideolect
       • Ideolect
         • Our own individual internalised system of language that has a great deal in common with he idiolects of other speakers in our community but almost certainly is not identical to any of them
   • Performance
     • What we actually do (including comprehension)
   • Garden-path sentence
     • A sentence that is grammatically correct but lures the interpreter towards a dead end interpretation, who will then have to retrace the interpretive steps to interpret correctly

2. Birner (2013) Chapter 1

3. Research Methods

   • Discourse Analysis
     • The study of a string of sentences
       • Pragmatics asks the question "What happens in discourse?", whereas discourse analysis asks "What is happening in this discourse?". Pragmatics draws on natural language data to develop generalisations, whereas discourse analysis draws on these generalisations in order to more closely investigate natural language data.
         • P. 5
   • Pragmatics research is Descriptive
   • Native speaker intuitions
     • introspection
       • The researcher's own intuitions
     • Informants
       • Someone else's intuitions
         • Through questionnaires or interviews

4. Components of Language

   • Semantics
     • Literal meaning
     • The shift of the status of a metaphor from pragmatic meaning to semantic meaning is a continuum
     • Lexical Semantics
       • Semantics of individual words
     • Sentential Semantics
       • Certain structures are associated with certain meanings
         • When two true sentences are joined by 'and' as in [I like pizza and I eat it frequently] we take the resulting conjunction to be true as well
   • Syntax
     • How words have been strung together into a sentence
   • Pragmatics
     • Study of language use in context including 'additional meaning' according to context
       • Pragmatics appears to be a matter of performance but it is rule-governed. It is part of our implicit knowledge of how to use language appropriately.
       • The study of Pragmatics tries to make the implicit knowledge explicit.
       • Meaning that is:
         • Non-literal
         • Context-dependent
         • Inferential
         • Non-truth-conditional
           • The conditions under which the statement is true don't depend on its pragmatic meaning
             • The truth of the statement [There's one piece of pizza left] does not depend on the intention of the statement but only on how many pieces are left
         • Linguists disagree which of these are defining properties of pragmatics
       • "The same utterance will mean different things in different contexts, and even mean different things to different people"
         • p. 4
     • Lexical Pragmatics
       • Pragmatics at word level
         • Above the sentence level there is pragmatics including meaning that is inferred based on contextual factors rather than conventional semantic associations