Pragmatics

Pragmatics

1. What is pragmatics?

   • Pragmatics is the study of "how to do things with words", or perhaps "how people do things with words"
     • Aspects of Pragmatics
       • Speech acts
         • People use language to accomplish certain kinds of acts, broadly known as speech acts
           • Most of these ought really to be called "communicative acts", since speech and even language are not strictly required
             • It's common to divide speech acts into two categories: direct and indirect.
               • Direct speech acts
                 • There are three basic types of direct speech acts, and they correspond to three special syntactic types that seem to occur in most of the world's languages.
                   • Assertion
                     • Declarative sentences
                       • It´s fuction is conveys information; is true or false
                         • Examples: "Jenny got an A on the test" "Les filles ont pris des photos."('The girls took photos') "Biak eko nos." ('Biak took the food')
                   • Question
                     • Interrogative sentences
                       • It´s fuction is elicits information
                         • Examples: "Did Jenny get an A on the test?" "Les filles ont-elles pris des photos?"('Did the girls take photos') "Biak eko nos me? "('Did Biak take the food')
                   • Orders and requests
                     • Imperative sentences
                       • It´s fuction is causes others to behave in certain ways
                         • Examples: "Get an A on the test!" "Prenez des photos!"('Take some photos!') "Goko nos! "('Take the food!')
               • Indirect speech acts
                 • We can easily come up with a number of alternate ways to ask the same question by using sentence types other than interrogative
                   • Let's look again at the interrogative sentence: (d1) Did Jenny get an A on the test?
                     • This is still in the form of a question, but it probably is not an inquiry about what you know. Most of the time, the answer "yes, I do" would be ostentatiously uncooperative. The normal answer we would expect in real life would be "Yes, she did", or "No, she only got a B", or something of the sort.
                       • Here the reply is directed to the speech act meaning, not the literal meaning. A simple "yes" answer that responds to the literal meaning would usually be taken for an uncooperative answer in actual social life
       • Rhetorical Structure
         • Some of this rhetorical structure involves the relationships of phrases inside sentences, and some of it involves relationships among sentences or groups of sentences. Like syntactic structures, these rhetorical structures usually seem to be "trees" -- that is, successive subdivisions of larger units into smaller ones.
           • On this view, it might not turn out to be possible to list all the possible rhetorical structures, or to uniquely and accurately classify every passage in terms of such structures, any more than we can list all possible hand tools, or necessarily classify all the tools that we find into a fixed taxonomy. After all, someone can always invent a new tool, or a tool that combines aspects of several old ones
       • Convetional implicature
         • Cooperative Principle. It has four sub-parts or maxims that cooperative conversationalists ought in principle to respect:
           • (1) The maxim of quality. Speakers' contributions ought to be true.
             • (2) The maxim of quantity. Speakers' contributions should be as informative as required; not saying either too little or too much
               • (3) The maxim of relevance. Contributions should relate to the purposes of the exchange.
                 • 4) The maxim of manner. Contributions should be perspicuous -- in particular, they should be orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.
       • Managing the flow of reference in discourse.
         • In conveying a message, we have to consider more than just "who did what to whom." We also have to keep in mind what our listeners know, and how to lay the message out for them in an orderly and understandable way.
           • We have to be careful not to introduce familiar things as if they were new. Aside from being insulting, this can be confusing, since our listeners may try to find a new interpretation to match our implication of novelty.
             • There are many aspects of language that help to indicate whether a particular piece of information is "old" or "new", and to manage the amount of detail that we use in talking about it, and to make it more or less salient for our listeners or readers.