Contrastive Pragmatics

Contrastive Pragmatics

1. A subfield of linguistics that studies how context and speakers contribute to meaning.

   • There are different elements that are taken and studied within this subfield:
     • Text: a linguistic unit of variable size,
       • Cotext: the linguistic environment of words.
         • Context: the extralinguistics setting of the text is embedded in.
     • Studies how context contributes to:
       • Meaning cross-linguistically
       • Cross culturally

2. Pragmatics deals with aspects of the context:

   • Speaker factors
   • Physical context

3. Identifies possible clashes of assumptions or interpretations in order to provide knowledge.

4. Information structure

   • Refers to the way conceptual material or is chosen and structured formally within a sentence to refer to reality.
     • Speech acts:
       • Are utterances by which the speakers ''acts by means of language''
         • There exist five types of speech acts:
           • Assertives
             • Commisives
               • Veridictives
           • Expresssives
             • Directives
               • Declaratives
       • Speech acts can be analyzed on three levels:
         • Locutionary
           • Illocutionary
             • Perlocutonary

5. Speakers of different languages describe events in the world differently:

   • Path of motion
   • Manner of motion

Images and files in the map