Pragmatics

Pragmatics

1. study of how senders and addressees, in acts of communication, rely on context to elaborate on literal meaning.

2. Conversational implicature

   • are inferences that depend on the existence of norms for the use of language,
   • Implicatures from manner
     • According to the maxim of manner, our speech (and written utterances) should also be orderly.
   • Implicatures from the quantity maxim
     • An implicature relating to the low end of the quantity maxim – giving too little information
   • Implicatures from relevance
     • Grice’s relevance maxim lays down that contributions should be relevant to the assumed current goals of the interlocutors

3. Presuppositions

   • the shared background assumptions that are taken for granted when we communicate.

4. Speech Acts

   • Content and force in speech acts
     • Truth is vital for the speech acts known as statements, but can be peripheral to other speech acts.
       • Expressives
         • are used to express a psychological state about a presupposed proposition.
       • Directives
         • convey a proposition about a future act of the addressee that the speaker desires, and the point is to try to get the addressee to commit to making the proposition true.
   • There are straightforward, almost non-technical ways of describing people’s linguistic interactions
   • Orders are the speech acts carried by utterances based on imperative sentences