Chapter 6: Pragmatics

by Cornelius Puschmann

In human communication, much of what is expressed goes beyond simply conveying information to others. One limitation of semantics is that dimensions of meaning that are outside the content of the linguistic sign are also outside the scope of description. Social and affective meaning are not covered by semantics (which focuses on conventional/conceptual meaning only), but virtually any real-life communicative situation contains signs which are used to express something about the speakers and their social relationships. Pragmatics is concerned with how people use language within a context, in real-life situations. While semantics is concerned with words, phrases and sentences, the unit of analysis in pragmatics is an utterance made in a concrete communicative context. Pragmatics is concerned with how factors such as time, place and the social relationship between speaker and hearer affect the ways in which language is used to perform different functions.

Inference and presupposition

How do we get from message to meaning? We infer the "total meaning" of an utterance based on all the information we have available in the moment we hear it. This includes past experiences, our knowledge about the person we are communicating with, about the situation, about what was previously said, what is deemed culturally appropriate and countless other factors. In everyday communication, speakers have a number of presuppositions about the world-knowledge of hearers. When someone addresses you and says "Did you know that John and Mary split up?" the speaker has the presupposition that you know John and Mary and were aware of the fact that they were previously a couple. Our presuppositions lead us to formulate utterances whose meaning we assume can be inferred by listeners - in other words, that can be deduced by those we communicate with. After all, we all want to be understood.

Pragmatic implicature and entailment

If inference is what listeners do to interpret the meaning of utterances, implicature is the process through which speakers include meaning beyond the literal message in an utterance.

Example:

Bob: Are you coming to the party?

Jane: You know, I'm really busy.

Jane's response pragmatically implicates her intention (that she won't come to the party), which Bob can infer via his past experience from countless other conversations. Pragmatic implicatures are characterized by the fact that usually several alternative interpretations are possible. For example, the dialogue above could also go like this:

Example:

Bob: Are you coming to the party?

Jane: You know, I'm really busy, but I'll come.

With the remark but I'll come Jane effectively cancels the implicature that she won't come to the party.

Entailment is a related but distinct phenomenon and it belongs in the realm of semantics, because it is not affected by the context. If one proposition entails another, this works in the same way as a logical condition of the form IF X THEN Y. For example The president was assassinated entails The president is dead. If the first utterance is true, the second one is automatically also true - one proposition logically follows the other one.

Illocution and perlocution

We use the terms illocution and perlocution to describe the meaning a speaker wants to convey with an utterance and the interpretation that a hearer forms when hearing it.

locution = the content of the utterance itself

illocution = the meaning intended by the speaker

perlocution = the interpretation of the message by the hearer

Mismatches between illocution and perlocution are what we generally describe as misunderstandings.

Speech Acts

When language is used by human beings in real-life situations, there are generally communicative goals associated with every utterance. Speakers express their emotions, ask questions, make requests, commit themselves to actions - they do things with words. The term speech act is used to describe such language actions. A wide range of utterances can qualify as speech acts.

Common Speech Acts

There exist several special syntactic structures (sentence forms) which are typically used to mark some speech acts.

Consequently there are typical association between Sentence Form and Speech Act.

Direct and indirect speech acts

In everyday situations, we often do not directly express what we intend, but instead formulate our utterances in ways which appear more polite to hearers. Compare the utterances Pass me the salt! and Could you pass me the salt? Both are in effect requests, but the first one, phrased as an imperative, has a different connotation than the second, which uses the form of a question. It's obvious to us from experience that Could you pass me the salt is not actually a question about the ability of the addressee to pass the salt, but a prompt to action, and responding to this prompt simply by saying Yes, I could and not acting would not be an appropriate reaction. Could you pass me the salt? has two pragmatic levels. On the surface level it is a question, but underlying this is a request. It therefore qualifies as an indirect speech act, whereas Pass me the salt! is a direct speech act.

Felicity Conditions

Speech acts (whether direct or indirect) can be classified according to their felicity. Speech acts are infelicitous (meaning they don't work as intended) when certain essential requirements are not met. A speech act is infelicitous when the utterance is illogical (I promise to call you last year), when certain requirements aren't met (I will buy you a Porsche, honey) or when the speaker is lying (I really like your new jacket). Note that there is a subtle difference between the three examples. The first one can never 'work' (i.e. be felicitous), because it is inherently illogical. The second one may work or not, depending on whether the speaker can afford to buy her partner a Porsche - something she might not know for sure herself at the time of making the utterance. The third one is a flat-out lie (in this example) - the speaker does not like the listener's new jacket. Felicity conditions are determined by context and especially performative speech acts often require a number of contextual conditions in order to be felicitous.

Context and co-text

Pragmatics enables us not only to describe verbal actions (speech acts) plausibly, but it also allows us to account for language phenomena which exemplify the close connection between linguistic signs and the settings they are used in. The term context can be broken down into two categories for that purpose

• the world around us, the situation in which a piece of discourse happens (context)
• the surrounding discourse - what was previously said (co-text)

The linguistic phenomena of deixis and anaphora serve to illustrate the difference between context and co-text. While deictic expressions point to something in the context, anaphoric expressions stand as replacements for something that has occurred in prior discourse.

Types of deixis

Central types of deixis include

• person e.g. I, you
• place e.g. here, there, near, far, left, right, come, go
• time e.g. now, soon, then, today, yesterday, tomorrow, next, last

Non-central types of deixis are

• social e.g. Sir, Madam, Mr. President, Your Honor
• manner and degree e.g. this (big), so (fat), like this, etc. (accompanied by gestures)
• discourse e.g. this story, as mentioned above, this chapter, therefore

Reading

Kortmann, Bernd (2005). English Linguistics: Essentials. Berlin: Cornelsen Verlag. Ch. 7.

Yule, George (2006). The Study of Language: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 11.

Advanced Reading

Horn, Laurence R. & Ward, Gregory (Eds.). (2004). The Handbook of Pragmatics. Malden: Blackwell.  

Levinson, Stephen C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Verschueren, Jeff (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.  

WWW

SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms: http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsPragmatics.htm

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