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Pragmatics

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In linguistics and semiotics, pragmatics is concerned with bridging the explanatory gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. The study of how context influences the interpretation is then crucial. In this setting, context refers to any factor — linguistic, objective, or subjective — that affects the actual interpretation of signs and expressions.

Pragmatics is interested predominantly in utterances, usually in the context of conversations.

A distinction is made in pragmatics between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of the sentence, while the speaker meaning is the piece of information (or proposition) that the speaker is trying to convey.

The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.

An utterance describing pragmatic function is called metapragmatic.

Origins

Pragmatics reacted to the structuralist linguistics outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure. In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has a structure to be analyzed, made up of parts that can be defined in relation to others. It engages in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue.

While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics, pragmatics carries on its tradition. Also influential were Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf.

Non-referential uses of language

Roman Jakobson identified six functions of language, only one of which is the traditional system of reference.

  • referential: conveys information about some real phenomenon (corresponds to Austin's illocutionary act)
  • expressive: describes feelings of the speaker
  • conative: attempts to elicit some behavior from the addressee (corresponds to Austin's perlocutionary act)
  • phatic: builds a relationship between both parties in a conversation
  • metalingual: self-references
  • poetic: focuses on the text independent of reference (sort of corresponds to Austin's locutionary act)

Émile Benveniste discussed pronouns "I" and "you," arguing them to be fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject.

Michael Silverstein has argued that the "non-referential index" communicates meaning without being explicitly attached to semantic content.

According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs and interpretations, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas that a word refers to, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines the relationship between signs.

Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied meaning of the given idea.

Jaques Derrida once remarked that some of linguistic pragmatics aligned with the program he outlined in Of Grammatology.

Significant works

Topics in pragmatics


Bibliography

  • Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford University Press.
  • Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. (1978) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
  • Carston, Robyn (2002) Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Clark, Herbert H. (1996) "Using Language". Cambridge University Press.
  • Cole, Peter, ed.. (1978) Pragmatics. (Syntax and Semantics, 9). New York: Academic Press.
  • Dijk, Teun A. van. (1977) Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman.
  • Grice, H. Paul. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
  • Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
  • Levinson, Stephen C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press.
  • Mey, Jacob L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).
  • Potts, Christopher. (2005) The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Thomas, Jenny (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Longman.
  • Verschueren, Jef. (1999) Understanding Pragmatics. London, New York: Arnold Publishers.
  • Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, eds. (1995) Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York: Norton.
  • Wierzbicka, Anna (1991) Cross-cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Yule, George (1996) Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study). Oxford University Press.

See also

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