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Lecture 7
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics which originally examined the problem of how listeners uncover speaker’s intentions. It is sometimes defined as the study of “speaker meaning”, as opposed to linguistic meaning.
It deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be predicted from linguistic knowledge alone. In narrow sense it deals with how listeners arrive at the intended meaning of speakers. In its broad sense, it deals with the general principles followed by human beings when they communicate with one another. Pragmatics overlaps with discourse analysis, which deals with the various devices used by speakers and writers when they knit single sentences together into a coherent and cohesive whole.
The term usually attributed to the British philosopher Charles Morris (1937 – 1971), who distinguished between syntax (the relations of signs to one another), semantics (the relations of signs to objects), and pragmatics (the relations of signs to interpretations). In a modern, communication-oriented terminology, we prefer to talk about “messages” and “language users”. In contrast to traditional linguistics, which first and foremost concentrates on the elements and structures (such as sounds and sentences) that the language users produce, pragmatics focuses on the language using humans.
This branch of linguistics is interested in the process of producing language and in its producers, not just in the end-product, language. The proper domain of pragmatics would be what N. Chomsky called performance, i. e. the way the individual goes about the language. This concrete linguistic practice would be distinguished from an abstract competence, understood as user’s knowledge of the language and its rules.
The facts with which pragmatics deals are of various sorts, including:
Different theorists have focused on different properties of utterances. There exists a distinction between ‘near-side pragmatics’ and ‘far-side pragmatics.’ The utterances philosophers usually take as paradigmatic are assertive uses of declarative sentences, where the speaker says something. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the nature of certain facts that are relevant to determining what is said. Far-side pragmatics is focused on what happens beyond saying: what speech acts are performed in or by saying what is said, or what implicatures are generated by saying what is said.
Classical pragmatics
The traditions in pragmatics were inaugurated by the J.L. Austin and H.P. Grice. Both of these philosophers were interested in the area of pragmatics which can be called ‘beyond saying’: a fairly clear distinction could be made between what is said, the output of the realm of semantics, and what is conveyed or accomplished in particular linguistic and social context in or by saying something, the realm of pragmatics. What is said is sort of a boundary; semantics is on the near side, and those parts of pragmatics that were the focus of the classic period are on the far side.
The British philosopher John Langshaw Austin (b. 1911–d. 1960) was intrigued by the way that we can use words to do different things. Whether one asserts or merely suggests, promises or merely indicates an intention, persuades or merely argues, depends not only on the literal meaning of one's words, but what one intends to do with them, and the institutional and social setting in which the linguistic activity occurs.
John Austin is the person who is usually credited with generating interest in what has since come to be known as pragmatics and speech act theory. His book titled “How to do things with words” was published in 1962. His first step was to show that some utterance are not statements but actions. He reached this conclusion through an analysis of what he termed “performative verbs”. Let us consider the following sentences:
I pronounce you man and wife.
I declare war on France.
I name this ship The Albatros.
I bet you 5 dollars it will rain.
I apologize.
The peculiar thing about these sentences, according to J. Austin, is that they are not used to say or describe things, but rather actively to do things. That is why J. Austin termed them as performatives and contrasted them to statements (he called them constatives). Thus by pronouncing a performative utterance the speaker is performing an action. The performative utterance can really change things under certain circumstances. J. Austin specified the circumstances required for the success as felicity conditions. The utterances will have no effect unless a number of obvious conditions are met. If the felicity conditions are not satisfied, then the resulting utterance is not really right or wrong: it is merely infelicitous, and it has no effect (or at least not the intended effect). Performatives may be explicit and implicit:
I promise I will come tomorrow. – I will come tomorrow.
I swear I love you. – I love you.
J. Austin identified three distinct levels of action beyond the act of utterance itself. He distinguishes:
1) the act of saying smth.
2) what one does in saying it
3) what one does by saying it.
Thus the action performed by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts:
In other terms it can be explained as a formal meaning of the utterance without reference to its function within discourse.
The window is open may be a request (It is awfully cold here – would you mind shutting the window?) or a suggestion (A: I can’t get out of the room – the door is stuck fast. B: The window is open – why you do not climb out?) or smth. else.
Today the term speech act is often used to denote specifically an illocutionary act (promising, threatening, informing, persuading, defending, blaming, etc.), and the intended effect of a speech act is illocutionary force.
The window is open – and you close a window (non-verbal).
Speech act theory
It is a method by which philosophers and linguists have tried to classify the ways in which humans use language, in this case by treating it as a parallel to other actions which humans perform. Proponents of speech act theory try to list the various possible speech acts which speaker might attempt to perform – statements, requests, queries, commands, promises, placing of bets, and so on. The list vary from writer to writer, though the overall core tends to be similar.
Direct and indirect speech acts can be singled out.
Direct speech act is an act which is expressed overtly by the most obvious linguistic means.
e.g. Go to bed !
Indirect speech act possesses the syntactic structure more usually associated with another act.
e.g. Isn’t it passed your bedtime?
You should have been in bed long ago.
To know which speech act is intended one should specify conditions – circumstances under which it would be appropriate to interpret something as a particular type of speech act.
If we could fully identify felicity conditions for each type of speech act, then we would have moved some way towards understanding how humans use language.
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has provided a further approach to how people understand one another. The original problem was one of finding out how computers could be made to cope with inexplicit and superficially irrelevant conversations. Knowledge might be stored in the form of stereotypical situations, or frames these memorized frameworks are adapted to fit in with present reality, so they are altered as required.
Austin's student, John R. Searle developed speech act theory as a theory of the constitutive rules for performing illocutionary acts, i.e., the rules that tell what performing (successfully) an illocutionary act (with certain illocutionary force and certain propositional content) consists in. The rules are classified as (i) propositional content rules, which put conditions on the propositional content of some illocutionary acts; (ii) preparatory rules, which tell what the speaker will imply in the performance of the illocutionary acts; (iii) sincerity rules, that tell what psychological state the speaker expresses to be in; and (iv) essential rules, which tell us what the action consists in essentially.
R. Searle proposes a taxonomy of illocutionary acts into five mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes:
Speech act theory adopts a social or institutional view of linguistic meaning.
An American philosopher Paul Grice is sometimes regarded as the “father of pragmatics”. Herbert Paul Grice (b. 1913-d. 1988) emphasized the distinction between what words mean, what the speaker literally says when using them, and what the speaker means or intends to communicate by using those words, which often goes considerably beyond what is said. Grice's so-called theory of conversation starts with a sharp distinction between what someone says and what someone ‘implicates’ by uttering a sentence. What someone says is determined by the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered and contextual processes of disambiguation and reference fixing; what she implicates is associated with the existence to some rational principles and maxims governing conversation. What is said has been widely identified with the literal content of the utterance; what is implicated, the implicature, with the non-literal, what it is (intentionally) communicated, but not said, by the speaker. The study of such conversational implicatures is the core of Grice's influential theory.
He emphasized that human beings communicate efficiently because they by nature helpful to one another. He attempted to specify the principles which underline this cooperative behaviour, and proposed 4 “maxims” or rules of conversation which cannot jointly be summarized as a general principle: “Be cooperative”.
1. Maxim of Quantity
Give the right amount of information when you talk
2. Maxim of Quality
Be truthful.
3. Maxim of relevance
Be relevant.
4. Maxim of manner
Be clear and orderly.
At this outline level, the cooperative principle seems like commonsense. The main problem with Gricean maxims is that they are fairly vague, and the conversational implicatures or conclusions which can be drawn are wide and numerous.
Recently, pragmatics has expended into a wide and somewhat vague topic which includes anything relating to the way in which people communicate that cannot be captured by conventional linguistic analysis. Within pragmatics, discourse analysis (the study of language in discourse) has become a major focus of attention.