The Pragmatics of English Communication

The pragmatics of English
communication
Prof. Marcella Bertuccelli
WHAT IS MEANING?
• PHONOLOGY: phonemes
• MORPHOLOGY: morphemes
• SYNTAX: sentence structures
• SEMANTICS: meanings
• PRAGMATICS: meanings
IS MEANING ONE OBJECT?
MEANING
SEMANTICS PRAGMATICS
(linguistic meaning) (meaning in context)
L. CARROLL,
Through the looking glass
- There is glory for you!-

- I don’t know what YOU MEAN by “glory”- Alice said.
- Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. -Of course you don’t, till I
tell you. I MEANT there is a nice knockdown argument for you”.
- But “glory” doesn’t MEAN a nice knockdown argument- Alice
objected.
- When I use a word - Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone -
it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.
- The question is - said Alice- whether you can make words mean so
many different things”.
- The question is – said Humpty Dumpty- which is to be master, that’s
all.!
Pragmatic meaning
• When a diplomat says “yes” he means “perhaps”
• When a diplomat says “perhaps” he means “no”
• When a diplomat says “no” he is not a diplomat.
• When a lady says “no” she means “perhaps”

• When a lady says “perhaps” she means “yes”
• When a lady says “yes” she is not a lady (Voltaire)
Speaker meaning,
sentence meaning, word meaning
• SPEAKER MEANING: what a speaker
means (i.e. intends to convey) when he
uses a piece of a language
• SENTENCE MEANING: what a sentence
means given the rules of the language
concerned
• WORD MEANING: what a word means in
the lexis of a language
The Nature of Linguistic Meaning
How many types of Meaning?
• 1. Descriptive ( referential or conceptual)
meaning
• 2. Non descriptive meaning

• 2a Social Meaning
• 2b Expressive (affective or evaluative)
meaning
The nature of
Pragmatic meaning
• What does “dog” mean?
• A) in language ( semantics): animal, four legs, barks, friend of
man…
• B) in a specific context ( pragmatics): (neuter)You won, you
lucky dog ! You stole my wallet, you dog!( contemptible person)
• Mary: Shall we go to the cinema?

• John: I feel a bit tired
What does John mean by his words?
• Only pragmatic meaning: He means that he does not wish to go
to the cinema
PRAGMATICS
• Definitions of PRAGMATICS
• Levinson 1983 : 14 definitions
• Pragmatics as an additional level of

language analysis (componential view)
• pragmatics as a perspective (Verschueren)
COMPONENTIAL VIEW OF
PRAGMATICS?
Pragmatics as a perspective
• Difficulties with the componential view of pragmatics:
• Sounds do not have meanings but communicate information
beyond their structure
• Morphemes can have pragmatic functions (morphopragmatics)
• Words have meanings which depend on contexts of use
(Lexical pragmatics)
• Sentences: syntactic structures have informational properties
related to contexts (topic-comment)
• Texts have communicative functions depending on typology
and contextual features
• Consequently: pragmatics pervades ALL LEVELS of linguistic
analysis.
Speaker Listener
E Semantics D M
M 1. Semantic 1. Semantic
t
N E E
E C
C S
a
S O
O S Grammar S
D 2. Grammatical (Morphology and Syntax) 2. Grammatical D A
A
m
I I G
G N
g
N E E
G G
3. Phonological Phonology 3. Phonological
Pr a
Articulatory
Phonetics
Auditory
Phonetics
s
Sending Receiving
ic
message message
Acoustic Phonetics
Pragmatics
• (a) Pragmatics studies the context-dependent

aspects of verbal communication and
comprehension.
• (b) Pragmatics studies the role of non-
linguistic factors in verbal communication
and comprehension.
Semantics and pragmatics
• Two distinct but complementary disciplines
• Semantics is concerned with the cognitive meaning of
sentences, the meaning that is context-free;
• Pragmatics is concerned with the meaning of speech
acts, the meaning that is context-dependent.
• Semantics reveals the sentence meaning of dyadic
relation, answers the question “what does x mean?”;
while pragmatics reveals the speaker’s meaning of
triadic relation, answers the question “what do you
mean by x?”
• What do you mean by “a fool”?
History of pragmatics
• SEMIOTICS
• PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
• SOCIOLOGY
• ANTHROPOLOGY
• LINGUISTICS……
Charles Morris (1938): Syntactics
Semantics
Pragmatics
SEMIOTICS
Charles Morris (1903 – 1979)
1938 “Foundations of the theory of signs”
Concerned with the study of the science of signs, which he
called semiotic;
Distinguished 3 branches of semiotics: syntactics (or
syntax), which studies the formal relation among
different signs; semantics, the study of the relation
between the signs and the objects they denote; and
pragmatics, the study of the relation of signs to their
interpreters, i.e. people
Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Wien 1889 – Cambridge 1951)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Meaning = use(words are not defined by reference to the objects they
designate, nor by the mental representations one might associate with them,
but by how they are used: the meaning of the word presupposes our ability to
use it ) Ex. “game” impossible to define but we do use the word successfully
(card games, betting games, sports, "war games “…)
Language = an activity (to see how language works, we have to see how it
functions in a specific social situation)
Language games (Sprachspiele) – things you do with language, uses

of language. What a sentence means depends on its use; language is
social, not mental activity
John L. Austin (1911- Oxford1960)
• How To Do Things with

Words (1962)
• Using language is doing things (= speech
acts)
• Constative utterances
• Performative utterances
locutionary act:
there‘s a bull in this field – „just saying it“
illocutionary act:
the „force“ of an utterance
there‘s a bull in this field – warning
perlocutionary act:
the „effect“ of an utterance

there‘s a bull in this field – hearer is frightened,
hearer avoids going into the field
John Searle (*1932)
Speech Acts (1969)
Expression and Meaning (1979)
Assertives: (stating, suggesting, boasting, predicting, guessing …)
Directives: (ordering, demanding, requesting, inviting, permitting …)
Commissives: (promising, offering, refusing, threatening …)
Expressives: (thanking, congratulating, pardoning, blaming, praising …)
Declaratives: (naming, baptizing, declaring open, appointing …)

H.P. GRICE (1913-1988)
• Meaning (1957)
• The logic of conversation (1967/1975)
• William James lectures (1967)
• Studies in the way of Words (1989)
• SPEAKER MEANING
• COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE (conversational maxims)
• IMPLICATURES
LINGUISTICS
• 1960’s Chomskian linguistics (competence-
performance)
• “In the Chomskyan linguistic tradition, well-
formedness plays the role of the decision-maker in
questions of linguistic ‘belonging’: a language consists
of a set of well-formed sentences, and it is these that
‘belong’ in the language; no others do.”(Mey,
2001:25).
• Pragmatics: wastebasket of linguistics (Bar-Hillel, Y.
(1971): Out of the pragmatic wastebasket. Linguistic
Inquiry, 2, pp. 401-407. )
1983 – 2 seminal books
• 1. Leech’s Principles of Pragmatics
• 2. Levinson’s Pragmatics
• Followed by many textbooks, handbooks,

encyclopedias
Topics in pragmatic research
• Deixis and reference

• Speech acts
• Presupposition
• Implicatures
• Conversation analysis
• Text/discourse analysis
OUR FOCUS
• COGNITIVE PRAGMATICS
• Gricean and post-gricean approaches to
meaning

The Pragmatics of English Communication

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Pragmatics of English Communication

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Pragmatics of English Communication

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The pragmatics of English

• SYNTAX: sentence structures

- There is glory for you!-

• When a lady says “no” she means “perhaps”

• 2. Non descriptive meaning

• Mary: Shall we go to the cinema?

• Levinson 1983 : 14 definitions

• Pragmatics as an additional level of

• (a) Pragmatics studies the context-dependent

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Language games (Sprachspiele) – things you do with language, uses

• How To Do Things with

the „effect“ of an utterance

Assertives: (stating, suggesting, boasting, predicting, guessing …)

Directives: (ordering, demanding, requesting, inviting, permitting …)

Commissives: (promising, offering, refusing, threatening …)

Expressives: (thanking, congratulating, pardoning, blaming, praising …)

Declaratives: (naming, baptizing, declaring open, appointing …)

• 1. Leech’s Principles of Pragmatics

• Followed by many textbooks, handbooks,

• Deixis and reference

You might also like