Unit 2: The semantics-pragmatics interface

2.1. Deixis
• Types of deixis
2.2. Presupposition
 Introduction
• What is the common aspect that links
pragmatics and semantics?
MEANING
• However, their focus is different

Meaning
Signifier

Signified Context
 Meaning
• Semantics – meaning is derived from linguistic
knowledge (i.e. from the words themselves)
– Conventional, lexical meaning (as found in
dictionaries)
– Based on truth-conditions (literal meaning, logical
forms)
• Pragmatics – meaning is derived from linguistic
knowledge but also other aspects such as context
(in its wider sense)
– Based on non-truth-functional conditions
(implicature)
• She got lucky
• Imagine the following conversation:
A: What’s your mother like?
B: She is a woman and she is married to my
father.
• Why is it so odd?
 How often are we literal?
• A father is trying to get his 3 year old daughter
to stop lifting her dress up and showing her
new underwear to their guests
FATHER: We don’t DO that
DAUGHTER: I KNOW Daddy, you don’t
wear dresses
 Another example
• A 3 year old comes in the front door

MOM: Darling, please, wipe your feet

He removes his shoes and socks and carefully

wipes his feet on the doormat.
 The question is…
• Can we really separate meaning from meaning
in context?
• Most often, the boundary between Semantics
and Pragmatics is blurry but…
• In some cases, this is totally impossible, which
is why there is a clear connection between
both areas
• E.g. indexical expressions (aka deictics)
– I am speaking right now
 In fact…
• Although we can study meaning and language
indendently from its context, we need to look
at pragmatic meanings to really understand
what is going on

A: See you!
B: Ok, when?
And we need to “enrich” the message
• “semantic analysis takes us only part of the
way towards the recovery of utterance
meaning and pragmatic enrichment
completes this process. In other words, the
logical form becomes enriched” (Jaszczolt,
2010: p. 460)
 Examples
• Sorry I’m late. My car broke down.
– (Oh, so she’s got a car…)
• I talked to my husband about it.
– (Oh, so she’s married then)
What does AND “mean” in these utterances?
 She got married and got pregnant
 She got pregnant and got married
 She’s got a boy and a girl
 The kid dropped the glass and it broke
2.1. Deixis
• The term “deixis” comes from the Greek word for
pointing and refers to a particular way in which
certain linguistic expressions (“deictics” or
“indexicals”) are dependent on the context in
which they are produced or interpreted.

• E.g. “I am here now” (will express different

propositions on each occasion of use)
• The phenomenon of deixis has been of considerable
interest to philosophers, linguists and psychologists 
natural languages (face-to-face interaction)

• As people take turns talking, the referents of I, you, here,

there, this, that, etc. systematically switch too –difficulty for
children in language acquisition.

• In simple terms, deixis is organised around a “deictic

centre” (the speaker) and his/her location in space and
time at the time of speaking although the location of the
addressee is also taken into account, forming a two-centred
system.
 Deictic categories
• Personal deixis
• Time deixis
• Spatial deixis
• Discourse deixis
• Social deixis
 Personal deixis
• Traditional grammatical category of person, reflected in pronouns and verb
agreement, involves the most basic deictic notions.
1st person encodes the participation of the speaker and temporal and spatial deixis
are organised primarily around the location of the speaker/addressee at the time of
speaking.
– Speaker inclusion (1st person)
– Addressee inclusion (2nd person)

• As far as is known all languages have 1st and 2nd person pronouns but not all have
3rd person pronouns (e.g. Macedonian)
• Other languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural
pronouns – those that do and do not include their audience.
• For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number
(singular, dual, trial, plural) and clusivity, such as mitripela ("they two and I") and
yumitripela ("you two and I").
 Examples
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
(Oscar Wilde)

"From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with
laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
(Groucho Marx)

"I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a
department store, and he asked for my autograph."
(Shirley Temple)

"I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine."
(Rita Rudner)
 Time deixis

• “now”, “tomorrow”, “ten years ago”, “this week”, “this

November”, etc. take the speaker’s location in time at the
time of the utterance.

• However, the most pervasive aspect of temporal deixis is

“tense”.

• The grammatical categories (tenses) are a mixture of deictic

time distinctions and aspect, often hard to distinguish.

• Some languages (e.g. Chinese or Malay) have no tenses as

such.
 Spatial deixis

• Deictic adverbs like “here” (including speaker) and “there”

(remote from the speaker) are the most direct examples of
spatial deixis.

• Other spatial deictics are “this” and “that” (some languages

have a three-way distinction, e.g. Latin or Spanish or even a
seven-way, e.g. Malagasy.

• Spatial deixis is also frequently encoded in verbal roots or

affixes, with a typical basic distinction between “motion
towards speaker” (e.g. come) and “motion away from
speaker” (e.g. go)
 Discourse deixis

• In a spoken or written discourse, it is frequent to

refer to earlier or forthcoming segments of the
discourse (e.g. “in the previous/next paragraph”)

• Since a discourse unfolds in time, it is natural to

use temporal deictic terms (“next”) although
spatial terms are also frequent (“in this chapter”)
 Social deixis

• This includes “honorifics”, frequent in most languages of the world

• Honorifics are not exactly personal deictics since they involve a

separate dimension: they encode the speaker’s social relationship
to another person (usually the addressee but not always), on a
dimension of rank.

• There are two main kinds of honorifics:

– Referent honorifics: where the honoured party is referred to: “usted”,
“vous”, “lei”, “Mr.” “Mrs.”, etc.
– Non-referent honorifics: we can signal respect without referring to the
addressee by choosing between different lexical and grammatical
options. E.g. Japanese (-san, -chun, -kan, etc.), Korean or Javanese.
 Practice:
Identify and classify the deictics
• You'll have to bring that back tomorrow,
because they aren't here now.

• -Where are you going now?

–Over there.

• This is intolerable, Mister Smith.

 Deixis and Reference
• The act of using language to refer to entities in
the context is known as reference: an act in which
the speaker uses linguistic forms to enable the
hearer to identify something.

• These linguistic forms are known as referring

expressions and enable the hearer to identify the
entity being referred to, which is in turn known as
the referent.

• E.g. “I went with Francesca and David”

• Deixis and reference are very closely related.
Apart from deictics, there are other types of
words and phrases that can be referring
expressions:
– Proper names (e.g. Aristotle, Paris): these name
persons, institutions and objects whose reference is
clear as opposed to common nouns (e.g. a
philosopher, a city).
– Singular definite terms (e.g. the woman standing by
the table)
• We will see reference in more detail in Unit 6
2.2. Presupposition
 Entailment
• A sentence A entails B (A ||- B) if whenever A is true,
then B must also be true.
• Entailment is a semantic relation: it holds no matter
what the facts of the world happen to be (it holds in all
possible worlds).

Examples

a. Mary broke the window ||- The window broke

b. Sue and Fred went to the party ||- Sue went to the
party
 What is presupposition?

• Because of the principles of communicative economy

and clarity, when we talk much is unsaid or taken for
granted. For example:
• “All John’s children are wise” presupposes that
– “John has children”
– “John has more than one child”

• Intuitively and pre-theoretically, presuppositions could

be therefore defined as “background assumptions”
Presupposition can be informally defined as an inference or
proposition whose truth is taken for granted in the
utterance of a sentence. […] This background assumption
will remain in force when the sentence that contains it is
negated. Presupposition is usually generated by the use of
particular lexical items and/or linguistic constructions (i.e.
presupposition triggers)
(Huang, 2007: 65) (my emphasis)
 Properties of presuppositions
• As opposed to entailment, presuppositions
have these characteristics:
• They remain constant under negation
(entailments don’t)
E.g. “My car has not broken down”
=> I have a car
E.g. “John’s daughter is not really naughty”
=> John has a daughter
 Remember these examples of
entailment?
Mary broke the window ||- The window broke
Mary didn’t break the window ||- The window
broke
Sue and Fred went to the party ||- Sue went to
the party
Sue and Fred didn’t go to the party ||- Sue went
to the party
 More properties of presuppositions
• Defeasibility or cancellability: Presuppositions (unlike
semantic entailments) are cancellable, e.g., if they are
inconsistent with background knowledge
– Sue cried before she finished her thesis.
→ Sue finished her thesis.
– Sue died before she finished her thesis
≠ Sue finished her thesis.

• In our background knowledge (cultural knowledge), we

know that people do not do things after they die. The
presupposition is therefore abandoned in this co-text.
 Presupposition triggers
• Presuppositions seem to be tied to particular
words –or aspects of surface structure. These
linguistic items that generate presuppositions are
called presupposition-triggers (Levinson, 1983:
179)

• Levinson (1983: 181-185) lists 31 presupposition-

triggers, from factive verbs (e.g. know, regret,
realise, etc) to change-of-state verbs (e.g. stop,
arrive), cleft sentences, iteratives (e.g. again) etc.
 Examples
John realised / didn’t realise that he was in debt.
→John was in debt.
→ There is a referent for John

Paul stopped / didn’t stop beating his wife.

→ Paul had been beating his wife.
→ There are referents for Paul and a female partner.
→ Paul is married

It was / wasn’t Henry that kissed Rosie

→ Someone kissed Rosie.
→ There are referents for Henry and Rosie

The boy came / didn’t come again

→ The boy had come before.
→ There is a referent for the boy
 The projection problem
• It is related to the behaviour of presuppositions in
complex sentences, where they also disappear.
• Compare (a) and (b):
– John didn’t cheat again.
→ John had cheated before.
– John didn’t cheat again if indeed he ever did.
≠ John had cheated before.
• “To sum up: semantic theories of presupposition are
not viable because Semantics is concerned with
invariant stable meanings and presuppositions are not
invariant or stable.” (Levinson, 1983: 204)
 Why do we use presuppositions?
• Presuppositions are implications that are often
felt to be in the background — to be assumed by
the speaker to be already known to the
addressee (we also talk about “presupposition
accommodation” or “pragmatic enrichment”)
E.g. “My car has broken down”
=> I have a car
E.g. “John’s daughter is really naughty”
=> John has a daughter
 It has long since been observed that presuppositions may have
informative uses (Karttunnen 1974, Stalnaker 1974).

In other words, when an utterance contains a presupposition

that still may not be included among the beliefs shared by the
interlocutors. In particular, it may be new information for the
listener, who will "accommodate" the presupposition by adding
it to the shared background beliefs (Lewis 1979)
e.g. A: Are you going to lunch?
B: No, I’ve got to pick up my sister.

B presupposes that s/he has a sister, this information may be shared by both interlocutors
(mutual knowledge) or not, in this case, A would accommodate it as part of his background
knowledge.
 More examples
• e.g. “We regret that children cannot accompany
their parents to the commencement exercises.”
(Gauker, 1998)

→The point is to inform parents that children

cannot come.
→Parents have to accommodate this new piece of
information into their background knowledge.
→By putting it that way, the speaker acknowledges
that this news might be disappointing to some
interlocutors.
• Such informative uses of presuppositions
are also frequent with persuasive purposes
(e.g. in the press, in advertisements,
political speeches, etc.)

• The manipulation by the speaker/writer of

these linguistic devices has both textual
and pragmatic relevance. It is more
difficult to question something that is
communicated only implicitly (via
presuppositions) than openly.
 Examples
• e.g. Political discourse and the press
“The moral and civil unity of the nation is also rooted in
and held fast by, religious life and belonging to the
Catholic Church” (Romano Prodi, 9/9/97)
=> “Romano Prodi basically said that we are united
because we are Catholics.” (La Stampa, 9/9/97)

• e.g. Advertising
“Carlsberg, possibly the best beer in the world”
“L’Oreal, because you are worth it”
 To conclude…
Presuppositions are “the result of complex
interactions between semantics and
pragmatics.” (Levinson, 1983: 225)