1- LANGUAGE IN USE

A Sample of language
A sentence can be analyzed by linguists grammatically. They examine the structural relations in the
sentence. But the speakers do not the sentence as a sample of language and analyze it into its formal
constituents. They just recognize its purpose and see its action. Briefly the speakers treat it as a text.
What is a text?
In order to call a piece of language as a text, it should be produced for a communicative purpose. We
must know the language to interpret a text. But sometimes even if we know the language we don’t
understand what the text means. What the text refer is understood only by looking context. Context
also helps us to infer purpose of the text.
Text and discourse
People produce texts to get message across, to express ideas and beliefs, to explain something, to
get other people to do certain things etc. These complex of communicative purposes can be referred
as the discourse and it motivates its production in the first place. Texts do not contain meaning, but
are used to mediate it across discourses. Discourse term refers to what text producer meant by a
text and what a text means to the receiver.
Spoken and written text
Texts are perceptible traces of the process of mediating a message. In a conversation these traces are
temporary and disappear as soon as they are produced to serve their immediate discourse purpose.
On the other hand written text is not produced in this way. It is recorded and designed one-sidedly in
the act of production by the one of the participants as a completed expression of intended message.
Then text is taken up and interpreted as a separate process. So the convergence between intention
and interpretation is more difficult to achieve. While speaking people do not only use language but
also paralanguage. Also written text may be multimodal. It is also a difficulty.
2- COMMUNICATION
Three kinds of pragmatic meaning
Language is used to express a proposition of some kind. This includes making a connection with
context in such a way as to make an appropriate reference. Therefore one kind of pragmatic meaning
is reference. The person who utters an expression performs a kind of communicative or illocutionary
act. The speaker is not just acting but acting upon the other person. While doing illocutionary act,
she brings about a perlocutionary effect. Our ability to communicate (our communicative
competence) incorporates knowledge of what is encoded in language and knowledge of how these
encodings are used appropriately in a context.
Four Aspects of Communicative competence
Hymes says that to be communicatively competent in a language we must be capable of recognizing
how far an instance of it is possible, feasible, and appropriate and how far it is actually performed or
produced.
3- CONTEXT
Conditions of language use
We only produce language when we have the occasion to use it, and the occasions for use occur in
continuous and changing contexts of our daily life.
Context and Shared Knowledge
Context is an abstract representation of a state of affairs. And the context is the common knowledge
of the two people concerned, which will have been established in their previous conversation
(shared knowledge)
Text-activated context
Context is not what is perceived in a particular situation, but what is conceived as a relevant, and
situational factors may have no relevance at all. Generally where and when a written text is read is
quite different from where and when it was actually produced. The common context of shared
knowledge is essential for communication. Some of this context will be created by means of text
itself.
Context is a psychological construct; a conceptual representation of a state of affairs. In
communication what happens is that a first-person party produces a text which keys the second-
person party into a context assumed to be shared.
SITUATED MEANING AND CULTURAL MODELS
3.1 Meaning
The words have multiple and ever changing meanings created for and adapted to specific contexts of
use. The meaning of words integrally linked to social and cultural groups in ways that transcend
individual minds.
3.3 Situated Meaning
One aspect of word meaning is humans recognize certain patterns in our experience of world.
3.4 Cultural Models
In addition to situated meaning each word is associated with a cultural model. A cultural model is
usually a totally or partially unconscious explanatory theory or storyline connected to a word-bits and
pieces of which are distributed across different people in a social group – that helps to explain why
the word has the different situated meanings and possibilities for the specific social and cultural
groups of people that it does.
THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN INTERPRETATION
2.1 Pragmatics and discourse context
Discourse analyst describes what the speakers and hearers are doing by using terms such as
reference, presupposition, implicature and inference.
2.1.1 Reference
In discourse analysis, reference is treated as an action on the part of speaker/writer. Referring is not
something an expression does; it is something that someone can use an expression to do.
2.1.2 Presupposition
Presuppositions are what are taken by speaker to be common ground of the participants in the
conversation.
2.1.3 Implicatures
Implicature term is defined as what a speaker can imply, suggest or mean, as distinct from what the
speaker literally says. There are conventional implicatures which are defines as the conventional
meaning of the words used. More importantly for discourse analysis, there is conversational
implicature which is derived from general principle of conversation plus a number of maxims which
speakers will normally obey. Conversational maxims:
Quantity: Do not make your contribution more informative than required.
Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false.
Relation: Be relevant.
Manner: Avoid ambiguity, be brief.
2.1.4 Inference
Since the discourse analysis has no direct access to speaker’s intended meaning in producing an
utterance, he often has to rely on a process of inference to arrive at an interpretation for utterances
or for the connections between utterances.
2.2 Context of situation
In the interpretation of sentences context is very important.
2.2.1 Features of Context
Hymes specifies features of context. He abstracts the roles addressor who produces the utterance
and addressee who is the recipient of the utterance. If you know what is being talked about (topic)
your expectations will be further constrained. If you know where the event is situated in place and
time your expectations will be still further limited. Another features of context are channel (how is
contact between participants in the event being maintained), code (what style of language is used),
message-form (what form is intended), event (the nature of communicative event within which a
genre may be embedded), key (which involves evaluation) and purpose (what did the participants
intent should come about as a result of the communicative event.
A more elaborate checklist is provided by the Lewis, specifically to provide an index of those co-
ordinates which hearer would need to have specified in order that he could determine the truth of a
sentence:
Possible-world co-ordinate: states of affairs which might be could be.
Time co-ordinate: to account for tensed sentences and adverbials.
Place co-ordinate: account for sentences like “here it is”
Speaker co-ordinate: to account for sentences which include first person reference.
Audience co-ordinate: to account for sentences including you, yours, yourself etc.
Indicated Object co-ordinate: to account for sentences containing demonstrative phrases like
this, those, etc.
Previous Discourse co-ordinate: to account for sentences including phrases like the latter, the
aforementioned, etc.
Assignment co-ordinate: an infinite series of things.
2.2.2 Co-text
Even in the absence of information about place and time of original utterance, even in the absence of
information about the speaker/writer and his intended recipient, it is often possible to reconstruct at
least some part of the physical context and to arrive at some interpretation of the text. The more co-
text there is, the more secure the interpretation is.
2.3 The expanding context
Deictic expressions must be interpreted with the respect to the content of the utterance in which
they occur and the relevant standard temporal description of an utterance will vary depending on the
knowledge and intention of the analyst in referring to the utterance as located in time. Lyons
distinguishes between the deictic role and social role. In different social contexts, different terms of
address will be found.
2.4. Principles of ‘local interpretation’ and of ‘analogy’
Principle of local interpretation: The hearer does not construct a context any larger than he needs to
arrive at an interpretation.
Analogy: The hearer is constrained in his interpretation by past similar experience.
4- SCHEMATIC CONVENTION
Context and Situation
Context is an abstract representation, a mental construct. It may be abstracted form the immediate
situation of utterance, as when reference is made to something that is directly perceptible by both
parties in an interaction.
Concept of the schema
A schema is a construct of familiar knowledge. Everything new has to be related to what is given. It is
relatively easy to accommodate new information into existing schemata.
Frames of Reference
What happens in text interpretation is that the language triggers off the recall of some familiar state
of affairs, some schema or other, and this sets up an expectation of what is to follow. A Frame of
reference projects the reader’s attention forward to what is to come next.
Frames and Cultural Assumptions
These schemata are cultural, taken-for-granted constructs, and they become so firmly entrenched in
our consciousness that we often find it difficult to envisage any alternative ways of thinking.
Interpersonal Routines
There are ideational constructs as shared conceptions of a third-person reality-reality out there.
There are also schematic constructs of a different kind. These represent not the customary ways in
which we conceive of the third-person world, but customary ways in which we engage with second
persons, the conventions we take for granted that concern how people normally interact with each
other. These we can refer to as interpersonal schemata.
Adjacency Pairs
The two turns make up a minimal routine which has been called an adjacency pair.
Genres
We recognize certain stretches of interaction as speech events of specific kinds, or genres, and we
have names to attach to them: meeting, interview, cross-examination, debate and so on. There will
always be a set of assumptions and expectations about what behavior is appropriate to the genre,
about what is the ‘done thing’ and what is not. Speeches and sermons are example of speech events
which are single-turn genres.
5- CO-TEXTUAL RELATIONS
Information Structure
In terms of textual structure, the first piece of information, which here takes the form of a subject
noun phrase, is said to be the theme, and the rest of the utterance the rheme. It’s clear that
thematization plays a crucial role in organizing information in a text.
Text Linkage
Linking the theme and rheme across parts of text depends on the identification of other more
specific and small-scale connections to establish text continuity.
Anaphora and pro-forms
The pronoun, as its name suggests, acts as a pro-form, that is to say, it stands in for the fuller
expression that precedes it. This kind of text-internal or co-textual connection is known as anaphora.
Cohesion
The identification of connections that are linguistically signaled, like those between a pronoun and a
previous noun phrase, enables us to recognize the cohesion of a text. Cohesive devices serve to link
parts of a text together. Pro-forms can have anaphoric function that work retrospectively in that they
copy features from preceding expressions in text. Pro-forms can also work as cataphoric, devices that
is to say they can precede a more explicit mention.
Cohesion and the Least Effort Principle
The general point here is that communication generally operates on a least effort principle and we
only use as much language as we need to make the required contextual connection. The problem is
always to know how to regulate the degree of co-textual explicitness by the judicial choice of pro-
form.
Cohesion and coherence
Cohesive devices are only aids to understanding and can only be effective to the extent that they
enable readers to construct meaning that makes contextual sense to them, in other words to the
extent that the cohesion in the text enables them to derive a coherent discourse from it.