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Lecture 12 - Pragmatics I

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19 views30 pages

Lecture 12 - Pragmatics I

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tschekwann
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Pragmatics I

Warming-up

• Suppose you happen to drive across a sign like this, what is the first
interpretation that comes up in your mind?
• Is the sign advertising a place where you can park your “heated attendant”?
• Does the sign indicate a place where parking will be carried out by attendants
• We would normally understand that we can park a car in this place, that
it’s a heated area, and that there will be an attendant to look after the car.

• How do we decide that the sign means this when the sign doesn’t even
have the word car on it?
• By the context in which they occur, and some pre-existing knowledge
of what would be a likely message as we work toward a reasonable
interpretation of what the producer of the sign intended it to convey.
• We are actively involved in creating an interpretation of what we read
and hear.
Pragmatics
• Pragmatics is the study of language in use.
• Speakers (or writers) depend on a lot of shared assumptions and
expectations when they try to communicate.
• These are called context.

• The investigation of those assumptions and expectations provides us


with some insights into how we understand more than just the
linguistic content of utterances.
Context
• There are different kinds of context.
• The physical context: the environment “out there” where we
encounter words and phrases
e.g. the word BANK on a wall of a building is understood as a
financial institution.
• The linguistic context (also known as co-text): the co-text of a word
is the set of other words used in the same phrase or sentence.
e.g. in a phrase like the steep/overgrown bank, bank is understood as
“the side of a river”
Deixis
• There are some very common words in our language that can’t be
interpreted at all if we don’t know the context.
• Expressions as such are technically known as deictic (/daɪktɪk/)
expressions, from the Greek word deixis, which means “pointing” via
language.

• We use deixis to point to people (him, them, those things), places


(here, there, after this) and times (now, then, next week).
• Person deixis: me, you, him, her, us, them, that woman, those idiots

• Spatial deixis: here, there, beside you, near that, above your head

• Temporal deixis: now, then, last week, later, tomorrow, yesterday


Reference
• Words themselves don’t refer to anything. People refer.
• Reference: an act by which a speaker (or writer) uses language to
enable a listener (or reader) to identify something.

• To perform an act of reference, we can use


proper nouns (Chomsky, Jennifer, Whiskas)
other nouns in phrases (a writer, my friend, the cat)
pronouns (he, she, it)
• For each word or phrase, there is a “range of reference.”

• In the late 1960s, two elderly American tourists who had been touring
Scotland reported that, in their travels, they had come to a Scottish
town in which there was a great ruined cathedral. As they stood in the
ruins, they saw a small boy and they asked him when the cathedral had
been so badly damaged. He replied in the war.

• Their immediate interpretation, in the 1960s, was that he must be


referring to the Second World War which had ended only twenty years
earlier. But when they asked the boy which war he meant, he replied
the war with the English, which, had formally ended in 1745.
Inference
• A successful act of reference depends more on the listener/reader’s
ability to recognize what the speaker/writer means than on the
listener’s “dictionary” knowledge of a word that is used.

• (In a restaurant, one waiter to another)


Where’s the spinach salad sitting?
He’s sitting by the door.
• Jennifer is wearing Calvin Klein.
• Picasso is in the museum.
• We saw Shakespeare in London.
• Mozart was playing in the background.

• The key process here is called inference.


• An inference is additional information used by the listener to create a
connection between what is said and what must be meant.
Anaphora

• We usually make a distinction between how we introduce new


referents and how we refer back to them.

• In this type of referential relationship, the second (or subsequent)


referring expression is an example of anaphora (“referring back”).
• The first mention is called the antecedent.
• So, a boy, a puppy and a small bath are antecedents and The puppy, the
boy, he, it and the bath are anaphoric expressions.

• The connection between antecedents and anaphoric expressions can be


based on inference:
Cataphora
• Cataphora: a pattern which reverses the antecedent–anaphora
relationship by beginning with a pronoun, then later revealing more
specific information.

• This device is more common in stories:


• It suddenly appeared on the path a little ahead of me, staring in my
direction and sniffing the air. An enormous grizzly bear was checking
me out.
Speech acts
• We have not yet considered the fact that we usually know how the
speaker intends us to “take” (or “interpret the function of”) what is
said.
• We use the term speech act to describe such actions.

• Some sentences do not have truth values. They are not propositions.
• “What time is it?”
• “What a day I’ve had!”
• “Good luck on your exam!”
• Propositions are constatives ( 表述句 ): statements that either state or
describe, and thus verifiable (have true-values).
• Sentences above are performatives （施为句） : sentences which are
uttered to perform a certain act and are thus not verifiable.

• One test sometimes used for performatives is inserting the word


“hereby”, which is kind of a way of saying, “by saying this, I do this.”
I hereby pronounce you man and wife.
I hereby apologize.
* I hereby bought a phone.
Felicity conditions
• Rather than being true or false, we can think of performatives as being
felicitous or infelicitous: whether the speaker has met the required
conditions (have the right) to perform the action.

• i.e. if you are not the president of the university, you don’t have the
right to lift the lockdown of the campus.
Speech Act Theory
• Origin: late 1950s, by British philosopher John Austin
• Great development: 1970s-80s, by John Searle
Direct and indirect speech acts
• We use language for “requesting,” “commanding,” “questioning” or
“informing.”

• Can you ride a bicycle?


• Can you pass the salt?

• These are direct speech acts.


• When the intention of the issuer is not clearly expressed, we have
indirect speech acts.

• You left the door open. / It’s cold outside.


• (Please close the door.)

• Do you know where the Ambassador Hotel is?


• (Please show me the way.)
Three aspects to speech acts
• We can conceive of a speech act as consisting of three parts:

• LOCUTION: What the speaker says

• ILLOCUTION: The speaker’s intention

• PERLOCUTION: The resulting effect


• LOCUTION: “May I borrow that pen?”
• ILLOCUTION: Requesting the pen.
• PERLOCUTION: The addressee hands the speaker the pen.

• LOCUTION: What time is it?


• ILLOCUTION: Requesting the time.
• PERLOCUTION: Addressee tells speaker the time.
Searle’s classification of speech acts
• Representatives/assertives ( 阐 述 类 ): stating or describing, saying
what the speaker believes to be true.
• Directives ( 指令类 ): trying to get the hearer to do something.
• Commissives ( 承 诺 类 ): committing the speaker himself to some
future course of action.
• Expressives ( 表 达 类 ): expressing feelings or attitude towards an
existing state.
• Declarations ( 宣告类 ): bringing about immediate changes by saying
something.
Representatives
• Represents the speaker’s beliefs about the state of the world.

• I’m a doctor, not a mechanic.

• That’s no moon, it’s a space station.

• Superman is flying overhead.


Directives
• Direct the addressee (the person being spoken to) to a certain course of
action.

• Please pass the salt.

• Don’t touch my hair.

• Note: Searle treated questions as a subcategory of directives.


Commissives
• Commit the speaker to a course of action, indicate the speaker’s
intentions.

• I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

• I’ll finish it soon.


Expressives
• Convey the speaker’s emotional state.

• My condolences.

• Congratulations!

• Thanks for calling.

• I appreciate the thought.


Declarations
• Declarations bring about a state of affairs by being uttered.

• You’re fired!

• Case dismissed.
Summary of key points
• All utterances can be treated as speech acts, ways of doing things with
language.
• Speech acts consist of locution, illocution, and perlocution.
• Austin identified performatives as a type of speech act which bring
about a change in social reality.
• Performatives have felicity conditions.
• Searle proposed classification of representatives, directives,
commissives, expressives, declarations.

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