Pragmatics and Text Analysis Chapter 6

 Pragmatics is the study of language usage from a functional perspective and is concerned with the principles that account for how meaning is communicated by the speaker (writer) and interpreted by the listener (reader) in a certain context. Introduction

 Different from semantics, pragmatics studies the contextual meaning. This distinction can be seen in the following example:  Mike: What happened to that bowl of cream?  Annie: Cats drink cream. Introduction

 Semantically, Annie's reply can be paraphrased as "Domestic felines consume the liquid fat of milk," but pragmatically, Annie probably implies "That bowl of cream was probably eaten by our cat."  In other words, semantics focuses on the meaning that comes from linguistic knowledge, while pragmatics concentrates on those aspects of meaning that cannot be predicted by linguistic knowledge alone and takes into account our knowledge about the physical and social world. Introduction

 Pragmatics also differs from syntax in that pragmatics is concerned with the appropriateness of naturally occurring utterances.  For example, the four utterances in the following dialogue are all syntactically incomplete, but pragmatically they are all "appropriate" in the particular context. Introduction

 Jane: Coffee?  Steve: Sure.  Jane: White?  Steve: White. Introduction

 Like pragmatics, text analysis is also concerned with language used in particular contexts. It is the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected spoken or written texts.  In other words, it is the study of linguistic units larger than sentences or clauses. Introduction

 As pointed out by the British philosopher Austin in 1962, sentences are not always uttered just to say things, but rather, they are used to do things.  Based on this assumption, Austin advanced the Speech Act Theory, which is now generally viewed as one of the basic theories of pragmatics.  All linguistic activities are related to speech acts. Therefore, to speak a language is to perform a set of speech acts, such as statement, command, inquiry and commitment. Speech Act Theory

 When a sentence is uttered, the speaker is performing three kinds of speech acts simultaneously: locutionary act ( the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning), illocutionary act ( its real, intended meaning), and perlocutionary act ( actual effect, whether intended or not).  Among these kinds of speech acts, pragmatists are most interested in illocutionary act. This is because illocutionary act conforms to the speaker's intention and is thus the focus for the study of verbal communication.

 A locutionary act may have different illocutionary forces in different contexts. In other words, an utterance may be interpreted as a direct or indirect speech act.  "Don't you think it's too stuffy in here?"  What is the speaker saying?

 (a) literally as an inquiry for the addressee's opinion of the air condition in the place where the sentence is uttered,  (b) as an indirect statement describing the stuffy atmosphere in the place where the utterance occurs, and  (c) as an indirect request for the addressee to open the window or to turn on the air-conditioner.

 Similarly, an illocutionary act can be performed by different locutionary acts. For example, the illocutionary act of asking the addressee to open the door may take, among many others, the following three different locutionary acts:  a. Command: Open the door please.  b. Request: Would you please open the door?  c. Statement: The doorbell is ringing.

 An utterance may allow two or more interpretations in some situations: the literal meaning and the non- literal meaning.  In order to account for such a linguistic phenomenon, Grice in 1967 found that tacit agreement exists between the speaker and the hearer in all linguistic communicative activities. They follow a set of principles in order to achieve particular communicative goals. Thus, Grice proposed the term cooperative principle and its maxims. The Cooperative Principle

 The maxim of Quality  try to make your contribution one that is true, especially: (i) do not say what you believe to be false and (ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.  The maxim of Quantity  (i) make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange, and (ii) do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

 The maxim of Relevance  make your contribution relevant.  The maxim of Manner  Be perspicuous, and specifically: (i) Avoid obscurity of expression; (ii) Avoid ambiguity; (iii) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) and (iv) Be orderly.

 But in real communication, the participants often flout the cooperative principle and its maxims.  In this example, B flouts the quantity maxim by not making his or her contribution as informative as is required:  A: When are you going to the airport?  B: Sometime this morning.  Here the speaker fails to provide the precise time of his or her going to the airport. The particularized conversational implicature, among some others, is that the speaker does not know the precise time of his or her departure.

 A: The hostess is an awful bore, don't you think?  B: The roses are lovely, aren't they?  A: Let's get the kids something.  B: Okay, but I veto I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M.

 Presupposition can be defined in linguistics as any kind of background assumption against which an expression or utterance makes sense or is rational.  Presuppositions refer to the conditions that must be met in order for the intended meaning of a sentence to be regarded as acceptable.  Their team won this year’s African finals.  Their team played in the African finals. presupposition

 A text is not a collection of lexical items and/or sentences in random. Instead, it must be semantically unified. In other words, it must have texture, i.e. the property that distinguishes a text from a non-text. The unity of a text can be achieved by a number of semantic and lexicogrammatical means, among which the most important is cohesion.cohesion Cohesion

 Cohesive ties may be either grammatical devices such as reference, ellipsis and substitution, and conjunction, or lexical devices such as general words, reiteration and collocation. We can therefore refer to them respectively as grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.

 Reference refers to the semantic relation in which a word or words are used to enable the addressee to identify someone or something. The word or words used for reference are called the reference item. The person(s) or thing(s) identified by the reference item are called the referent. Reference is a specific nature of information that is signaled for retrieval. The information to be retrieved is the referential meaning.  John has moved to a new house. He had it built last year. Reference

 Substitution refers to the replacement of one item by another and ellipsis the omission of an item. Unlike reference, which is a relation between meanings, substitution and ellipsis are a relation between linguistic items. Substitution and ellipsis are two closely related processes.  A: I ate two eggs and a cup of milk for my breakfast.  B: I ate the same. Substitution and Ellipsis

 Conjunction in grammar refers to a word or expression like and, but, or that connects words, phrases, clauses and/or sentences. As one of the major grammatical cohesive ties, however, this term is used to focus on the inter-clausal and inter-sentential levels. In other words, we concentrate on how the conjunctive expressions contribute to the cohesion of a text. so  It's a good idea for parents to monitor the amount as well as the kind of television their preschool child watches. Controlling viewing is easier to do during the preschool years than during the school years, so you should initiate a pattern of restricted television watching now. Conjunction

 Lexical cohesion refers to the cohesive effect achieved by the choice of lexical items. By choosing items that are related in some way to those that have gone before, the speaker or writer creates cohesion in the text.  English lexical cohesive ties fall into two categories: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration can take the following four forms: repetition, synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy (a word whose semantic filed is included within that of another word e.g. red is a hyponym of colour) and meronymy ( A word that denotes a constituent part).antonymymeronymy  They hide out on the illegal journey in the smugglers, cars, trucks and vans, sometimes stowing away in cardboxes or disappearing behind the loads of watermelons and sacks of potatoes. Lexical Cohesion

 Theme can be defined as the element which serves as the point of departure of the message conveyed by the clause. It is the ground from which the clause is taking off. In English, this element always takes the first position of a clause. The remaining part of the message, the part in which the Theme is developed, is called the Rheme. Theme and Rheme My parents gave mea new bicycle ThemeRheme

 An information unit usually consists of two components. The part which the speaker invites the addressee to attend to as new, or unexpected, or important is the New. The part which the speaker presents as being already known to the addressee is the Given. In the tone structure, the New is always signaled by the tonic accent.  The duke gave my aunt that teapot. Given + New

 End of lecture  Thank you for your attention