COMMUNICATION OF MEANING PRAGMATICS COMMUNICATION OF MEANING

Questions Pragmatics tries to answer When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’; When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’; When he says no, he is not a diplomat.— Voltaire (Quoted, in Escandell 1993) These lines reminds us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says. What’s the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterances, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate. Questions Pragmatics tries to answer

Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated (verbally, nonverbally, and with silence) by the speaker and interpreted by the listener. Research is undertaken by considering how the message is organized, what the context of the message is, who the speakers are, and what their relationship is. Research area

Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which we will mean specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language. Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as dealing with the effect of context. Research area

Definitions in philosophy Stalnaker 1970. Syntax studies sentences, semantics studies propositions. Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed.  Kempson 1988Pragmatics provides an account of how sentences are used in utterances to convey information in context. The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (Davies 1995). The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is, roughly, the distinction between the significance conventionally or literally attached to words, and thence to whole sentences, and the further significance that can be worked out, by more general principles, using contextual information. Definitions in philosophy

Definitions in Linguistics The study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication. (Crystal, 1997 Definitions in Linguistics

The term “pragmatics” surfaced in the United States in the late 1930s The term “pragmatics” surfaced in the United States in the late 1930s. In 1938, Charles W. Morris, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, proposed pragmatics as part of a semiotic theory (theory of signs) which studied signs in terms of their relations to (a) objects (semantics), (b) each other (syntactics), and (c) people (pragmatics). Pragmatics: overview

This idea was further explored by the German philosopher Rudolf Carnap who stated that pragmatics encompassed studies in which reference is made to the speaker, to the user of the language (1955); from this perspective communication was not viewed as an abstract language system, but rather as a system that considered the users engaged in the communication. At the same time in Europe a movement towards a linguistic philosophy that promoted the study of ordinary language in its own right (ordinary language philosophy) was gaining interest. Its main exponent, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) proposed speaking as a changing activity (a “form of life”) dependent on history, culture, and context. Pragmatics: overview

Austin J.L. Searl J. Paul Grice In the late 1960s, as a break from Chomsky’s transformational grammar, generative semantics (e.g., Ross, 1970) emerged as a branch of linguistics with a special interest including pragmatic phenomena as part of semantics within a grammatical theory. Generative semantics was largely influenced by philosophers of language such as J. L. Austin (1962), John Searle (1969), and H. Paul Grice (1975), who put forward some of the basic principles of pragmatics, which have been adopted, investigated, revised, and challenged up to this day Austin J.L. Searl J. Paul Grice

Speech act theory is one of the most studied topics in pragmatics Among these were three important ideas: first, the idea that language is not just an abstract system to describe a world that can be reduced and captured by truth-conditions; second, the idea that language is a complex system in which the speaker, the hearer, and the context of the message are situational variables that determine meaning (Austin, 1962); and third, the idea that language is used not only to say things, but actively to do things, that is, the speech act theory (see speech acts research) initiated by Austin (1962) and later advanced by Searle (1969). Speech act theory is one of the most studied topics in pragmatics

Speech Acts: John Austin The British philosopher John Austin (1911-1960) ‘How to Do Things with Words’ (lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955) tried to distinguish performative/constative, then proceeded to the general theory of speech acts. Speech Acts: John Austin

Cooperative principle: Grice’s maxims To Austin’s and Searle’s ideas, we need to add the very influential notion by Grice that communication is a cooperative action as well as the concept of implicature (Grice, 1975). According to Grice, the meaning of a sentence is different from the speaker’s meaning (i.e., not only what is said, but also what is implicated). When inferring the speaker’s meaning, the hearer has some expectations that the conversation is a rational and cooperative activity (cooperative principle) and would follow some rules, called maxims, which specify the amount of talk (quantity maxims), the truthiness of the talk (quality maxims), the relevance of what is said (maxim of relation), as well as the clarity of the talk (manner maxims) Cooperative principle: Grice’s maxims