Pragmatics An Overview

Historical Intro. Pragmatics as a ling. Subj. is familiar today. It was rare 50 years ago. To the generation of Bloomfield Ling. Meant phonetics , phonemics & morphophonemics. Syntax was considered so abstract to be discovered .

-In 1950, Chomsky discovered the centrality of syntax. -He didn’t give any consideration to meaning -In the early 1960s Katz & his collaborators (Katz & Fodor1963-Katz & Postal 1964-Katz 1964) began to find out how to incorporate meaning into a formal ling. Theory. Lakoff with others was soon arguing (1971) that syntax couldn’t be legitimately separated from the study of language use.

-Pragmatics was then introduced in the ling. Map. Ling. Discipline has been expanded to include not only physical data of speech ,but also form, meaning and context. All the linguists mentioned earlier were Americans who represent the dominating influences but we shouldn’t overlook independent thinkers such as Firth with his early emphasis on the situational study of meaning and Halliday with his comprehensive social theory of language

-Equally important , we shouldn’t overlook the influences of philosophy on pragmatics Austin (1962), Searle (1969, and Grice(1975) American structuralists were happy with the idea that ling. Was a physical science with no reference to meaning. But by accepting ambiguity &synonymy as one of the basic data of Ling., Chomsky opened the door for semantics. His pupils in generative semantics school went a stage further in taking semantics to be the base for their ling. Theory.

By admitting semantics to a central place in language ,one can’t exclude the way meaning varies from context to context. And so in no time semantics spills over into pragmatics. On this basis, the generative semanticists tried to apply the paradigm of generative grammar to problems – such as the treatment of presuppositions and of illocutionary force –which most people would regard as involving pragmatics.

-For many years there was a debate among linguists regarding the dominant component of the lang. Is it the form as Chomsky’s formal grammar( competence ) or the functional component (performance ) which was admitted by Chomsky himself. .

Geoffrey Leech discussed eight postulates of any conversation or language in use. P1-The semantic rep. of a sentence is distinct from its pragmatic interpretation. P2-Semantics is rule-governed= grammatical ; pragmatics is rhetorical ( principle-controlled.) P3-The rules of grammar are fundamentally conventional; the principles of general pragmatics are fundamentally non-conventional, ie motivated in terms of conversational goals.

P4-General pragmatics relates the sense (or grammatical meaning) of an utterance to its pragmatic (or illocutionary) force. This relationship may be direct or indirect. P5-Grammatical correspondences are defined by mappings while pragmatic correspondences are defined by problems & their solutions. P6-Grammatical explanations are primarily formal; pragmatic explanations are primarily functional.

P7-Grammar is ideational; pragmatics is interpersonal & textual. P8-In general, grammar is describable in terms of discrete & determinate categories; pragmatics is describable in terms of continuous & indeterminate values.

In conclusion: -Semantics is concerned with meaning as a linguistic identity. What words actually mean? -Pragmatics is concerned with meaning as a cntextual identity. What we ( speakers ) want words to mean. Language ( la langue ) vs. language use ( la parole). Both fields are concerned with meaning, but the difference between them can be traced to two different uses of the verb to mean.

What does x mean? What do you mean by x?