Pragmatics

Definitions of pragmatics Pragmatics is a branch of general linguistics like other branches that include: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics. 1.Charles Morris’s famous definition of pragmatics was “the study of the relation of signs to interpreters-” 2.Levinson’s consideration of pragmatics was “the study of those relations between language and context that is grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language.”, 3.Mey’s definition was “Pragmatics studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society.”. 4.Ran Yongping expressed his idea in his book A Survey of Pragmatics : “Pragmatics is a discipline not only concerning the sense, but also concerning the derivation of sense and the understanding of underlying meaning as its objects.

Other definitions “ Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning.” 2: “ Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning” 3:“ Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said” 4:“ Pragmatics is the study of the expression of relative distance.” ( Yule:2008).

Types of Pragmatics There are three divisions of Pragmatics: 1.Micro-pragmatics 2. Macro-pragmatics and 3. Meta-pragmatics

1. Micro-pragmatics The studies of Micro-pragmatics are, on the level of language using, centering upon the discussion of pragmatic tasks aroused by the understanding of language symbols’ reference and implicature during conversation, including Context, Conversational implicature, Reference, Pragmatic Principles, speech Acts and Conversation Analysis.

2. Macro-pragmatics The studies of Macro-pragmatics are, on the level of society & culture, focus on the problems of how to use language for language user during the process of communication, including Pragmatic Acts, Literary Pragmatics, Pragmatics Across Cultures and the Social Aspects of Pragmatics..

3. Metapragmatics Metapragmatics which can be considered as a review, a survey or a reflection of pragmatics itself, including making statements about itself, questioning itself, improving itself, quoting itself and rethinking the methodologies and theoretic system during the process of its studies

Levels of Language and Linguistics ]TEXT Discourse analysis Text linguistic Meaning semantics Sentences, clauses, phrases, words Grammar(Morphology& syntax) Sounds and lettes Phonology and phonetics Situation and context pragmatics

Pragmatics and other linguistics aspects In contrast to phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, which describe different levels of language structure, Pragmatics deals with language use. It is still a fairly young discipline in linguistics, and is thus defined in a variety of ways. However, Pragmatics is mostly used in connection with the relationship between linguistic signs and their users (as depicted in the cartoon above). It investigates how context (both situational and linguistic contexts) affects the meaning of utterances.

The essence of pragmatics Syntax addresses the formal relations of signs to one another, semantics the relation of signs to what they denote, and pragmatics the relation of signs to their users and interpreters

The central rationale for pragmatics sentence meaning (semantics) in natural languages vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning (intentions). The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged

The difference between grammatical analysis and pragmatic analysis First, grammatical studies look for rules while pragmatic studies look for principles. Rules are black and white, i.e. you are either right or wrong. For instance, you have to say “He studies linguistics”; the –s is required by a rule. Principles are not black and white; you can obey them to some extent and violate them to some extent. For example, one principle says we should tell the truth and another says we should be polite in our speech.

Secondly, in grammar studies, we end up with products while in pragmatics we always deal with processes. In other words, ever-unfolding process-as the discourse goes after we have analyzed a sentence grammatically, our job is done; in a pragmatic inquiry, we deal with an on and on, the extra meaning of some words become clearer and clearer.

Summary The field of pragmatics deals with the principles of language use that explain how extra meaning is conveyed without being encoded in language. Therefore we need to investigate the speaker meaning, i.e. how meaning is communicated by the speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). Thus, pragmatics concentrates more on the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves (which is analysed in semantics).