Definitions and background

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 881.

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XIV PREFACE

Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as commun­icated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). It has, consequently, more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves. Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning.

This type of study necessarily involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular context and how the context influences what is said. It requires a consideration of how speakers organize what they want to say in accordance with who they're talking to, where, when, and under what circumstances. Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning.

This approach also necessarily explores how listeners can make inferences about what is said in order to arrive at an interpreta­tion of the speaker's intended meaning. This type of study explores how a great deal of what is unsaid is recognized as part of what is communicated. We might say that it is the investigation of invisible meaning. Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said.

This perspective then raises the question of what determines the choice between the said and the unsaid. The basic answer is tied to the notion of distance. Closeness, whether it is physical, social, or con­ceptual, implies shared experience. On the assumption of how close or distant the listener is, speakers determine how much needs to be said. Pragmatics is the study of the expression of relative distance.

These are the four areas that pragmatics is concerned with. To understand how it got to be that way, we have to briefly review its relationship with other areas of linguistic analysis.

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Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

One traditional distinction in language analysis contrasts prag­matics with syntax and semantics. Syntaxis the study of the relationships between linguistic forms, how they are arranged in sequence, and which sequences are well-formed. This type of study generally takes place without considering any world of ref­erence or any user of the forms. Semanticsis the study of the relationships between linguistic forms and entities in the world; that is, how words literally connect to things. Semantic analysis also attempts to establish the relationships between verbal descriptions and states of affairs in the world as accurate (true) or not, regardless of who produces that description.

Pragmaticsis the study of the relationships between linguistic forms and the users of those forms. In this three-part distinction, only pragmatics allows humans into the analysis. The advantage of studying language via pragmatics is that one can talk about people's intended meanings, their assumptions, their purposes or goals, and the kinds of actions (for example, requests) that they are performing when they speak. The big disadvantage is that all these very human concepts are extremely difficult to analyze in a consistent and objective way. Two friends having a conversation may imply some things and infer some others without providing any clear linguistic evidence that we can point to as the explicit source of 'the meaning' of what was communicated. Example [i] is just such a problematic case. I heard the speakers, I knew what they said, but I had no idea what was communicated.

[i] Her: So—did you?

Him: Hey—who wouldn't?

Thus, pragmatics is appealing because it's about how people make sense of each other linguistically, but it can be a frustrating area of study because it requires us to make sense of people and what they have in mind.

Regularity

Luckily, people tend to behave in fairly regular ways when it comes to using language. Some of that regularity derives from the fact that people are members of social groups and follow general

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patterns of behavior expected within the group. Within a familiar social group, we normally find it easy to be polite and say appro­priate things. In a new, unfamiliar social setting, we are often unsure about what to say and worry that we might say the wrong

thing.

When I first lived in Saudi Arabia, I tended to answer questions in Arabic about my health (the equivalent of 'How are you?') with the equivalent of my familiar routine responses of 'Okay' or 'Fine'. However, I eventually noticed that when I asked a similar question, people generally answered with a phrase that had the literal meaning of 'Praise to God'. I soon learned to use the new expression, wanting to be pragmatically appropriate in that con­text. My first type of answer wasn't 'wrong' (my vocabulary and pronunciation weren't inaccurate), but it did convey the meaning that I was a social outsider who answered in an unexpected way. In other words, more was being communicated than was being said. Initially I did not know that: I had learned some linguistic forms in the language without learning the pragmatics of how those forms are used in a regular pattern by social insiders.

Another source of regularity in language use derives from the fact that most people within a linguistic community have similar basic experiences of the world and share a lot of non-linguistic knowledge. Let's say that, in the middle of a conversation, I men­tion the information in [z].

[2] I found an old bicycle lying on the ground. The chain was rusted and the tires were flat.

You are unlikely to ask why a chain and some tires were suddenly being mentioned. I can normally assume that you will make the inference that if X is a bicycle, then X has a chain and tires (and many other regular parts). Because of this type of assump­tion, it would be pragmatically odd for me to have expressed [2] as [3].

[3] I found an old bicycle. A bicycle has a chain. The chain was rusted. A bicycle also has tires. The tires were flat.

You would perhaps think that more was being communicated than was being said and that you were being treated as someone with no basic knowledge (i.e. as stupid). Once again, nothing in

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the use of the linguistic forms is inaccurate, but getting the prag­matics wrong might be offensive.

The types of regularities just described are extremely simple examples of language in use which are largely ignored by most linguistic analyses. To understand why it has become the province of pragmatics to investigate these, and many other, aspects of ordinary language in use, we need to take a brief historical look at how things got to be the way they are.