Language 9.3

Question 1

What does extralinguistic mean? (1 sentence)

Answer 1

What we communicate is beyond the main linguistic material: a lot comes through inferencing

Question 2

What is an inference? (1 sentence)

Answer 2

Meaning that is not part of the explicit signal

Question 3

What is pragmatics? (1 sentence)

Answer 3

The study of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker, the addressee, and other features of context

Question 4

What are speech acts? (1 sentence)

Answer 4

Defined in terms of a speaker’s intentions and their effects on a listener

Question 5

What are 5 types of speech acts, and what do they mean? (1 sentence each)

Answer 5

1. Representative - speaker is asserting fact and conveying their belief that statement is true
2. Directive - speaker trying to get listener to do something
3. Commissive - speaker commits themselves to some future course of action
4. Expressive - speaker wishes to reveal their psychological state
5. Declarative speaker brings about new state of affairs

Question 6

What is Grice’s Cooperative principle and what are its 4 key characteristics?

Answer 6

Communication is guided by expectations of cooperativity
- Quality - tell truth
- Quantity - be informative
- Relation - be relevant
- Manner - be clear

Question 7

What is audience design, and what are two examples? (3 points)

Answer 7

Speakers tailor utterances to suit addressees’ needs
Child-directed speech
‘Foreigner talk’

Question 8

What is common ground? (1 sentence)

Answer 8

Knowledge we share and we know we share

Question 9

What are three causes of common ground? (1 point each)

Answer 9

Physical co-presence: being in same physical environment
Community: share specific knowledge
Linguistic co-presence: words used previously to discuss certain topics

Question 10

Damage to what area of the brain causes pragmatic impairments, and what occurs? (2 points)

Answer 10

• Right hemispheric damage in stroke patients can cause pragmatic impairments
• Struggle to understand communicative intentions in non-literal language (sarcasm, idiom, humour, metaphor)