Pragmatics Flashcards
What is pragmatics ?
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.
What are the three main types of context ?
Linguistic context : previous utterances in the discourse.
Situational context : what is going on around you (sometimes also includes world knowledge).
Social context : about the relation between conversation participants.
What are deictics ?
Deictics are a category of words that always make reference to context (here, now, me, etc).
What are performative speech acts ?
Performative speech acts bring about a reality just by being uttered (a judge sentencing someone, a priest baptising someone, etc.). You cannot really say « False ! » to them because they are true in virtue of being said !
Can speech acts be further divided into types based on the kind of thing they do ?
Yes ! Speech acts can be further divided into types based on the kind of thing they do (do they engage the speaker to do something, or the hearer to do something, or are they about emotion, etc. ?)
Representatives : assertions, statements, claims, hypotheses, descriptions, suggestions.
Commissives : promises, oaths, pledges, threats, vows.
Directives : commands, requests, challenges, orders, summons, dares.
Declarations : blessings, firings, baptisms, arrests, marrying, judicial speech acts such as sentencings, declaring a mistrial, etc (note that this is the category for performatives).
Expressives : greetings, apologies, congratulations, condolences, thanking.
Is conversation regulated by rules ?
Yes ! Conversation is regulated by rules, with the overall one being «cooperate ». Assuming that someone is cooperative, you then use Grice’s Conversational Maxims to reason about what the speaker means and ‘ calculate ‘ implicatures. The maxims are :
Quality : Tell the truth
Quantity : Don’t give more or less information than required
Relation : Be relevant
Manner : All the aesthetic things : don’t be obscure, use vocabulary that your speaker won’t understand, drone on and on, etc.
What is an implicature ?
An implicature arises when we hear something that seems to violate a maxim. but then we ask what motive that person has for doing so. Example : Someone asks « Is your friend good-looking ? » and you say «He has a nice personality. » Because that is not a relevant answer to the question, your friend reasons that you didn’t want to have to say «no » because you like your friend, so you compensate with something positive.
What is a presupposition ?
A presupposition is something that presents certain information in the sentences as already ‘’given’’ (established), though it is sometimes used sneakily in cases where information is not established but we don’t want anyone to question it. Example : stop (you cannot stop something you never did), so «He stopped smoking presupposes that he used to smoke »
Practice exercises
- As you will remember from the first day of class, titles are very important to get right in English. I also said that for someone with doctorate, if you don’t use Dr. Smith, it is better to use the person’s first name (Elizabeth, John) rather than another title (Ms. Smith, Mr. Smith). Using the Maxims, explain why Ms./Mr Smith would be more insulting than Dr. Smith, citing which Maxims is crucial in the reasoning process.
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Practice exercises
- There are four syntactic sentence forms in English : declarative, interrogative, exclamative, and imperative. These are sometimes taught as being related to the speech acts that they are used to convey.
First, try to correlate the syntactic categories and the speech act categories. Do you run into problems ? If so, what are they ?
Finally, try to find examples of when someone might use a sentence form for one category, but with a speech act from another category. For example, can you think of an interrogative sentence that is actually a directive ?
Soon
Practice exercises
- How does pragmatics help us understand the humor in this comic strip ?
Little boy : I saw on tv that some guy won 10 million dollars in a lottery.
Little boy : Have you ever won a big prize, grampa ?
Grandfather : I won your grammars hearth.
Little boy : Yeah, me neither.
Practice exercises
- For each of the following, what is a presupposition of the sentence ?
a. I’m going to Sherbrooke in December, too.
b. Having seen the Dysney version of A Christmas Carol, I am prepared for the puppet version.
c. My brother regrets not taking LIN 1325
d. It wasn’t Santa who brought those presents.
e. Elizabeth lost her tuque on the metro.
Soon
