Pragmatics

Question 1

What is pragmatics?

What is the focus of pragmatics?

Answer 1

Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning, as communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener.

The focus of pragmatics is on what people mean by their utterances rather by what the phrases mean by themselves.

Pragmatics also explores how listeners make differences about what is said and what remains unsaid is recognized as part of what is being uncommunicated.

Question 2

Who is the modern usage of the term attributed to?

Answer 2

The philisopher Charles Morris in 1938.

Question 3

The dimensions

Answer 3

• The study of speaker meaning
• The study of contextual meaning
• The study of how more gets communicated than it’s said
• The study of the expression of relative closeness

Question 4

What does deixis refer to?

Answer 4

Deixis refers to such words and phrases that cannot be fully understood without any contextual information, such as:

• Who the speaker is
• The time or place of speaking
• The gesture of the speaker
• The current location in the discourse
• The topic of the discourse

Question 5

Types of deixis

Answer 5

1. Personal deixis= concerns the persons involved in an utterance, such as:
   - The persons directly involved (the speaker and the listener, I, you…),
   - The persons not directly involved (He, she, they…)
   - The persons mentioned in the utterance (3rd person)
2. Spatial (place) deixis= the relative locations of people and things
   - (proximal, near to the speaker= this, these, here, come, bring..)
   - (distal, far away from the speaker= there, that, those, go, take..)
3. Temporal (time) deixis= it concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in an utterance
   (proximal: now, today, tonight..)
   (distal: then..)
4. Social deixis= concerns itself with the aspects of sentences which reflect certain realities of participants or the social situation in which the speech events occurs
   - absolute social deixis= your highness, mr. president)
   - relational social deixis= my husband, teacher, cousin…)
5. Discourse deixis= it refers to the use of expressions in an utterance
   so, but therefore

Question 6

The term implicature.

Answer 6

The term implicature accounts from what the speaker may imply, suggest or mean as distant from what the speaker may literally say.

Question 7

What is the study of implicature justified by?

Answer 7

a) It offers significant functional explanations of linguistic facts.
b) It provides explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than is said.
c) Seems to affect simplifications in both the structure and the content of semantic descriptions.

Question 8

Grice’s theory of implicature

Answer 8

Grice’s theory of implicature is an attempt at explaining how a hearer or listener gets from what is said to what is meant, from the level of expressed meaning to the level of implied meaning. His suggestion is that there is a set of assumptions guiding the conduct of conversation. He introduced 4 conversational maxims and a cooperative principle.

Question 9

The cooperative principle + who

Answer 9

Paul Grice
The cooperative principle runs as follows:
- Make your contribution, such as is required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
(The listener presumes that the speaker is being cooperative and is speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly and exactly)

Question 10

The 4 conversational maxims are:

Answer 10

1. The maxim of quantity: say just as much as necessary, not more or less, make your contribution as informative as is required.
2. The maxim of quality: tell the truth, do not say what you believe is false, don’t say that for which you lack evidence.
3. The maxim of relation: make your contribution relevant.
4. The maxim of manner: avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief and be orderly.

Question 11

What are hatches?

Answer 11

When making a statement, certain expressions can be used to indicate the degree of certainty concerning the information given. These expressions are called hatches.

Question 12

5 ways of failing to observe a maxim + who?

Answer 12

Grice identified 5 ways of failing to observe a maxim:
1. Floating a maxim- a float occurs when a speaker fails to observe a maxim on the level of what is said, with the intention of generating an implicature.
Ex.: What an amazing basketball player John is!
2. Violating a maxim- unostentatious non-observance of a maxim.
3. Infringing a maxim- non-observance of a maxim due to imperfect linguistic performance.
4. Opting out of a maxim- a speaker cannot, for legal or ethical reasons, reply in a way normally expected.
5. Suspending a maxim- when there is no expectation from the part of participants in conversation.

Question 13

What is reference & referring expressions?

Answer 13

Reference is an act in which a speaker or a writer uses linguistic forms to enable a listener or a reader to identify something.
These linguistic expressions are called referring expressions, which can be:
1. Proper nouns (Denisa, Shakespeare…)
2. Nouns phrases- definite (the author, the writer, the cook) or – indefinite (an author, a writer, a cook)
3. Pronouns (he, she, it…)

Question 14

What is inference?

Answer 14

Since there is no direct relationship between entities and words, the listeners’ task is to infer which entity the speaker intends to identify by using a particular expression.
The process where additional information is needed to connect what is said to what is meant is called inference.

Question 15

Types of reference

Answer 15

The physical environment or context has a powerful impact on how referring expressions are to be interpreted.
Anaphoric reference= a reference to an already introduced reference.
Cataphoric reference= reference to reference that will be introduced later.

Question 16

What is entailment?

Answer 16

Entailment= relationship between two sentences, such that the first is true, the second must also be true. Sentences, not speakers, have entailments.

Question 17

What is presupposition?

Answer 17

Presupposition= is something that the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. Speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions.

Question 18

Types of pressupositions

Answer 18

1. Existential p.= entities named by the speaker and assumed to be present
   The cold war has ended.- There was a cold war.
2. Factive p.= the assumption that something is true, identified by the presence of some verbs (now, to know, realize, be glad, be sorry)
   In using one word, a speaker can act as if another meaning will be understood.
   Mary stopped running= she used to run
3. Non-factive p.= it is an assumption referred to something that is not true (verbs- dream, imagine, pretend…)
   I dreamed that I was rich.- I am not rich
4. Lexical p.= is the assumption that, in using one word, the speaker can act as the another meaning will be understood.
   Mary stopped running.- She used to run
5. Structural p.= it is the assumption associated with the use of certain structures (wh-question structures).
   When did she travel to the USA?- She travelled to the USA at some point.
6. Counterfactual p.= the assumption that what is presupposed is not only untrue, but is the opposite of what is true.
   If you were my daughter, I would not allow you to do this. = You are not my daughter.

Question 19

What is a speech act?

Answer 19

Speech act= an action performed by means of language/utterances (apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, request).

Question 20

What are speech events?

Answer 20

Speech events= The speaker normally expects that the hearer will recognize their communicative intention when producing an utterance.Both speaker and hearer are usually helped in this process by the circumstances surrounding the utterance. These circumstances, including the other utterances, are called speech events.

Question 21

Locutionary, illocutionary & perlocutionary acts.

Answer 21

Locutionary act= the act of performing words into utterances that make sense in a language with correct grammar and pronounciation.
Illocutionary act= an intended communicative action by the speaker, bound to certain circumstances.
Perlocutionary act= the effect that the utterance has on the thoughts, feelings or attitude of a listener.

Question 22

Locution, illocution & perlocution.

Answer 22

What we say= locution
What we mean when we say (offer, explanation, etc)= illocution
What we accomplish by saying it= perlocution

Question 23

Who distunguishes types of illucutionary acts, and how many?

Answer 23

John Searle distinguishes 5 types of illocutionary acts:

1. Declaratives- are speech acts that change the world via utterance.
2. Representatives- are speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not, such as statements of facts, assertions, conclusions, descriptions.
3. Expressives- are speech acts that state what the speaker feels. They express psychological states and can be statements of pleasure, pain, likes, dislikes, joy, sorrow.
4. Directives- are speech acts that the speaker use to get someone else to do something. They express what the speaker wants and may be commands, orders, requests, suggestions, and can be positive or negative.
5. Comissives- are speech acts that speaker use to commit themselves to some future action. They express what the speaker intends and may be promises, threats, refusals, pledges, and can be performed by the speaker alone, or by the speaker as a member of a group.

Question 24

What is conversation analysis?

Answer 24

Conversation analysis is an analysis of natural conversation to reveal what the linguistic feature of conversation is and how conversation is used in ordinary life.

Question 25

Terms:
Floor
Turn
Turn-taking
Local management
TRP
TCU

Answer 25

The floor= the right to speak
A turn= having control of the conversation
Turn-taking= when the control is not fixed in advance
Turn-taking refers to the changing of roles of the speaker and the listener when they are in conversations.
Local management= a set of rules known by the speakers / conventions for getting turns, keeping them, giving them away.
TRP= Term relevance place- refers to the point in the ongoing conversation where a turn at talk from one participant to another occurs.
TCU= Turn construction unit= the basic segment of speech in a conversation.

Question 26

The conversational styles

Answer 26

1. High involvement style- some individuals expect that participation in a conversation will be very active, that speaking rate will be relatively fast, with almost no pausing between turns and with some overlap or even competition between turns.
2. High considerateness style- here, speakers use a slower rate, expect longer pauses between turns, do not overlap and avoid interruption or completion of the other’s turn.

Question 27

Adjacency pairs

Answer 27

Adjacency pairs are sequences of two utterances that are adjacent, produced by different speakers, ordered as a first part and a second part and typed so that a particular first part requires a particular second.

Question 28

Pauses, overlaps and backchannels

Answer 28

Pause= a silence between turns (silence or simple hesitations)
Overlap= both speakers trying to speak at the same time
Backchannel= ways of indicating that the listener is following or not objecting to what the speaker says.

Question 29

Felicity conditions

Answer 29

Felicity conditions= certain expected circumstances for the performance of a speech act to be recognized as intended.