Pragmatics Flashcards
Pragmatics
Words and phrases can have a literal meaning or a pragmatic meaning. A pragmatic meaning is an underlying meaning which is implied by what is actually said.
“Are you wearing those shoes tonight?” implies that the speaker doesn’t like the shoes by only asking if they are going to be worn.
Social Conventions in Pragmatics
Sometimes it is more polite to speak pragmatically instead of being to direct or explicit.
Grice’s maxims (there’s four)
Quantity: saying too much or too little
Quality: saying something that is untrue
Manner: communicating in an obscure way
Relation: changing the subject or being irrelevant
Positive and Negative politeness
Positive: assumes there is a good relationship. Involves shared dialect, informal grammar and lexis to emphasise solidarity with friends.
Negative: assumes there is not a good relationship. Involves more formal lexis and grammar to emphasise social distance and gain respect
Brown and Levison’s politeness theory
-we present a persona
-we try to be liked and accpeted
-we are polite and friendly to others
-we hope to get what we want
Face (Positive and Negative)
a view of oneself which one expects to be respected. Anything which goes against the face is a face threatening act (FTA)
Positive face is the need to be liked and respected
Negative face is our right to not be imposed upon
Deixis
When understand a word, phrase of sentence requires context.
Some sentences in english are impossible to understand if we don’t know who is speaking about whom, where and when.
e.g. “you’ll have to bring that back tomorrow because they aren’t here now”
Deictic expressions
Can only be understood with knowledge of context.
Example: “you’ll have to bring that back tomorrow because they aren’t here now”
that, tomorrow, they, here, now are deictic expressions because we can only know what these words are referring to with prior knowledge of the circumstances.
Antecedent and Anaphora (Anaphoric referencing)
“can i borrow your book”
“yes, it’s on the table”
Anaphoric referencing is referring to the noun already mentioned using a pronoun or determiner.
The first mention is the antecedent
Cataphoric referencing
using a pronoun or determiner to refer to the noun that will be mentioned later (in the same sentence or the next sentence)
Presupposition
what the speaker assumes is already known by the listener. Speakers design their linguistic messages on the basis of what their listeners already know.
Inference (in pragmatics)
The process of reaching a conclusion from known facts or evidence
Reference (in pragmatics)
When the speaker or writer uses a linguistic form to enable a listener to identify something.
Example: a man, whose name is unknown, being referred to as kronenbourg Terry because he is frequently seen drinking kronenbourg.
Volume (in pragmatics)
Loudness can show excitement, anger, or status.
Quiet might be a politeness strategy.
Stress
Every word or phrase has a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. This is called natural changing.
