Pragmatics Flashcards
Role of language
We use language to make statements about the world.
The statements express propositions that are true or false
> listener’s job is to identify what proposition is expressed
Identifying propositions
Different units of language can express the same proposition.
How are propositions expressed identified?
> identify sounds (phonology)
> how sounds are combined into morphemes
> how words / morphemes are connected in a syntactic tree
> finally this is interpreted by the semantic component
Limitations of a pipeline model
cf: Austin (1975) How to do things with words.
Thre are linguistic acts that do not admit T/F conditions.
> the sentence itself can be a performative action
> a sentence can be meaningful without necessarily being true or false
> some uses of language cannot be properly characterised as assertions / claims
Performative utterances
When uttered under the right conditions, PU bring about the action that they describe.
Instead of TRUTH CONDITIONS, consider FELICITY CONDITIONS (=social conditions where an utterance can constitute an act).
Performativity Test: Hereby
> If ‘hereby’ can be added before the predicate and the resulting utterance is still logical, the utterance is performative
Language as social action
Social actions can be achieved by utterances that don’t seem to have any proposition associated with them.
eg: Hello & Goodbye
> do not describe the world, but interacts with the conversation itself
Speech Act Theory
Utterances perform actions at 3 levels:
- Locutionary: what was said (the utterance)
- Illocutionary: what social action was performed by it (what does the utterance function as in the conversational context)
- Perlocutionary: what higher-order goal was achieved by it (what is the effect of the utterance’s function in the context)
Only the first two levels are necessarily realised, the perlocutionary level is basically open ended depending on the conversational context
Interpreting Speech Acts
Method: Sentence Types
1. Declarative: N V
2. Interrogative: V N? (V-fronting to indicate transformation from DEC to INT)
3. Imperative: V N (Subject dropped, V fronted)
Related Speech Acts:
1. Statement
2. Question
3. Request
Issues: Sentence type - Speech act relation can be arbitrary
> Syntactic encoding =/= speech act enacted
> eg: Rising declarative: indicates a change in conversational turn, hence its deployment in questions / requests.
Cooperativity Speech Acts and Context
Context helps to resolve the ‘indirectness’ of the speech act - sentence structure relation.
This works due to the principle of cooperativity
Gricean Pragmatics
Speakers assumed to obey principles of rational conversation
Listerners enrich meanings by assuming speakers are doing this.
Language understanding is an application of general principles of action understanding / social cognition.
Cooperativity
Cooperative Principle
Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the
talk exchange in which you are engaged.
Implications
> if someone conveys a message in a strange manner, the listener will have to make more assumptions to construe the message as rational and relevant to the conversation.
Gricean Maxims
- Quality: Be truthful. Do not say things that are false or for which you lack adequate evidence.
- Quantity: Give the appropriate amount of information, not too little or too much.
- Relation: Make your contribution relevant to the current goals of the conversation participants. (Be relevant)
- Manner: Be clear, brief and orderly. Avoid obscurity of expression. (Be perspicuous)
Conversational Implicature
> reconstruction of the intended message
relies on need to rationalise observed utterance, in light of conversational norms
when a maxim is apparently violated, listeners will draw inferences about why
Quantity Implicatures
Quantity Implicatures: The expectation that cooperative speakers provide as much information as is necessary for the current discourse purpose.
> Inferences about a stronger proposition that which was explicitly stated
Always to the effect that the speaker cannot commit to the stronger proposition
If the speaker is knowledgeable about the truth or falsity, quantity implicature is that the stronger proposition is in fact false
Relies crucially on maxim of quality (stronger inference violates the maxim). Grice believes that the maxim of quality is the central plank of cooperative conversation.
eg: some vs all
Maxim of Quality
Try to make your contribution true. Don’t say something if
* you believe it is false
* you don’t have enough evidence that it is true
(counter)Examples:
* irony and sarcasm: ‘That was a fun lecture’
* metaphor: ‘You are the sun’
Maxim of Quantity
- Make your contribution as informative as is required for the purposes of the exchange
- Don’t be more informative than is required
Quantity + relevance:
* scalar implicatures: ‘I like some country music’
* Relevance: ‘He has excellent handwriting’ on the reccomendation letter
Maxim of Relation
Be relevant
Example:
* A: Does Bill have a girlfriend?
* B: He has been going to New York a lot lately.
A [underlying assumption thanks to CP]: He said that because it is true and relevant; I have to work out how it is relevant (context dependent).
* [Bill does not live in NY] ==> He has a girlfriend in NY
* He could also be travelling to NY a lot as he does not have a girlfriend locally
Maxim of Manner
- Avoid obscurity
- Avoid ambiguity
- Be brief
- Be orderly
eg:
* Miss X sang ‘Home Sweet Home’
* Miss X produced a series of sounds that corresponded
closely with the score of ‘Home Sweet Home’
Implicatures:
The apparent violation of manner suggests that the performance was rather poor.
Pragmatics as Social Reasoning
Pragmatics may be more social psychology than linguistics (just happenes that the action in question is linguistic in nature).
- special case of action choice and understanding
- speech is goal driven (‘rational’ behaviour)
- speakers try to balance informativity and cost
- listeners rely on this assumption to identify enrichments
Culture-specificity of Gricean Maxims
Ochs Keenan 1976: Malagasy speakers do not obey quantity (society that treats knowledge as sacred, promoting witholding of knowledge)
Gricean Maxims may not be general rules of conversation
Limitations within the maxims
- Referring: Referring expressions like pronouns are maximally uninformative and the most context dependent.
- Mutual knowledge: Depending on context, mutual knowledge may be assymetric
Common Ground
Speakers track mutual knowledge
* not just about tracking each other’s goals, but also each other’s knowledge to make the common goal achievable efficiently
Successful reference depends on common ground
* community of co-membership
* physical co-presence
* linguistic co-presence
Deixis
Some word’s have context dependent meanings (recall: demonstratives, pronouns, time)
Generalisations of deictic words
1. Pronouns
2. Time-referring
3. Place-referring
Example of semantics-pragmatics interface
* semantics is about ‘stable’ sentence meanings
* need context (pragmatics) to fully identify these meanings
