Pragmatics

Question 1

Pragmatics

Answer 1

How people do things with words

Speech arts, rhetorical structure, conversational implicature, management of reference

Question 2

Speech Acts

Answer 2

use of language to accomplish certain kinds of acts

Threatening to drink water, promising to drink water, ordering a glass of water

Direct and Indirect

Question 3

Direct and Indirect Speech Acts

Answer 3

Direct Speech Acts: Assertion, Question, Order & Request

Assertion (Declarative)
Question (Interrogative)
Order & Request (Imperative)
Other meanings as well (threats, promises, cause and effects)

Indirect Speech Acts: speech act meaning, “do you know if she got an A on the test?”, “I wonder if she got an A”, complaints: “can you close the window?” “the window is still open”

Question 4

Performatives

Answer 4

expand the kinds of direct speech acts we can make beyond the three basic types that have their own special syntax

“I bet this will happen”
“I ask that you do this”
“I pronounce you husband and wife”

The hereby test, insert “hereby”

Question 5

Conversational Implicature

Answer 5

Grice’s 4 maxims:

1) Maxim of quality: what speaker says is truth
2) Maxim of quantity: as informative as required
3) Maxim of relevance: contribution relate to the purpose of exchange
4) Maxim of manner: contributions should be easily understood

• Literal meaning, context, cooperative principle
• Can be canceled and rely on context

Question 6

Rhetorical Structure

Answer 6

syntax typically operates on a smaller scale, among words or small groups of words inside sentences, while rhetoric works on a larger scale, typically relating clauses, sentences and whole sections of a discourse

Syntactic structure mainly expresses semantic relations like modification, predication, quantification (sentence meaning); Rhetorical structure typically expresses pragmatic relations like exemplification, concession, justification, summary (speaker meaning)

Question 7

The flow of language

Answer 7

Not assuming people know something they might not, not acting like something you both know is something new

“old information” (part of the earlier content of a discourse, for instance) is referred to using a pronoun, and occurs early in a sentence. What is “new” typically occurs as a noun, and occurs later in the sentence