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Summary Pragmatiek/Pragmatics (Understanding Pragmatics of Senft and lecture notes)
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Summary of the book H1-5 and the lectures associated with the course 'Pragmatics'.
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Summary Understanding Pragmatics, ISBN: 9781444180305 Pragmatics (LCX056B05)
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Samenvatting Understanding Pragmatics - Gunter Senft, H. 1-5
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Samenvatting Understanding Pragmatics (book)
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1. Pragmatics and Philosophy________________________________________________________________________________________________
Charles Peirce defined three types of sign-referent relations. Signs derive their meanings from the way
they relate to their referent. Signs give us cues as how to interpret them:
1. Iconic: it resembles something — the sign looks like the thing it is supposed to present
2. Symbolic: it states an agreement — if we use this sign we interpret it in this and that way
3. Indexical: points at its meaning that is intended — if you see smoke, you expect fire (you do not see
fire but interpret it because of the smoke). In language we also have indexical relations: ‘this’, ‘he’,
‘tomorrow’ (you will never know until you have identified).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ferdinand de Saussure however said that signs derive their meanings from their relation to other signs.
Also, the signs give us cues as how to interpret them by:
1. Syntagmatic: the company they keep
2. Paradigmatic: being selected from a range of possible alternatives
Syntagmatic
The ridiculous girl fell into the pond.
silly person jumped river
Paradigmatic
foolish woman tripped lake
crazy princess walked pool
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Bertrand Russel said that: “Nothing in my life was quite the same after that first meeting with Euclid. In his
works, I found what I had vainly sought for in Grandma’s faith. Geometry showed me the only way towards
reality: Reason. In it, I encountered for the first time the delicious experience of knowing something with
total certainty. Proof thus became my ‘Royal Road to Truth’”. He said that things can only be said with the
right truth and certainty (proof). This is were Analytic Philosophy (AP) comes from, which is concerned with
the study of language in relationship with language and truth. Language usually was considered as
imprecise (ambiguity and imprecisions) instruments to describe the world. The job of AP was to untangle
this mess and discover the precise meaning of a sentence. This is also in line with Gilbert Ryle.
After this, Russel and Wittgenstein came up with syllogisms, which is a way of reasoning. They used the
same method that was used in geometry — you start with a line and build up with facts towards a
conclusion. It consists of three propositions:
1. Major premise: this is a major term — All men are mortal.
2. Minor premise: this is a minor term — All Greeks are men.
3. Conclusion: minor term + major term — All Greeks are mortal.
With this approach, the things you can say is very limited. This is not a real concept of what language is.
Therefore, AP evolved, because Gödel says that the program of Russell is formally impossible to prove all
truth statements. From now on, context became relevant. Exact and precise statements could be verified/
falsifier when they were compared to the actual state of affairs in the world. It was then transformed into
things we know is true, about a particular object in a particular time and context. This method is called
Logical Positivism. This says that sentences must be verifiable in order to be meaningful.
This also introduced paradoxes, evolves around information that is taken for granted between interacting
speakers. For example, when we say “The present king of France is bald” we infer that this is a precise
statement. But can we judge whether this is true or false? We only want to use statements that are precise
enough to be able to judge whether it is true or false. You will end up with a problem here, because there is
no such entity as the king of France. But, if you say it is false, because there is no present king of France,
you will end up with a problem because the negotiation of a false statement is necessarily true. If you were
to say “The present king of France is not bald” it necessarily had to be true in the first place. What Russel
says is: when you utter “the current king of France is bald”, you are not uttering one proposition but two. It
is a statement that seems contradictory but actually is true ("less is more”).
, Another conclusion could be that sentences have no meaning, which regards to another strength of AP
where they try to show that words actually do not have a meaning in a sentence, or that sentences may
have different meanings in different contexts. They would indicate these sentences as imprecise,
meaningless and rubbish. Both of these approaches fit into this ‘picture theory of language’.
We need presuppositions, which are background beliefs relating to an utterance that must be mutually
known or assumed by the speaker and the addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in
context. Information that is taken for granted between interacting speakers. When you say “Jane once
wrote fiction” you presuppose that she once wrote fiction. The same goes for the following meanings:
1. Semantic meaning (context free)
1. (Bike_speaker (broken))_time
2. Propositional meaning (contextualized) — context is added in order for the speaker and addressee to
know what they are talking about.
1. (Bike_Mike Huiskes (Broken))_July 27th 2018
________________________________________________________________________________________________
John Austin came up with his Speech Act Theory (SAT) which explains how speakers use language to
accomplish intended actions and how listeners determine the meaning from what is said. It is a subfield of
Pragmatics concerned with the ways in which words can be used not only to present information but to
also carry out actions. Where Wittgenstein conflated meaning and use, does Austin something else; he
distinguishes the meaning of words from the speech acts. We can distinguish speech acts into two kinds:
1. Performatives: something is done in or by saying something. These sentences perform an act but are
neither true or false. An example is: “I name the ship Queen Elizabeth”. However, even though they
cannot be true or false, they can go wrong, like saying “I name the ship Queen Elizabeth” after the ship
was named. In this case, the performative is ‘general unhappy’. In performatives we see two types:
1. Explicit performatives: containing a performative verb (adding the adverb ‘hereby’): “I (hereby)
promise that I shall be there”.
2. Primary performatives: these are produced without a performative verb: “I shall be there”.
2. Constatives: something is said which can be true or false. It is a statement-making utterance. For
example: “We live in a small town I the north of Holland”.
Performatives and constatives both have a common underlying structure. This means that performatives
and constatives are not really as distinct from each other as Austin claimed them to be. However, a
sentence like ‘it is yours’ can either be a performative or a constative — depending on the occasion. Both
need to meet felicity conditions:
1. There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect.
2. The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in the procedure.
3. The procedure must be executed (i) correctly and (ii) completely.
4. The persons must have the requisite thoughts, feelings and intentions, as specified in the procedure.
5. If consequent conduct is specified, then the relevant parties must so do.
Utterances that do not meet the conditions are called infelicities or as Austin calls it: MISFIRES, for
example when a man says “my house” when he actually has two houses and the context does not make
clear which of the two is meant. When utterances are not achieving the conditions they are insincerities,
(‘infractions’, ‘breaches’) or how Austin calls it: ABUSES, for example when someone gives bad advice or
when someone does not keep the promise.
After this, there is a shift from the dichotomy performative/constative to a general theory of illocutionary
acts of which the various performatives and constatives are just sub-cases. Austin now proposes a
framework in terms of which all speech acts (constatives and performatives) can be described. It says that
there are three components in every utterance:
1. Locutionary act: saying something —using the sound, grammatical and semantic systems of the
language (“close the door”).
2. Illocutionary act: doing something in saying something —the act identified by an explicit performative
(“he urged me to close the door”).
3. Perlocutionary act: doing something by saying something — the act performed by or as a result of
saying something (non-linguistic) (“he persuaded me to close the door”).
We can apply it to an example of “it is cold in here”. The locutionary act is the act of saying it with its literal
meaning — that the weather is cold. The illocutionary act can be a request of the hearer to shut the
window. The perlocutionary act can be the hearer shutting window or his refusal to comply with the
request. What speech act is most concerned about are the illocutionary acts, for it attempts to account for
the ways by which speakers can mean more than what they say.
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