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Pragmatics Summary
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This document includes: Summary of Key Terms per week + Answers to Weekly Assignments + Important Seminar Notes + Tips for the Exam Prep
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University of Groningen, Faculty of ArtsBA Communication & Information Studies
LCX056B05 - Pragmatics 2024 - 2025
Summary of Key Terms per week + Answers to Weekly Assignments +
Important Seminar Notes + Tips for the Exam Prep
by Lidia Nikolova
Dear colleagues, I hope this document makes it easier for you to prepare
for the exam. The discussion of all key terms is quite detailed, so
everyone is able to get the gist of each of them.
Keep in mind that this document is not enough to prepare for the exam.
Make sure to read in detail each study material for this course, before
making use of this document.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... 1
Week 2 – Truth and Action ....................................................................................................... 3
Key terms of this week: ........................................................................................................ 3
1.2 John Austin’s Speech Act theory ...................................................................................... 3
1.3 John Searle’s Speech Act Theory ...................................................................................... 9
1.3.2 Sincere promising and its propositional content conditions ........................................... 10
1.3.4 Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts ................................................................... 13
1.3.5 Direct VS Indirect Speech Acts .................................................................................... 15
Week 3 – Indirectness and Implicatures .................................................................................. 16
Key terms of this week: ...................................................................................................... 17
Cooperation Principle and its Constitutive Conversational Maxims (Grice).............................. 17
Flouting of the Maxims ...................................................................................................... 19
Five properties of implicatures ........................................................................................... 21
GCIs and PCIs .................................................................................................................... 23
1
, Entailments VS Implicatures ............................................................................................... 24
Scalar implicatures ............................................................................................................ 26
Neo – Gricean Pragmatics (Q&R principles by Horn) ............................................................. 26
Neo – Gricean Pragmatics (Q, I, M principles by Levinson) .................................................... 27
Week 5 – Culture and Context ................................................................................................ 41
Culture and Context ........................................................................................................... 42
Chapter 4 - Senft - Pragmatics and ...................................................................................... 42
Critical assessment of ethnography of speaking: .................................................................. 47
Linguistic relativity (by Sapir-Whorf (hypothesis)) ................................................................ 48
Exercises about: ................................................................................................................ 48
Linguistic relativity: how far does it go? ............................................................................... 48
Context and Deixis - Peter Auer .......................................................................................... 52
Representational Theory of Language: ................................................................................ 53
Auer’s Theory of Contextualization ..................................................................................... 55
Week 6 – Framing and Participation........................................................................................ 59
Key terms of this week: ...................................................................................................... 59
Knowledge Clip ................................................................................................................. 59
Notes from Seminar of week 6............................................................................................ 61
Contextualization cues ....................................................................................................... 63
Footing (term introduced by Goffman) ................................................................................ 63
Week 7 – Face and Politeness ............................................................................................. 66
Politeness Theory of Brown & Levinson ............................................................................... 67
Decision Tree for choosing linguistic strategies ..................................................................... 71
(Brown & Levinson): .......................................................................................................... 71
To be or not to be polite? ................................................................................................... 75
Face Work by Goffman ....................................................................................................... 77
Watt’s take on politeness ................................................................................................... 78
Goffman vs Watts .............................................................................................................. 78
Week 7 Video .................................................................................................................... 79
2
, Week 2 – Truth and Action
Weekly reading:
Chapter 1 - Understanding pragmatics (Senft)
Key terms of this week:
Austin: Searle: Grice:
speech Act Theory Speech Act Theory cooperative principle
constatives effects of illocutionary acts conversational maxims
performatives proposition flouting
locutionary acts performing 2 acts (ill. act)
perlocutionary acts propositional content conditions
Illocutionary acts preparatory conditions
Felicity conditions sincerity condition
Primary performatives essential condition
Explicit performatives constitutive rules table
Phonetic, phatic, rhetic dimensions of variation (illoc. act)
direct speech act
indirect speech act
1.2 John Austin’s Speech Act theory
Austin differentiates between constatives (assertions or statements) and
performatives (utterances with which something is done).
Austin later abandoned this theory and stated that all utterances are performatives.
Classification of Speech Acts by Austin (central to his idea of language as action):
3
, • Locutions – speech acts which have meaning
• Illocutions – speech acts which have a certain force
• Perlocutions – speech acts which achieve certain effects
Austin’s differentiation between performatives and constatives:
Performatives are:
• Declarative sentences, in which something is done in them/ or is done by saying
something.
• Characterized by verbs produced in 1st person, singular present active
• These sentences are neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’.
• Although they are seen this way, performatives can go wrong – then they are
referred to as unhappy.
Examples of performatives:
“I name this ship Queen Elizabeth.”
“I bet you six pence Fury, the black stallion will win the race.”
Example of performatives going wrong:
Announcing the bet, after the race is over -> then the performative is ‘in general
unhappy’.
For such reasons, performatives should meet the following felicity conditions:
The examples are of sentences where these conditions are not met.
A. (i) There must be a conventional procedure having a conventional effect
Assume there is a married couple and both are Christians. If the husband
says to his wife ‘I hereby divorce you’ repeating this utterance three times
he will not achieve a divorce; however, with a Muslim couple such an
action would constitute a divorce.
(ii) The circumstances and persons must be appropriate, as specified in the
procedure.
Assume a clergyman baptizing a baby ‘Albert’ instead of ‘Alfred’
B. The procedure must be executed
4
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