Week 1. Introduction
Pragmatics is the study of knowing what the speakers mean with words by using them.
A speech act is the use of language for an intentional purpose, for example:
● insult someone
● pass a compliment
● Etc
As an apology for causing inconvenience, the term ‘excuse me’ has a politeness
function so that the two parts of his utterance are two speech acts, an apology and a
request for help. Politeness phenomena (Brown&Levinson) mark a departure from
maximally efficient communication. When a guest wants the landlady to open the bar,
they don’t use the maximally economical imperative form “open the bar” but instead
asks the question “is the bar open?”. It is an important phenomenon since we need to
explain why anyone would go to unnecessary trouble when communicating a meaning.
In pragmatics there is no such thing as a rule: we have expectations about how
interaction will go and, as we’ll see later, can identify principles which seem to guide
what we choose to say in order to convey speaker meaning. In a similar way, pragmatic
meanings are probabilistic in the sense that the addressee must infer from my use of
‘you need to get yourself a better car’ that I’m passing a compliment, but as his
inference is only the best guess he can make as to what I mean by what I say, it’s
probabilistic.
The judgments we make about pragmatics are governed by optimality, so that a
speaker tries to achieve an optimal form for the meaning she seeks to convey and a
hearer tries to determine an optimal meaning for the form of the utterance he hears.
This is why in pragmatics there are only extents to which we achieve an optimal
meaning-to-form and form-to-meaning correspondence. Metapragmatic features, such
as prosody and discourse markers, lessen the task of reaching an optimal
understanding, especially when an unusually large processing effort is required or when
without this marking we wouldn’t be able to recover such speaker meanings at all. We
might therefore think of them as constraints on interpretation because, by reducing the
wide range of possible interpretations, they help us to recover the speaker’s intended
meaning in an economical way and within the limited time that online processing of talk
allows. Talk-in-interaction has an emergent nature: participants can not always predict
another’s response.
,Sentence meaning is the term we use to describe the literal meaning of sentences,
whereas speaker meaning is the term we use to describe the meanings we infer that
go beyond literal meaning. Sometimes the propositional form of the sentence meaning
will look similar to the propositional form of the speaker meaning, as in:
(1) that’s the bus <sentence meaning>
that’s the bus that Joan will be on <putative speaker meaning>
Sometimes they look very different, as in
(2) you need to get yourself a better car <sentence meaning>
I’m full of admiration for your lovely new car <putative speaker meaning>
In Optimality Theory, matching sentence meaning to speaker meaning is not subject to
rules which generate utterances but to constraints which limit the possibilities available
for conveying the meaning the speaker has in mind. Metapragmatic marking guides
the correct interpretation of an utterance that might otherwise be misunderstood. So by
prefacing what this says with ‘oh’ “Oh, 25p off milk products'', the correct meaning is
conveyed. The reason we use the word metapragmatic is because it shows that
speakers are (possibly subconsciously) aware of the pragmatic effect of what they say.
Speech act theory distinguishes between what we say and what we do by saying, or
between the propositions carried by our utterances and the force they have.
Felicity conditions is context most commonly associated with an utterance. So if
someone asks whether the bar is open, the felicity condition with this utterance is that
this person would like to drink. However, if the person was asking for another reason,
the person hasn’t found an optimal form for the speaker meaning.
Week 2. Truth and Action
Austin’s Theory: Language = Action, no language
is pure description; a person producing an
utterance is not describing the world, they are
acting in the world (and change it by producing the
utterance)
They for example perform a suggestion. It does not
have a truth value, it’s a speech act.
Constative: representations of language can be true or false → truth
“The odds of getting the flu are exactly 1 in 674”
Performative: representations of language can be successful or not → action
“I promise the lecture is over soon”
Later Austin abandoned this and claimed all utterances are performatives, because
even if you are describing you are still acting the world.
, Therefore: utterances are not guided by truth but by cultural knowledge about how to
use these utterances and by their relationship to intention and thought.
Searle’s Theory: the basic unit of human
linguistic communication is the illocutionary act’
in the form of a ‘complete sentence’ produced
under specific conditions. Illocutionary acts
have an ‘effect’ on the hearer; the hearer
understands the speaker’s utterance. Speaking
is performing illocutionary acts in a
rule-governed form of behavior. These rules are
either regulative and can be paraphrased as
imperatives, or they are constitutive and create
and define new forms of behavior. Searle’s
constitutive rules of speech acts represent
Austin’s felicity conditions.
Felicity conditions to study performatives:
Locutionary act: (phonetic → uttering noises, phatic → using words in a certain
grammatical structure, rhetic → using words with a certain meaning)
- Phonetic act: [w a t f ðə d g ɒʧ ʊ ɔː ɒ ]
- Phatic act: watch out for the dog
- Rhetic act: he said to me “watch out for the dog”
Illocutionary act: expressing → performative use of preposition, He expresses the
opinion that the dog might be dangerous
Perlocutionary act: convinced → intended effect of speech act, He has convinced me
that I should be careful with the dog
constitutive rules for illocutionary acts:
- propositional content rule: range of content, smallest common denominator of the
content
- preparatory rules: meaningfulness of the action, conditions/prerequisites for the
existence
- sincerity rule: the utterance must be intended
- essential rule: the utterance counts as…
A classification of illocutionary acts (1976)
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