Meanings Of Pragmatics

Definition 1



Charles Morris (1903 – 1979) was concerned with the study of the science of signs, which he called semiotic;distinguished 3 branches of semiotics: syntactic (or syntax), which studies the formal relation among different signs; semantics, the study of the relation between the signs and the objects they denote; and pragmatics, the study of the relation of signs to their interpreters, i.e. people.



Definition 2
Pragmatics is the study of relations between language and context.( George Yule)

Example:

**She is 65 years old. But she went a bit funny after her husband died.

Funny:
• causing amusement, laughter;
• difficult to explain or understand; strange;
• slightly unwell;
• slightly insane, eccentric.



Advantage of Definition 2: it is not as wide as Morris’s definition, it delimits the field and excludes from the area of pragmatics such disciplines as sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics.

Disadvantage: all the communicative (or conversational) characteristics are excluded.



Definition 3 (by cognitive pragmatics)
Pragmatics is the study of how receivers of messages interpret utterances.



Definition 4 (socio-psychological pragmatics)
Pragmatics is the study of the speaker’s meaning: what does the producer of the message mean, why does he choose to express his idea in a certain way.


Understanding an utterance:
Understanding the sense + the context + assigning reference to the utterance:

Example
**He sat on the wall, he had a great fall...

**Assigning more than one reference or sense to one and the same utterance can create a humorous effect:

Example
**In a clothing store: "Wonderful bargains for men with 16 and 17 necks."

utterance + the structure of the utterance

Example
**The boy was playing with the dog eating a smelly hamburger.


Four possible ways of understanding utterance meaning and
force:

1) You can understand both the meaning of the utterance and its force. This is the most common state of affairs; otherwise our communication with other people would be impossible.

Example

**Teacher: What is a “force” of an utterance?
Student: The force of an utterance is the speaker’s communicative
intention.

2) Understanding utterance meaning but not force:

Example
Teacher: Say, you can't sleep in my class.
Student: I could if you didn't talk so loud.

3) Understanding force but not utterance meaning:

Example
Speaker A: Where do you live?
Speaker B (meJ): I live in Fanling.
Speaker A: How did you come here?
Speaker B starts a long explanation: the principal of
the school where I used to work advertised a job in a
Russian newspaper…
Speaker A interrupts impatiently: No, I mean did you
come here by bus?

4) Understanding neither meaning nor force:

Example
Customer: When I bought this cat, you told me he was good
for mice. He doesn't go near them!
Clerk: Well, isn't that good for mice?

+ how more gets communicated then what is said


CONCLUSION: Pragmatics is a complex discipline. It studies
Meaning In Interactions (J. Thomas)


Act speech theory


When we speak, our words do not have meaning in and of themselves. They are very much affected by the situation, the speaker and the listener. Thus words alone do not have a simple fixed meaning.
• Locutionary act: saying something (the locution) with a certain meaning in traditional sense. This may not constitute a speech act.
• Illocutionary act: the performance of an act in saying something (vs. the general act of saying something).
The illocutionary force is the speaker's intent. A true 'speech act'.
e.g. informing, ordering, warning, undertaking.
• Perlocutionary acts: Speech acts that have an effect on the feelings, thoughts or actions of either the speaker or the listener. In other words, they seek to change minds!
Unlike locutionary acts, perlocutionary acts are external to the performance.
e.g., inspiring, persuading or deterring.
Two types of locutionary act are utterance acts, where something is said (or a sound is made) and which may not have any meaning, and propositional acts, where a particular reference is made. (note: acts are sometimes also called utterances - thus a perlocutionary act is the same a perlocutionary utterance).


Searle (1969)


identified five illocutionary/perlocutionary points:
1. Assertives: statements may be judged true or false because they aim to describe a state of affairs in the world.
2. Directives: statements attempt to make the other person's actions fit the propositional content.
3. Commissives: statements which commit the speaker to a course of action as described by the propositional content.
4. Expressives: statements that express the “sincerity condition of the speech act”.
5. Declaratives: statements that attempt to change the world by “representing it as having been changed”.
Thus pretty much all we do when we are talking is assert, direct, commiserate, express and declare. In fact we follow two types of rules:
• Constitutive rules or Definition rules that create or define new forms of behavior.
• Regulative or Behavior rules that govern types of behavior that already exist.
The meaning of an utterance is thus defined more by convention than the initiative of the reader. When we speak, we are following learned rules.
Performativity occurs where the utterance of a word also enacts it ('I name this ship...'). It is a form of illocutionary act. This has been taken up by such as Judith Butler in feminism and has been used to indicate how pornography is less a form of speech as a performative act of sexual degradation. It is related to suture and interpellation in the way it forces a situation.
Example
Oh! - is an utterance (note that communication is not intended - it is just a sound caused by surprise).
The black cat - is a propositional act (something is referenced, but no communication may be intended)
The black cat is stupid - is an assertive illocutionary act (it intends to communicate).
Please find the black cat - is a directive perlocutionary act (it seeks to change behaviour).