6. What Did You Mean by What You Said? Pragmatics
6.7. Summary
As we have seen from the examples and the accompanying explanations, the field of pragmat-ics is a practical way of looking at how language works and how it is used by people. Our communication is dependent on the setting and the participants, the topic and the media we are using to send and receive information. Speakers send messages in the hope that listeners can follow what they say and listeners make an effort to do so. They need to be cooperative to maintain successful communication, in which we make statements or carry out activities by speaking. Communication is either direct or indirect; however, people are good at inter-preting indirectly communicated messages; we apply certain strategies in doing so. Commu-nication is not only language-related; it also contains cultural elements, which are to be learnt by the learner of a language.
Thus, pragmatics is the study of language from the point of view of the users, of the choices they make, the forces they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on the other participants in an act of communication. Pragmatics involves semantics, sociolinguistics and non-linguistic context.
6.7. Summary
Points to Ponder
1. Consider the following excerpt:
“What are we going to do about Baba?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“She can’t remember anything.”
“Did she ask you whether she was taking medicine?”
“No.”
“No she’s not or no she didn’t ask?”
“She didn’t ask.”
“She was supposed to,” I said.
“Well, she didn’t.”
(Delillo, D.(1986) p.61:White Noise. Viking/Penguin: New York) a. What is ambiguous in this dialogue?
b. Where does the ambiguity originate, from a linguistic point of view?
c. How much context is minimally needed to clear up the ambiguity?
d. How do the participants resolve the ambiguity?
e. What is “she was supposed to” referring to?
f. Do you think the last reply is ambiguous?
g. How much of it is syntactically and how much pragmatically based?
2. “What’s your name?”
“Betty Skymitch.”
“Spell it, please.”
B – E – T – T – Y
a. What presupposition is violated?
b. What makes this conversation funny?
3. I promise to set fire to your house.
I warn you that you will be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
WARNING: Your lawn will turn brown in November.
a. What is the problem with these speech acts?
b. Can you think of any conditions that make any of these speech acts acceptable?
Suggested Reading
Austin, J.L. (1962): How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press: Oxford Starting from an exhaustive examination of his well-known distinction of performa-tive utterances from statements, the writer abandons that distinction, replacing it by a more general theory of illocutionary forces of utterances which has important bear-ings on a wide variety of philosophical problems.
Leech, G. (1983): Principles of Pragmatics. Longman: London
This book presents a model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of good communica-tive behaviour. The writer maintains that the language system in the abstract must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. It builds on speech act theory and the theory of conversational implicature and enlarges pragmatics to in-clude politeness, irony and other social principles of linguistic behaviour.
Levinson, S.C. (1983): Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the concern of pragmatics.
In this book the writer provides an integrative analysis of the central topics in prag-matics – deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure.
An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language use – psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature. Many students in these disciplines, as well as students of linguistics, will find this a valuable textbook.
Mey, J.L. (1993): Pragmatics: An Introduction. Blackwell: Oxford
This is a concise introduction to the field of pragmatics – the study of language from the point of view of its users, of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in an act of communication. The book includes chapters on what we say when we do not say explicitly what we mean and on the regularities and irreg-ularities of everyday conversation. It aims to introduce the reader to the complexities of language use, and the use of language to social effect.
Suggested Reading
hen we want to use a word and are not sure of its meaning, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that we can ”find out what it really means” by looking at its origins. For example, in the 13thcentury the English word nicemeant
“foolish, stupid, senseless”. Nevertheless, looking at the history of words is a fascinating ex-ercise and sometimes leads us to new inisghts. Although the meaning of words is arbitrary, words of the same language are related to each other and to others in other languages, and each word has its own story or history. The Old English word tunge, like the word tongue in English today, refers to the muscular organ in the mouth, but also to speech and language.
The visually different word language, meaning the same as it does today, comes from 12th century French. Yet these words have the same ancestor: the Old Latin dingua, which in turn comes from the supposed Proto-Indo-European word *dnghwa. Proto-Indo-European pre-dates writing and is the hypothetical reconstructed ancestral language of the Indo-Eu-ropean family, in others words, of English and German and French and Latin and the Slavic languages and Sanskrit and Greek and … other languages. However, Hungarian is not among them, as every Hungarian schoolchild knows. To find out how we know that tongue
and languageare related even though they are so dissimilar, read the following chapter.
Language Change and Language History Judit Górász
Kodolányi János University College Department of English Language and Literature
7.1. Living languages change constantly 7.1.1. Levels of change
Take a look at the following Old English sentence (Old English is the “ancestor” of today’s English) and its Modern English equivalent:
Her Cynewulf benam Sigebryht his rices 7 West Seaxna wiotan for unryhtum dćdum buton Hamtunscire.
‘Here Cynewulf and the West Saxon wise men deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for evil deeds except for Hamptonshire.’
Would you have recognised the OE sentence as English? The difference is rather obvious even though some words may seem familiar. If we examine the Old English sentence, we can find evidence of change at all levels of language. Here are a few examples: