The pragmatic aspect of the sentence

Plan

Introduction…………………………………………………………………..……...2

Chapter 1. Theoretical aspects of pragmatics……………………………………...3

1. Notion of pragmatics…………………………………..………………....4

                       1.1.1. Fields related to pragmatics………………………………………...6

2. Pragmatics in literary theory……………………………...........................7

Chapter 2. The pragmatic aspect of the sentence………………..…………….......9

                          2.1. Pragmatic interpretation of sentences ………………………….………..10

                          2.2. Indexicality ………….……………………………………………..…….11

            2.2.1. Kaplan about Indexical and Demonstratives………………...……13

                          2.3. Gricean conversational maxims ………………………………...……….13

                          2.4. Levinson's theory of Utterance-Type-Meaning……………..…………...16

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..19

Literature used…………………..………………………………………………….20 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any preexisting knowledge about those involved, and other factors. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance. In pragmatics, an utterance is most often taken to be a linguistic action performed by a certain speaker in a certain place at a certain moment. [11]

The problem of pragmatics is not new. A significant contribution to the study was made by such scientists as Austin, Morris, Wezhbicka, Grice, Goffmann and others.

So, the topicality of this paper is specified by the need to study such important linguistic subfield as pragmatics and to research the pragmatic aspects of the sentences as well as sentences pragmatic interpretation.

The object of this paper is the sentence and its pragmatic interpretation.

The subject of this paper is the ways of interpreting sentences from the pragmatic point of linguistics.

The aim of this paper is to identify and describe the pragmatic aspects of sentences in English. To achieve this goal it is necessary to perform a number of specific objectives:

• to define pragmatics and its general characteristics;
• to examine ways of pragmatic interpreting of sentences;
• to define pragmatic aspects of utterances;
• to define Gricean conversational maxims.

 

Chapter 1. Theoretical aspects of pragmatics.

The term ‘pragmatics’ was first introduced by Charles Morris, a philosopher. He contrasts pragmatics with semantics and syntax. He claims that syntax is the study of the grammatical relations of linguistic units to one another and the grammatical structures of phrases and sentences that result from these grammatical relation, semantics is the study of the relation of linguistic units to the objects they denote, and pragmatics is the study of the relation of linguistic units to people who communicate. [1; 22]. Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which specific events are meant, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language. Logic and semantics traditionally deal with properties of types of expressions, and not with properties that differ from token to token, or use to use, or from utterance to utterance, and vary with the particular properties that differentiate them. Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as dealing with the effects of context. This is equivalent to saying it deals with utterances, if one collectively refers to all the facts that can vary from utterance to utterance as ‘context.’ One must be careful, however, for the term is often used with more limited meanings. [7; 1]

In pragmatics, an utterance is most often taken to be a linguistic action performed by a certain speaker in a certain place at a certain moment. It has, then, the ontological status of actions: each utterance is a unique historical event; it is a token, not a type; an utterance made by one speaker cannot be made by another one; an utterance made here and now cannot be made there later. In Linguistics, ‘utterance’ is often used for the action of pronouncing orally a sentence, but philosophers tend to also include writing, signing, and other modes of language use, and for the action of using a sub-sentential expression. It is the view of many but not all pragmatists that the primary bearers of truth-conditional contents are utterances, not sentences; or, even better, that truth-conditional contents or propositions are expressed by the speakers who utter sentences, not by the sentences themselves. Utterances of declarative sentences are called ‘statements.’ [6; 3]

Different theorists have focused on different properties of utterances. To discuss them it will be helpful to make a distinction between ‘near-side pragmatics’ and ‘far-side pragmatics.’ The picture is this. The utterances philosophers usually take as paradigmatic are assertive uses of declarative sentences, where the speaker says something. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the nature of certain facts that are relevant to determining what is said. Far-side pragmatics is focused on what happens beyond saying: what speech acts are performed in or by saying what is said, or what implicatures (see below for an explanation of this term) are generated by saying what is said.The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker's meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning is bridged. Pragmatic studies of verbal communication start from the assumption (first defended in detail by the philosopher Paul Grice), that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the expression and recognition of intention. [5; 12] An utterance is a linguistically-coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding.

1.1. Notion of pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of the context-dependent aspects of meaning which are systematically abstracted away from in the construction of logical form. The word pragmatics derives via Latin pragmaticus from the Greek πραγματικός (pragmatikos), meaning amongst others "fit for action", which comes from πρᾶγμα (pragma), "deed, act", and that from πράσσω (prassō), "to pass over, to practise, to achieve". Pragmatics seeks to characterize the features of the speech context which help determine which proposition is expressed by a given sentence.

Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics as outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure. In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being. [10]

The areas of pragmatics study:

• The study of the speaker's meaning, not focusing on the phonetic or grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what the speaker's intentions and beliefs are.
• The study of the meaning in context, and the influence that a given context can have on the message. It requires knowledge of the speaker's identities, and the place and time of the utterance.
• The study of implicatures, i.e. the things that are communicated even though they are not explicitly expressed.
• The study of relative distance, both social and physical, between speakers in order to understand what determines the choice of what is said and what is not said.
• The study of what is not meant, as opposed to the intended meaning, i.e. that which is unsaid and unintended, or unintentional.
• Information Structure, the study of how utterances are marked in order to efficiently manage the common ground of referred entities between speaker and hearer.
• Formal Pragmatics, the study of those aspects of meaning and use, for which context of use is an important factor, by using the methods and goals of formal semantics. [5; 2]

The meaning of a sentence can be regarded as a function from a context (including time, place, and possible world) into a proposition, where a proposition is a function from a possible world into a truth value. Pragmatic aspects of meaning involve the interaction between an expression's context of utterance and the interpretation of elements within that expression. Pragmatics seeks to 'characterize the features of the speech context which help determine which proposition is expressed by a given sentence'. The pragmatic subdomain of deixis or indexicality seeks to characterize the properties of shifters, indexicals, or token-reflexives, expressions like *I, you, here, there, now, then, hereby*, tense/aspect markers, etc.) whose meanings are constant but whose referents vary with the speaker, hearer, time and place of utterance, style or register, or purpose of speech act. [3; 43]

Well, the central problem for pragmatics is that the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding vastly underdetermines the speaker's meaning. There may be ambiguities and referential ambivalences to resolve, ellipses to interpret, and other indeterminacies of explicit content to deal with. There may be implicatures to identify, illocutionary indeterminacies to resolve, metaphors and ironies to interpret. All this requires an appropriate set of contextual assumptions, which the hearer must also supply. Most pragmatists working today would agree with this characterisation of pragmatics. Most would also agree that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately a non-demonstrative inference process which takes place at a risk: there is no guarantee that the meaning constructed, even by a hearer correctly following the best possible procedure, is the one the speaker intended to convey. However, this picture may be fleshed out in several different ways, with different implications for the relation of pragmatics to other cognitive systems. On the one hand, there are those who argue that most, if not all, aspects of the process of constructing a hypothesis about the speaker's meaning are closely related to linguistic decoding. These code-like aspects of interpretation might be carried out within an extension of the language module, by non-metapsychological processes whose output might then be inferentially evaluated and attributed as a speaker's meaning. On the other hand, there are those who see pragmatic interpretation as metapsychological through and through. On this approach, both hypothesis construction and hypothesis evaluation are seen as rational processes geared to the recognition of speakers' intentions, carried out by Fodorian central processes or by a 'theory of mind' module dedicated to the attribution of mental states on the basis of behaviour. [9; 13]

1.1.1. Fields related to pragmatics

There is a considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community. However, sociolinguists tend to be more interested in variations in language within such communities.

Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social phenomena; it thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology. Because pragmatics describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts. For example, the study of code switching directly relates to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force. [10]

Pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas to which a word refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships among signs or symbols. Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied meaning of the given idea.

1.2. Pragmatics in literary theory

Pragmatics underpins Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. In Gender Trouble, she claims that gender and sex are not natural categories, but socially constructed roles produced by "reiterative acting."

In Excitable Speech she extends her theory of performativity to hate speech and censorship, arguing that censorship necessarily strengthens any discourse it tries to suppress and therefore, since the state has sole power to define hate speech legally, it is the state that makes hate speech performative. [10]

Jaques Derrida remarked that some work done under Pragmatics aligned well with the program he outlined in his book Of Grammatology.

Émile Benveniste argued that the pronouns "I" and "you" are fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject. [7; 5]

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. They draw three conclusions:

1) A performative utterance does not communicate information about an act second-hand—it is the act;

2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics;

3) There is no distinction between language and speech. [11]

The last conclusion tries to refute Saussure’s division between language and parole and Chomsky’s distinction between surface structure and deep structure simultaneously.

So, pragmatics deals with utterances, and mainly with the context. The sentence meaning greatly underdetermines speaker's meaning, and it is a central problem of pragmatics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2. The pragmatic aspect of the sentence

In 1938 Charles Morris published Foundation of the Theory of Signs. He distinguished there three areas of logical investigation: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. This book is commonly recognized as the starting point of investigation into the area of pragmatics. As a matter of fact, Morris' book did not make any contribution to pragmatics but rather described problems of the understanding language which cannot be handled by semantic methods. He also explicitly indicated the need to solve them in another way. Concrete research began in the fifties. Levinson contains a review of the linguistic approach to pragmatics; however, an adequate monograph presenting the logical contributions to the area is still lacking. Since then the main results in the area have been achieved mainly by linguistically-oriented logicians and logically-oriented linguists. This stresses the fact that pragmatics lies on the borderline between logic and linguistics. [1; 215]

When it is manifest that one individual is producing an ostensive stimulus (e.g. an utterance) in order to communicate with another individual, it is manifest that intends to find this stimulus worth his attention (or else, manifestly, communication would fail). Humans are good at predicting what will attract the attention of others. So when one person understands that another person intends him to find her ostensive stimulus worth his attention, we can unpack his understanding in terms of the notion of relevance: one person intends another person to find the stimulus relevant enough to secure his attention. Thus, every utterance (or other type of ostensive stimulus, though we will talk only of utterances from now on) conveys a presumption of its own relevance.

John Austin is the person who is usually credited with generating interest in what has since come to be known as pragmatics and speech act theory. His ideas of language were set out in a series of lectures which he gave at Oxford University. These lectures were later published under the title “How to do things with words”. His first step was to show that some utterances are not statements or questions but actions. He reached this conclusion through an analysis of what he termed ‘performative verbs’. [1; 22]

If pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed, speech-act theory constitutes a central subdomain. It has long been recognized that the propositional content of utterance can be distinguished from its illocutionary force, the speaker's intention in uttering. [2; 135] The identification and classification of speech acts was initiated by Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle. In an explicit performative utterance (e.g. *I hereby promise to marry you*), the speaker does something, i.e. performs an act whose character is determined by her intention, rather than merely saying something. Austin regards performatives as problematic for truth-conditional theories of meaning, since they appear to be devoid of ordinary truth value; an alternate view is that a performative is automatically self- verifying when felicitous, constituting a contingent a-priori truth like *I am here now*. Of particular linguistic significance are indirect speech acts, where the form of a given sentence (e.g. the yes-no question in *Can you pass the salt?*) belies the actual force (here, a request for action) characteristically conveyed by the use of that sentence. [6; 4]

2.1. Pragmatic interpretation of sentences

Pragmatics is often defined as the theory of the way we use language. Theories of pragmatics then link the language and its user while semantics links the syntactical entities of language with their meanings. One may think that a semantics for a language is a sufficient basis for the capacity to use that language. Through having knowledge of an appropriate semantics a competent would user know the meanings of words and sentences and this should be enough to use the language properly. The reality appears to be much more complicated. [8; 16] Very often, especially where common-sense language is concerned, sentences are uttered in a way which seems to have no relation to their meaning.

Let us consider such example. Somebody asks you:

e.g. Would you be so kind to tell me what time is it?

Somebody can recognize that it is a yes-no question. She/he has at hand an appropriate theory of questions of this kind and knows that the speaker expects from him one of the answers: "yes" or "no". A logical analysis of this question, even if proper in the logical sense, would give us no chance to answer the question in the proper and commonly-known way. We all know that the speaker is not expecting an answer of the form "yes" or "no". Thus the problem arising in the situation described above consists in the difference between the literal meaning of and the meaning conveyed by the speaker. [3; 75] The conveyed meaning of is simply "Tell me what time is it".

A great part of the achievements made in contemporary logic comes from the investigations of the language of mathematics and has the result of work by mathematicians or, more precisely, mathematically-educated logicians. As a consequence the first-order predicate language is often considered as a good first approximation of natural language. Moreover, the properties of this formal language are, in a sense, projected on natural language causing the illusion that some typical natural language phenomena are paradoxical. There are two apparent influential paradoxes (in fact typical natural language phenomena): intentionality and indexicality. Their recognition and explanation were milestones along the hard path from classical logic to natural language. [4; 12]

According to the contemporary paradigm of logic, the meaning of a sentence is its truth value. Thus to get the meaning of a sentence it suffices to interpret the symbols occurring in the sentence. [5; 11]

Let’s consider another aspect of the structure of interpreting sentences. The sentence “Now I am here.” cannot be uttered without being true. We must admit that it is always true. Hence the rule of necessitation makes us accept the sentence: “It is necessary that now I an here.” However the last one seems to be impossible to accept. It is purely accidental whether I am here or elsewhere.

Because of the problems arising from interpreting such sentences logicians invented the notion of an eternal sentence. [9; 27] An eternal sentence is a sentence whose meaning doesn't depend on who utters it (or where/when it was uttered, etc.)

2.2. Indexicality

Deixis is the study of deictic or indexical expressions in language , like You, now, today. It can be thought about as a special kind of grammatical property, in turn instantiated in the more familiar grammatical categories of person, tense, (deictic) place, and so on.

Indexicality involves so called "the dynamical coexistence" of an indexical sign with its object of reference. It is normally associated with linguistic expressions that are semantically insufficient to achieve reference without contextual support. That support is provided by the mutual attention of the interlocutors and their ability to reconstruct the speaker's referential intentions given clues in the environment. [9; 13]

One such clue is gesture or gaze, which then becomes a part of the indexical sign. All this may seem coherent, but it does not suffice to establish clear boundaries to the phenomena. One problem is so called Deixis am Phantasma ('deixis in the imagination') in which one imagines oneself somewhere else, and shifts the deictic origo by a series of transpositions. Much deixis is relativized to text, as in reported speech, or as in the opening line of one of Hemingway's short stories: "The door of Henry's lunchroom opened and two men came in", where Henry has become the deictic origo. Then there is anaphora, which is so closely linked to deixis that it is not always separable, as in "I've been living in San Francisco for 5 years and I love it here" (where here is both anaphoric and deictic), bridged by the intermediate area of textual deixis (as in "Harry said 'I didn't do that' but he said it in a funny way", where it does not refer to the proposition expressed but to Harry's utterance itself). [5; 15] An additional boundary problem is posed by the fact that the class of indexical expressions is not so clearly demarcated. For example, in "Let's go to a nearby restaurant", nearby is clearly used deictically, but in "Churchill took De Gaulle to a nearby restaurant" it is clearly being used non-deictically - is this deixis relativized to text.