The pragmatic aspect of the sentence

The pragmatic character of indexicality is not the only central issue for a pragmatic theory of deictic expressions. For the organization of the semantic field of contrastive deictic expressions is often itself determined by pragmatic factors. The analysis of demonstratives is much complicated by their multi-functional role in language - they are often used not only to point things out, but to track referents in discourse and more generally to contrast with other referring expressions.

2.2.1. Kaplan about Indexical and Demonstratives

The most influential treatment of indexicals and demonstratives has probably been David Kaplan's monograph “Demonstratives”, versions of which were circulated in the seventies. Kaplan's basic concepts are context, character, and content. Character is what is provided by sentences with indexicals, like “I am sitting” or “You are sitting”, a function from contextual features to contents. [11]

For Kaplan, a context is a quadruple of an agent, location, time and world; intuitively, these are the speaker of an utterance, the time and location of the utterance, and the possible world in which it occurs; the beliefs of the speaker as to who he is, where he is, and when it is, and what the real world is like are irrelevant to determining content, although not of course to explaining why the speaker says what he does. A proper context is one in which the agent is at the location at the time in the world, which is of course the characteristic relation among the speaker, time, location and world of an utterance. [10]

 Kaplan did not officially take his theory to be a theory of utterances. He thought of his account, or at least of the formal theory he supplies, as a theory of occurrences, or sentences-in-context, which are abstract objects consisting of pairs of contexts and expression types. Utterances are an unsuitable subject matter for logical investigation. Utterances take time, for one thing, so it would not be possible to insist that all of the premises of an argument share the same context, but this stipulation is needed for logic. For another, since any utterance of “I am not speaking” would be false, we might have to conclude that “I am speaking” is a logical truth, an unwelcome result.[5; 18]

Kaplan does not call what he is doing “pragmatics” but the semantics of indexicals and demonstratives.

2.3. Gricean conversational maxims

In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people interact with one another.

As phrased by Paul Grice, who introduced it, it states, "Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."^[1] Though phrased as a prescriptive command, the principle is intended as a description of how people normally behave in conversation. [10]

Listeners and speakers must speak cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. The cooperative principle describes how effective communication in conversation is achieved in common social situations.

The cooperative principle can be divided into four maxims, called the Gricean maxims, describing specific rational principles observed by people who obey the cooperative principle; these principles enable effective communication.

The work of H.P. Grice is a milestone of pragmatics. Grice was a student of conversation, and he enunciated the basic principle that, outside of the theater of the absurd, most conversationalists seem to hold to: the Cooperative Principle. It has four sub-parts or maxims, that conversationalists are enjoined to respect. [8; 32]

• The maxim of quality. Speakers' contributions ought to be true.
• The maxim of quantity. Speakers' contributions should be as informative as required; not saying either too little or too much.
• The maxim of relevance. Contributions should relate to the purposes of the exchange.
• The maxim of manner. Contributions should be orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity. [4; 17]

The maxims work in two modes: the speaker mode and the hearer mode. The speaker mode has a normative sense: Formulate an utterance in such a way as to keep to all the maxims. The hearer mode is more sophisticated: When interpreting an utterance remember that an speaker kept to all the maxims. So when you find out that an speaker has flouted some maxims you have to interpret the utterance anew.

These maxims may be better understood as describing the assumptions listeners normally make about the way speakers will talk, rather than prescriptions for how one ought to talk. Philosopher Kent Bach wrote: “We need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.” [10]

Gricean Maxims generate implicatures. If the overt, surface meaning of a sentence does not seem to be consistent with the Gricean maxims, and yet the circumstances lead to think that the speaker is nonetheless obeying the cooperative principle, a person tends to look for other meanings that could be implied by the sentence. [6; 9]

Let us consider the following examples:

S: Where is Bill?

H: There is a yellow Porsche outside Sue's house.

S: Can you tell me the time?

H: Well, the mail has just come.

In both examples the simplest hearer interpretation of what H has said is that he did break the communication. So, according to the hearer mode of exploiting the maxims of relevance S should interpret the utterance anew appealing to their common knowledge that Bill is a friend of Sue and has a yellow Porsche and that postman comes always at 11 am.

Grice was using observations of the difference between "what is said" and "what is meant" to show that people actually do follow these maxims in conversation.[9;46] We can see how this works in considering the maxim of quantity at work in the following made-up exchange between parent and child:

e.g. Parent: "Did you finish your homework?" Child: "I finished my algebra". Parent: "Well, get busy and finish your English, too!"

The maxim of manner is crucial for understanding the difference between the following two utterances:

e.g. Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an aria from Rigoletto.

Miss Singer sang an aria from Rigoletto.

The content of both the sentences is more or less the same. The latter utterance expresses it direct way. While interpreting the former utterance, the hearer must ask herself why the speaker expresses so simple a matter in such a complicated way.[6;11] The hearer mode of maxim of manner suggests that there must be some reasons for such an utterance. The speaker wants to avoid of using the word sing, stressing singing isn't what Miss Singer is doing. This means Miss Singer is a bad singer.

e.g. This volume is well-bound and free of typographical errors.

This example flouts the maxim of quantity saying less than is normal for a book review, and probably the maxim of relevance as well, since binding and typographical errors are less significant to potential readers than the book's contents. What is implied is: "This volume stinks!".

Grice did not, however, assume that all people should constantly follow these maxims. Instead, he found it interesting when these were not respected, namely either "flouted" (with the listener being expected to be able to understand the message) or "violated" (with the listener being expected to not note this). Flouting would imply some other, hidden meaning. The importance was in what was not said.

2.4. Levinson's Theory of Utterance-Type-Meaning

Levinson's work is a good representative of grammar-oriented pragmatics. Levinson is only marginally a neo-Gricean. He is not committed to Grice's fundamental two-fold division between what is said, on the one hand, and implicatures, on the other — he proposes a third level of default or preferred interpretation. He does not provide a theory of utterance comprehension based primarily on recognition of communicative intentions, for default interpretations are not concerned with that. However, he does assume conversational principles and maxims, formulating a series of heuristics inspired in Grice's maxims of quantity and manner for a theory of Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs) that, as important as they were in Grice's program, have been neglected by many post-Gricean authors.[9; 19] Levinson's GCI theory is not a philosophical theory of human communication, nor a psychological theory of utterance understanding, but a partial theory of utterance-type meaning with its focus on linguistics. As he puts it:

In the composite theory of meaning, the theory of GCIs plays just a small role in a general theory of communication… It is just to linguistic theory that GCIs have an unparalleled import. [9; 21]

The two-layered view of utterance content consisting, according to Levinson, of a level of encoded meaning (sentence-meaning) and a level of inferential meaning (speaker's or utterance-(token)-meaning), must be supplemented by a third intermediate layer of utterance-type-meaning which is not based “on direct computations on speaker-intentions but rather on general expectations about how language is normally used” [9; 22] These expectations are formulated by Levinson as a series heuristics, which have a clear connection with Grice's maxims of quantity and manner:

First (Q) Heuristic: What isn't said, isn't .

This is related to Grice's first maxim of quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as required”) and is held responsible for the inference of so-called scalar implicatures, among others. So from an utterance of “Some students came to the party” it is inferable by default that not all the students came. It is not part of the meaning of ‘some,’ yet, in general — by default from the utterance-type — it is what one would infer in absence of evidence to the contrary. In this case, the heuristic has to be restricted to a set of alternates in a ‘scale,’ so that the use of one implicates the non-applicability of the other.

Second (I) Heuristic: What is expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified.

This is related to Grice's second maxim of quantity (“Do not make your contribution more informative than necessary”), and is taken to be involved in cases of interpretation of conditionals as bi-conditionals, the enrichment of conjunctions with the expression of temporal and causal relations among the conjuncts, ‘bridging’ inferences, collective reading of plural noun phrases, and so on.

Third (M) Heuristic: What is said in an abnormal way, isn't normal.

This heuristic is related to Grice's maxim of manner and, specially, to the first submaxim (“Avoid obscurity of expression”) and the fourth (“Avoid prolixity”). If according to the second heuristic an unmarked utterance gives rise to a stereotypical interpretation, now we have that this interpretation is overruled if a marked utterance is produced. One of the clearest examples is double negation versus simple positive assertion. Compare “It's possible the plane will be late” with “It's not impossible that the plane will be late.” [11]

When conflict among these three heuristics arise, Levinson argues that these are resolved in the following way: Q defeats M, and M defeats I. [9; 25]

So, there are some logical systems, which explain a large number of language phenomena from the pragmatic viewpoint. And different pragmatic peculiarities of the communicative situation determine the character of the sentence and its speech reasisation. Such peculiarities are time, space characteristics, individual characteristics of interlocutors and others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

Well, pragmatics deals with utterances, by which specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language, are meant. Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as dealing with the effects of context. The problems of pragmatics and different properties of utterances were investigated by different scolars.

Pragmatics deals with various tasks, including facts about the objective facts of the utterance, including who the speaker is, when the utterance occurred, and where; facts about the speaker's intentions: what language the speaker intends to be using, what meaning he intends to be using, whom he intends to refer to with various shared names, or what he intends to achieve by saying what he does; facts about beliefs of the speaker and those to whom he speaks, and the conversation they are engaged in; what beliefs do they share; what is the focus of the conversation, what are they talking about, etc.

Well, from the viewpoint of pragmatics, sentences can be conceived as utterance-types, resulted from abstracting all elements except the linguistic expressions used. An utterance in pragmatics is most often taken to be a linguistic action performed by a certain speaker in a certain place at a certain moment.

So, the pragmatic aspect of the sentence is determined by pragmatic peculiarities of the communicative situation, that include time and space characteristics of the communicative process, individual characteristics of both, the speaker and the listener, their social status, status in the process of communication, age, level of education, psychological characteristics and other aspects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Literature Used:

1. Волкова Л.М. Лекції з теоретичної граматики. КНЛУ. – 30 с.
2. Кацнельсон С.Д. Типология языка и речевое мышление. - Л.: Наука, 1972. - 224с.
3. Почепцов О.Т. Основы прагматического описания предложения. - К.: Вища школа, 1986. - 116 с.
4. Christopher Davis, Christopher Potts. The Pragmatic Values of Evidential Sentences. 2009- 20 p.
5. Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson. Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading. - Mind and Language, 2002. - 23 p.
6. Jacek Malinowski. The pragmatic Interpretation of Utterances. 2003 - 12 p.
7. Laurence R. Horn & Gregory Ward. Pragmatics (for Handbook of Pragmatics). 2004 - 10 p.
8. Paul Kay. Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions. 2003– 48 p.
9. Stephen C. Levinson, Max Planck. Deixis and Pragmatics (for Handbook of Pragmatics). 2004 - 62 p.

 

Internet sources:

    10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

    11. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/