Pragmatics

Pragmatics

For Charles Morris that pragmatics is the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters. Pragmatics is concerned not with language as system or product per se, but rather with the interrelationships between language form, messages and languages users.

In the code-model, communication is seen as an encoding-decoding process, when a code is system that enables the automatic pairing of messages (meanings, internal to senders and receivers), and signals (what physically transmitted, (sound, smoke visual, writing) between the sender and the receiver.

The code mode has the merit of describing one way in which communication can be achieved.

Pragmatic perspectivse on language use.

Pragmatic meaning

One task of pragmatics is to explain how participants in a dialogue such as the one above move from the decontextualized meanings of the words and phrases to a grasp of their meaning in context

Assigning reference in context

The process of Assigning reference also involves the interpretations of “deictic expression”. These are linguistic items that point to contextually salient referents without naming them explicitly.

Assigning sense in context

These observations show that contextual meaning (reference and sense) is not fully determined by the words are used: there is a gap between the meaning of the words used by the speaker and the thought that the speaker intends to express by using those words on a particular occasion.

Inferring illocutionary force

This theory which was generated by the philosopher John Austin (1975) and developed Josh Searle views language as a form of action, that when we speak, we do things like make requests, make statements, offer apologies and so on.

Working out implicated meaning.

Deriving an interpretations that satisfies the Co-operative principles is effected through the maxims which the communicator is presumed to abide by:

Truthfulness: (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are true).

Informativeness:  (communicators should do their best to be adequately informative)

Relevance: (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are relevant)

Style: (communicators should do their best to make contributions which are appropriately short and clearly expressed)

Explaining the impact of social factors.

Leech proposes a set of “politeness maxims” such as the modesty maxim and the agreement maxim which operate in conjunction with the co operative maxims. They are worded as rules (for example minimize praise of self, maximize agreement between self and other), but in fact they aim to describe the interactional principles that underlie language use.

The pragmalinguistic perspective focuses on the linguistics strategies that are used to convey a given pragmatic meaning, whereas the sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the socially based assessments, beliefs and interactional principles that underlie peoples’ choice of strategies.

A sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the social judgment associated with such a scenario, for example what the relationship between the participants is and the social acceptability of reaching for food in such context.

Conversational patterns and structure.

An approach that starts from the commonsense observation that people take turns in conversation, and that relies on descriptions of naturally occurring data discover the rules involved in the patterning of conventional exchanges. The utterances in pair are ordered, in that the first member of a pair requires a second member.

The role of context

Context plays a major role in the communication process, and so important task for pragmatic theory is to elucidate this process, it is widely accepted that the following features of the situational context have a particularly crucial influence on people´s use of language:

The participants: their roles, the amounts of power differential between them, the degree of distance-closeness between them the number of people present.

The  message content: how costly or beneficial the message is to the hearer and/or speaker, how face threatening it is whether it exceeds or stays within the rights and obligations of the relationship.

The communicative activity: how the norms of the activity influence language behavior such as right to talk questions, discourse structure, and level of formality.

Unfortunately, context is sometimes taken to be concrete aspects of the environment in which an exchange takes place and that have bearing on the communication process.

One of the main problems of pragmatic is to explain the constant updating of contextual assumptions in the course of a communicative exchange.

Pragmatics research: Pragmatics and methods

There a re two broad approaches to pragmatics, a cognitive-psychological approach and a social-psychological approach.

Cognitive pramatics are primarily intereted in exploring the relation between the decontextualized, linguistic meaning of utterances, what speakers mean by their utterances on given occassions, and how listeners interpreter those utterances on those given occasions.

                                                                  Charles Morris