8

Prof. S.A. Zhabotynska

General Linguistics

(5^th year)

Lecture 5 pragmatics Contents

1. Pragmatics: definition. Branches of pragmatics.

2. Speech act

• Constituents of a speech act

• Types of speech acts

• Direct and indirect speech acts

• Felicity conditions

3. Pragmalinguistics

1. Message: interpretation

• Frames and scripts

• Background knowledge, presupposition, and implicatures

• Pragmasemantics

3.2. Message: composition

• Text linguistics

• Discourse analysis

3.3. Conveying a message (general pragmatics)

• Cooperative principle

• Principle of politeness

• Talking in turns

4. Situation of speech: Cross-cultural pragmatics.

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1. Pragmatics

• Pragmatics is the brunch of linguistics which studies those aspects of meaning that cannot be captured by semantic theory. Pragmatics deals with how speakers use language in ways which cannot be predicted from linguistic knowledge alone. These ways demonstrate, in particular, the speakers’ choice of linguistic units, the constraints that speakers encounter in social interaction, and the effects achieved by a message. In a narrow sense, pragmatics is concerned with what the speaker wants to say in his or her message, and with how listeners arrive at the intended meanings. This version of pragmatics is represented in the theory of speech acts. In a broad sense, pragmatics focuses on the general principles followed by humans when they communicate with one another. Hence, pragmatics is understood as the studies of both the intended content of a message and the ways it is conveyed. The two major branches of pragmatics are pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics.

• Pragmalinguistics focuses on language used in speech. It is the study of language use from the viewpoint of the language’s structural resources. For instance, it may start with the pronoun system of a language, and examine the way in which people choose different available forms to express the range of attitudes and relationships (such as deference and intimacy). Pragmalinguistics incorporates pragmasemantics which analyzes the senses acquired by linguistic units in particular texts. Pragmasemantics borders on semantics proper. They can be viewed as ‘semantics of speech’ and ‘semantics of language’ respectively. Another branch of pragmalinguistics is general pragmatics (or pragmatics proper), which studies the principles governing the communicative use of language, especially as encountered in conversations. It focuses on the ways of conveying the message rather than the message itself.

The areas that study the message are also text linguistics and discourse analysis. Text linguistics is primarily concerned with the organization of the message, or text, as a formal and semantic whole. Discourse analysis studies the organization of a text with regard to the situation of speech. In other words, it studies the text “plunged into life”. Text linguistics and discourse analysis, being immediately linked to pragmalinguistics, remain however individual linguistic fields.

• Sociopragmatics examines the conditions on language use deriving from the social situation. For instance, it might begin with the social backgrounds of the participants of interaction and consider the way in which different factors (such as age, social status, gender, etc.) lead people to choose particular linguistic forms. Thus, sociopragmatics focuses on the speakers and the communicative situation. The latter serves as the context of interaction between the speakers who belong to one and the same culture (monocultural discourse) or to different cultures (cross-cultural discourse). The social background of the speakers is usually considered by sociolinguistics (to be discussed later). Cross-cultural discourse is studied within the framework of cross-cultural pragmatics.