Text 22

deborah tannen: You Just Don't Understand. Wm. Morrow 1990, page 40

A woman was telling me why a long-term relationship had ended. She recounted a recurrent and pivotal conversation. She and the man she lived with had agreed that they would both be free, but they would not do anything to hurt each other. When the man began to sleep with other women, she protested, and he was incensed at her protest. Their conversation went like this:

SHE: How can you do this when you know it's hurting me?

HE: How can you try to limit my freedom?

SHE: But it makes me feel awful.

HE: You are trying to manipulate me.

On one level, this is simply an example of a clash of wills: What he wanted conflicted with what she wanted. But in a fundamental way, it reflects the difference in focus I have been describing. In arguing for his point of view, the key issue for this man was his independence, his freedom of action. The key issue for the woman was their interdependence—how what he did made her feel. He interpreted her insistence on their interdependence as 'manipula­tion': She was using her feelings to control his behavior.

p Do you agree with the analysis presented here? Are there other implicatures possible from what is said in the dialog?

t> We are used to thinking that the term 'cross-cultural' will apply to people from different countries. Is it appropriate to think of the interactions between males and females within one country (sharing a lot of one culture) as a site for the study of cross-cultural pragmatics? What kinds of differences might be worthy of investigation?

114 Readings

READINGS 115

SECTION 3

References

The references which follow can be classified into introductory level (marked ■□□), more advanced and consequently more tech­nical (marked ■■□), and specialized, very demanding (marked

Chapter 1

Definitions and background

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steven davis (ed.): Pragmatics. A Reader.

Oxford University Press 1991

This is a collection of thirty-five papers, originally published in journals dealing mainly with philosophical issues in the recent history of pragmatics.

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Georgia green: Pragmatics and Natural Language

Understanding. Lawrence Erlbaum 1989

This is an introduction which focuses on linguistic pragmatics as 'the study of understanding intentional human action', with a strong emphasis on grammatical issues.

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Geoffrey leech: Principles of Pragmatics.

Longman 1983

This introductory text presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics, attempting to describe 'principles and maxims of good com-

REFERENCES 117

municative behaviour'. Pragmatics is defined as 'the study of how utterances have meanings in situations', with an emphasis on the analysis of politeness.

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Stephen c. levin son: Pragmatics.

Cambridge University Press 1983

This widely used introductory text offers several different definitions of pragmatics and presents 'an overview of some of the central tasks that pragmaticists wrestle with'. The emphasis is on linguistic and philosophical issues.

■ DD

JACOB mey: Pragmatics: An Introduction. Blackwell 1993

This is a comprehensive introduction to pragmatics as 'the study of the conditions of human language use as these are determined by the context of society'. There is a strong emphasis on the ways in which society's institutions govern the use of language.

■an

JAN NUYTS andjEF VERSCHUEREN (eds.):

A Comprehensive Bibliography of Pragmatics. Volumes 1-4. John Benjamins 1987

This remarkable resource provides a wide range of references. The very useful diagrams in the Subject Index (pages 51-69) act as a guide to the wide areas of study covered by pragmatics.

Chapter 2 Deixis and distance

ROBERT jarvella and Wolfgang klein (eds.): Speech, Place and Action: Studies in Deixis and Related Topics. John Wiley & Sons 1982

This is a collection of fifteen papers on different aspects of deixis by both linguists and psychologists, incorporating studies on deixis and the blind and in the sign language of the deaf.

■ ■D

JOHN Lyons : Natural Language and Universal Grammar. Cambridge University Press 1991

Chapters 8 and 9 in this collection of essays provide a lot of insights into the nature of deixis.

■ DO

ROGER wales: 'Deixis' in P. Fletcher and M. Garman (eds.): Language Acquisition (2nd edn.) Cambridge University Press 1986

This is a review paper covering studies of the first appearance and development of deictic forms in the early language of young children.

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JURGEN WEISSENBORN and WOLFGANG KLEIN (eds.):

Here and There: Cross-linguistic Studies on Deixis and Demonstration. John Benjamins 1982

This is a collection of fourteen papers on different types of deixis in a wide range of languages.

Chapter 3

Reference and inference •;- >; _;^:

STEPHEN ANDERSON and EDWARD KEENAN: 'Deixis' in

Timothy Shopen (ed.): Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press 1985

This paper presents a review of the range of deictic expressions used in a wide variety of languages.

Herbert clark and deanna wilkes-Gibbs: 'Referring as a collaborative process' in Cognition 22, 1986

This important paper presents evidence for the ways in which speakers in conversation collaborate to create referring expressions.