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Pragmática y discurso en lengua inglesa CONTENTS Unit 1. Introduction 1.1. Defining pragmatics The importance of context Pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure 1.2. Defining discourse analysis Field, tenor and mode of discourse Text types and genres Unit 2. Cohesion and coherence 2.1. Cohesive devices Lexical cohesion Grammatical cohesion 2.2. Deixis Types of deixis Deixis and reference 2.3. Thematic structure and information structure The concepts of Theme and Rheme Unmarked and marked Themes Thematic progression Unit 3. Speech Act Theory 3.1. Performative and constative acts 3.2. The utterance as act Locutive, illocutionary and perlocutionary force Felicity conditions 3.3. Types of speech acts Direct and indirect speech acts 3.4. Cross-cultural pragmatics Unit 4. Conversation Analysis (CA) 4.1. Defining conversation analysis 4.2. Turn-taking organization 4.3. Sequence organization Adjacency pairs Preference organization: preferred versus dispreferred responses 4.4. Repair mechanisms Unit 5. Grice and the Cooperative Principle 5.1. The Cooperative Principle and Gricean Maxims 5.2. Non-observing the maxims 5.3. From presupposition to implicature Conventional implicature Conversational implicature 5.4. Beyond Gricean maxims: Relevance theory The principle of relevance Explicature and implicature
Unit 6. Politeness Theory 6.1. Lakoff’s approach to politeness 6.2. Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness Goffman’s concept of “face” Face-threatening Acts Positive and negative politeness Politeness and implicature 6.3. Leech’s Politeness Principle and its maxims 6.4. Watt’s and Locher’s Relational Model Politic behaviour and politeness
- To define Pragmatics is a hard task, since it implies setting boundaries and limits and separating Pragmatics from other disciplines such as Semantics or DA.
- More recently, two approaches to Pragmatics:
- “ speaker meaning ”: focuses on the “producer” of the message and takes a more social view of the discipline.
- “ utterance interpretation ” (i.e. what the hearer understands). This approach focuses on the “receiver” of the message and takes a more cognitive view of the discipline.
- Only one of these sides also has important limitations. A more reasonable definition of pragmatics is considering it as meaning in interaction.
- “Meaning is not something which is inherent in the words alone, nor is it produced by the speaker alone, nor by the hearer alone. Making meaning is a dynamic process” (J. Thomas, 1995: 22) (In the exam, never speak about sentence. Sentence is utterence) The importance of context
- We can trace the concept of “context” back to Malinowski in the 1920s and Firth in the 1950s.
- The importance of context in figuring out ambiguities in written or spoken language is undeniable. “It’s a long time since we visited your mother” Context A: married couple talking in their living room. Context B: married couple in the zoo, in front of the hippos. (J.L. Mey, 2002: 41) *Context can change the meaning of words “Here she comes in all her vastness” (J. Thomas, 1995) Who is she? We don´t know. The only thing we know is that she is a female. But we don´t know who. Context: A TV reporter talking about a ship while the camera was focusing on the Queen mother.
- The term “context” is very common but “elusive of definition” (Widdowson, 2004: 36)
- Context is dynamic and involves three different dimensions:
- Situational context: refers to the time, the place where language is used. That is, the immediate physical environment surrounding speaker and hearer. - Could you please open the window?
- If you tell someone to clse the window and there is no window, he will be shocked.
- Co-text: refers to the linguistic context in which a particular utterance occurs. * If you say “hello and I am”… in the middle of a conversation it will be shocking. For example, in adjacency pairs such as the following: - A: Are you coming to the cinema? - B: I’ve got an exam tomorrow. *Everything B tell me, I will take it as an answer. B´s utterance means NO. Ex: Mary got married. She got pregnant. - First gets married and then goes pregnant. She refers to Mary, Ex: She got pregnant. Mary got married. - First, she got pregnant, then she marries.
- Cultural context (background knowledge): as speakers within a particular community, we have some background knowledge that also helps us “construct meanings” that speakers belonging to other cultural communities might not share. This is also referred to by other linguists as “mutual knowledge” or “common knowledge”.
- A: How is your new tennis partner?
- B: He has much in common with John McEnroe. *We need the background context of John McEnroe. He was aggressive, complained a lot.
- A: Good server?
- B: Bad temper. *Here, there has been pragmatic failure. There is no understanding. Context and ambiguity
- Context is also crucial in cases of ambiguity since it allows us to disambiguate
- Ambiguity takes place when a word/phrase/clause can have more than one meaning
- The most frequent types are:
- Lexical ambiguity (the most common of all)
- Syntactic or structural ambiguity
- Combination of both (syntactic ambiguity and lexical ambiguity) Ex: The Bishop walked among the pilgrims eating their picnic lunches: Syntactic ambiguity. Ex: John is looking for his glasses: Lexical ambiguity (Polisemy) Ex: John saw her duck: Both lexical and syntactic Duck: animal - John-saw-her-duck Duck: Going in the water. John-saw her-duck (doing that) Saw: Serrar. John-saw (serrar) - her-duck Types of “ambiguity”
- Lexical (“polysemy”):
- The coach left the stadium after the match. Coach: Entrenador, Coach: Bus. We have to know the context. I we see the
entrenador´ or thebus´. - John and Bill passed the port in the evening - Port: Glass of wine and port for ships.
- Syntactic or structural:
- They are cooking apples-> A: They-are-cooking-apples. B: Cooking apples: Apples specially made for cooking them.
- Visiting relatives can be boring-> A: Visiting-relatives-can-be-boring. B: Relatives who visit you can be boring.
- For those who have children and don’t know yet, there will be a picnic next weekend-> A: Don´t know there is a picnic next weekend. B: they don´t know they have children.
- In the case of structural ambiguity, we are already doing Discourse Analysis (see 1.2)
1.2. Defining Discourse analysis
- In the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal (1992) defines DA as:
- the study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such as paragraphs, conversations, interviews, etc.
- It is beyond the “sentence level”= discourse
- DA and pragmatics are hence very closed related (in fact, some authors even use the two terms to refer to the same discipline)
- For us, however, some differences can be found related to their fields of investigation The “context of situation” (situation context: settling, place, time) (co-text: language environment)
- Halliday and Hassan (1989) i. Field → what / social action (what´s going on) ii. Tenor → who / relations, statuses, roles (the people involved in the social action) iii. Mode → language / written, oral, mixed (what language are they used / verbal, written, combination)
- (^) Context is dynamic and its relationship with language is bilateral. (If we have a context we can predict the type of language but if we see the language we can predict the context -> pragmatic competence)
- (^) In other words, we can understand the text thanks to context but we can also guess the context from the text. Practise: guess the context of situation
- (^) Once upon a time… a fairy tale
- (^) This is to certify that… this is a formal context, a notary an a patient - written
- (^) Four hearts: card game (poker), oral language, players
- (^) On your marks: a race, runners, oral language
- (^) 30 please: an exchange situation, customers, shop
- (^) Just a trim, is it?: hairdresser, customer, spoken
- (^) Rail strike: newspaper (headline) or tain station or radio, written or oral
- (^) 348-1929: telephone number
- (^) Sea slight on a low swell: a poem, oral
- (^) Hands up: a robbery or a teacher in an exam
- (^) Hands up all those who’ve finished: a teacher asking students (background knowledge part of our pragmatic competence)
- (^) Add the eggs one at a time: recipe, written or oral (tv program) Pragmatics Discourse -User´s point of view -Analysis of language (spoken and /or written) as used in actual communication -Uttering/ interpreting -Much focused on language form and function and the relationships between words in a text. -Much focused on context -What makes a text a text -For some authors, pragmatics is wider than DA since it includes more than language (discourse) and provides the basis for DA.
- From here, a short walk takes you to the fountain: tourist guide, oral
- Remove battery holding down bolts: introduction, written
- Fifteen-love: tennis (you need to know that context) Worksheet 1: The importance of Context Exercise 1 Read the following text taken from a US newspaper. Peyton Manning threw three interceptions, the most he’s had in a game since his rookie year. Brett Favre threw three interceptions and fumbled twice. And Mark Brunell fumbled four snaps, losing two, and threw interceptions on consecutive possessions before being pulled. Yes, even the best of NFL quarterbacks can have off days. And when they do, their teams lose, as the Colts, Packers and Jaguars did Sunday. Activities: (a) What background knowledge does it assume for its readers? Readers must know what is NFL, who are the people motioned in the article and what teams are those mentioned in the article. (b) The text makes no concession to those who do not understand the reference of the specialised vocabulary. Why do think this happens? The text does not make any concession because we have a lack of knowledge, so we cannot connect concepts. Exercise 2 Read the following anecdote and try to explain the breakdown in communication according to context. When it was announced that T.S. Eliot had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, he was making a lecture tour of the US. A Mid-Western reported asked him if he had been given the prize for his great work The Waste Land. “No”, replied Eliot, “I believe I have been given it in recognition of my whole corpus.” Accordingly, the journalist wrote: “In an interview with our airport correspondent this morning, Mr. Eliot revealed that the Swedish Academy had given him the Nobel Prize not for The Waste Land but for his poem My Whole Corpus.” -Pragmalinguistic failure. The reporter misinterpret the information because of the context. Exercise 3 Think about different situational contexts where these utterances could have taken place and try to explain the different interpretations according to situational context. In other words, what could the “FIELD, TENOR AND MODE” be for each of them? (a) Fill it up - F: in a bar, gas station M: oral T: client (b) Out of order - something that doesn't work, someone inc charge or that, written (c) Car crash in road 15 - the news (informative) T: the authority, the journalist, the readers M: oral or written (d) 50 please - like 30 please (e) It’s very smoky in here - F: something is burning let´s get out / kitchen (open the window)
Worksheet 2: Identifying genre Read the following texts (or extracts) and, analysing the language used, say what genre they belong to: Text 1 Dear Gillian, Recently I have put on a lot of weight. I lost my job some weeks ago and cannot face going out to find a new one especially looking the way I do. I have no social life, all my friends are still working and I feel really ugly and a total failure. (Problem-page) A letter to a psychologist that is in a magazine. Normally in female magazines. Text 2 Too much exposure to books, newspapers, and computers today could produce eyestrain headaches, Cancer, so try to exercise a little caution when working with small print or computer text. Thoughts of love and romance could interfere with your ability to do your work effectively. You may be tempted to spend most of your time on the phone. We all have days like this, so don't fight it. Just make sure you're feeling great when the evening rolls around! An article in a magazine, it is a horoscope. Principle of analogy: they talk about money, health. Text 3 At least seven people have been killed in a series of apparently random shootings in the Michigan city of Kalamazoo, police said. Five people were killed at a restaurant and two at a car dealership. A 14-year-old girl was among those killed. The attacks are being linked to an earlier shooting at a car park, which left one woman seriously injured. Police have taken a 45-year-old male into custody and said that the threat to the public was now over. The man did not resist when approached by officers, and weapons were found in his car, police said. "These are random murders," Kalamazoo County Undersheriff Paul Matyas said, describing the spree as his "worst nightmare”. Newspaper article. Written because there is too much subordination for oral speech and also a lot of passive voice. Text 4 Umberto Eco, who has died aged 84, was a polymath of towering cleverness. His novels, which occasionally had the look and feel of encyclopedias, combined cultural influences ranging from TS Eliot to the Charlie Brown comic-strips. Linguistically technical, they were at once impishly humorous and robustly intellectual. For relaxation, Eco played Renaissance airs on the recorder, and read dictionaries (he was a master of several foreign languages). Obituary. When someone famous dies in the paper they usually publish an obituary in the newspaper. Expositure time.
Unit 2: Coherence and cohesion 2.1. Cohesive devices
- Lexical cohesion
- Grammatical cohesion 2.2. Deixis
- Types of deixis
- Deixis and reference 2.3. Thematic structure and information structure
- The concepts of Theme and Rheme
- Unmarked and marked Themes
- Thematic progression ——————————————————————————————————————————— Defining coherence and cohesion
- Coherence comes from a Latin word meaning “to stick together”
- Something is “coherent” when all of its parts fit together well and this whole “makes sense”
- In DA, we will study how texts become coherent units, with “texture” –i.e. all its parts make it a coherent whole which has sense (cohesion)
- Cohesion refers to the use of linguistic devices to join sentences together (e.g. conjunctions, reference words, substitution and lexical devices such as repetition of words, collocations and lexical groups) Are coherence and cohesion the same thing?
- They are closely related but they are not the same thing
- A text is cohesive if its elements are linked together, and coherent if it makes sense.
- So a text may be cohesive (i.e. linked together), but still incoherent (i.e. meaningless)
- In other words, cohesion is a formal feature of texts (it gives them their texture), while coherence is the extent to which the reader (or listener) is able to infer the writer's (or speaker's) communicative intentions.
- Thus, cohesion is objectively verifiable while coherence is more subjective. A text may be coherent to you, but incoherent to me.
- However, the most common thing is to have a cohesive text which is also coherent. 2 examples
- Cohesive but incoherent “She is a singer. Music is very important. The importance of being Ernest is a play by Wilde. Lions are wild animals. Don’t be an animal and come to the party. There are more political parties in Spain right now.” *That hasn’t got any sense Coherent but incohesive
- We can interpret that with background knowledge
GRAMMATICAL COHESION
- Grammatical cohesion is constructed by the grammatical structures tying up the text components
- Halliday and Hasan (1976) classify grammatical cohesion into 4 major classes: -Reference (aka co-reference)
- Reference occurs when one item in text points to another element for its interpretation.
- When there is no previous mention of the referent in the text, we call it exophoric reference (dependent on the context outside the text for its meaning)
- When the referring expressions refer to items within the same text, we call it endophoric reference. A: I went with Francesca (exophoric) and David. (exophoric reference) B: uh uh? A: Francesca’s room-mate. And Alice’s (exophoric ref.) –a friend of Alice’s from London. There were six of us. Yeah, we did a lot of hill walking. (endophoric)
- When a referring expression links with another referring expression within the co- text, we say it is cohesive with the previous mention of the referent in the text.
- Endophora also avoids unnecessary repetition and is a central part of grammatical cohesion. Rewrite the following text in a more cohesive way by means of referential expressions “We have been established by an Act of Parliament as an independent body to eliminate discrimination against disabled people and to secure equal opportunities for disabled people. To achieve the aim of eliminating discrimination against disabled people and securing equal opportunities for disabled people, we have set ourselves the goal of: “a society where all disabled people can participate fully as equal citizens.” (done) “We have been established by an Act of Parliament as an independent body to eliminate discrimination against disabled people and to secure equal opportunities for them. To achieve this, we have set ourselves the goals….
- There are two types of endophora (cohesion in the text):
- anaphora: the pronouns link back to something that went before in the preceding text (as in the previous example: “them” and “this”). (more frequent)
- cataphora: the pronouns link forward to a referent in the text that follows. It can be a stylistic choice, to keep the reader is suspense as to who or what is being talked about. Example
- “Students (not unlike yourselves) compelled to buy paperback copies of his (cataphora) novels –notable the first, Travel Light, [...] imagine that Henry Bech, like thousands less famous than he, is rich. He is not.” (anaphora)
Types of reference. -Personal reference is reference through the category of PERSON: -personal pronouns: she, he, it, -possessive determiners: my, your, her,… -possessive pronouns: mine, yours, hers, … -Demonstrative reference uses determiners and adverbs to point to other items in the text (deixis): This-That, These - Those / Here, there, then -Comparative reference establishes relationships of similarity or comparison between elements in the text: more, better, same as, etc. Worksheet 3: Reference Exercise: This text is taken from the opening page of chapter of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941). Identify all the cases of endophoric co- reference (both anaphoric and cataphoric). The cesspool 1 It cataphoric was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the 2 windows open to the garden, about the cesspool. The county council had 3 promised to bring water to the village, but they (the country council) anaphoric hadn’t. 4 Mrs Haines, the wife of the gentleman farmer, a goose-faced woman with 5 eyes protruding as if they (eyes) saw something to gobble in the gutter, said 6 affectedly: “What a subject to talk about on a night like this(the night)!” 7 Then (at that moment; background knowledge?) there was silence; and a cow coughed; and that (a cow coughed) led her to say how odd 8 it was, as a child, she had never feared cows, only horses. But, then (at the time she was a child), as a 9 small child in a perambulator, a great cart-horse had brushed within an inch 10 of her face. Her family, she told the old man in the arm-chair, had lived 11 near Liskeard for many centuries. There were the graves in the churchyard 12 to prove it(her family had lived near…) 13 A bird chuckled outside. ‘A nightingale?’ asked Mrs Haines. No, 14 nightingales didn’t come so far north. It was a daylight bird, chuckling over 15 the substance and succulence of the day, over worms, snails, grit, even in 16 sleep. 17 The old man in the arm-chair –Mr Oliver, of the Indian Civil Service, retired 18 –said that the site they (they country council) had chosen for the cesspool was, if he (Mr Oliver) had heard 19 aright, on the Roman road. From an aeroplane, he said, you (exophoric) could still see,
Worksheet 4: Cohesion Exercise 1: Read the following texts1 and choose the one you think is “better” written. Justify your choice. A. While Japan is the world leader for recycling plastics, that has not always been the case. It recycled less than 40% of plastic waste in 1996 in comparison to the current figure that stands at just over 75%. The change has come about partly as a result of legislation and partly from a clearly focused educational programme. Several laws requiring businesses and consumers to separate plastic waste have been brought into effect since 1997. Those measures have been supplemented with a series of public service advertisements explaining the benefits of separating out plastic. B. Nowadays, Japan is the world leader for recycling plastics and on average slightly over three quarters of plastic waste is recycled. Notwithstanding the fact that there was only a modest increase in this figure from five years previously, it represented a massive improvement in comparison to 1996 when less than 40% of waste was recycled. Nevertheless, the change has come about partly as a result of legislation and partly from a clearly focused educational programme. In addition, businesses and consumers are now required to separate plastic waste in accordance with a series of laws that the government has introduced since 1997. Consequently, the authorities have subsidised a series of public service advertisements which explain the benefits of separating out plastic. Text A. Because it is going more to the point and has better cohesion, the overuse of connectors, as in exercise B does not make a better essay. Exercise 2: Look for cases of lexical cohesion and classify them (i.e. collocation, reiteration: synonymy, etc.) REITERATION REITERATION REITERATION REITERATION Repetition Synonymy Hyponyms Hypernyms COLLOCATIONS plastic legislation measures (public services advert.) in comparison to waste laws be brought into partly separating come about recycle recycling as a result of recucling world leader plastic waste educational programme public service current figure
2.2. Deixis TYPES OF DEIXIS DEIXIS AND REFERENCE
- Deixis means pointing at something, that something is the reference (reference change with the context). Ex. I depends on who says “I”
- E.g. “I am here now” (3 indexical I, here, now.
- The phenomenon of deixis has been of considerable interest to philosophers, linguists and psychologists -> natural languages (face-to-face interaction)
- As people take turns talking, the referents of I, you, here, there, this, that, etc. systematically switch too –difficulty for children in language acquisition.
- In simple terms, deixis is organised around a “deictic centre” (the speaker) and his/her location in space and time at the time of speaking although the location of the addressee is also taken into account, forming a two-centred system.
- Deictic categories: personal, time, spatial, discourse, social. -Personal deixis(I, you, he, she, we/ I am including you in my deictic center)
- Traditional grammatical category of person, reflected in pronouns and verb agreement, involves the most basic deictic notions. 1st person encodes the participation of the speaker and temporal and spatial deixis are organised primarily around the location of the speaker/addressee at the time of speaking.
- Speaker inclusion (1st person)
- Addressee inclusion (2nd person)
- As far as is known all languages have 1st and 2nd person pronouns but not all have 3rd person pronouns (e.g. Macedonian)
- Other languages distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns – those that do and do not include their audience.
- For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number (singular, dual, trial, plural) and clusivity, such as mitripela ("they two and I") and yumitripela ("you two and I"). Examples: "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." (Oscar Wilde) "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it." (Groucho Marx) "I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph." (Shirley Temple) "I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn't mine." (Rita Rudner) -Time deixis( now, then, yesterday)
- “now”, “tomorrow”, “ten years ago”, “this week”, “this November”, etc. take the speaker’s location in time at the time of the utterance.
- However, the most pervasive aspect of temporal deixis is “tense”.
- The grammatical categories (tenses) are a mixture of deictic time distinctions and aspect, often hard to distinguish.
- Some languages (e.g. Chinese or Malay) have no tenses as such. -Spatial deixis (here, there)
- Deictic adverbs like “here” (including speaker) and “there” (remote from the speaker) are the most direct examples of spatial deixis.
- Other spatial deictics are “this” and “that” (some languages have a three-way distinction, e.g. Latin or Spanish or even a seven-way, e.g. Malagasy.
- Proper names (e.g. Aristotle, Paris): these name persons, institutions and objects whose reference is clear as opposed to common nouns (e.g. a philosopher, a city).
- Singular definite terms (e.g. the woman standing by the table) *Paris is referring expression. Referent could be the Eiffel tower. If I say a city isn’t a referring expression, we cannot image `a city´in general, there are a lot. *A woman standing in a table. We activate a woman image and a table. They are referring expressions. 2.3. Thematic structure and information structure THE CONCEPTS OF THEME AND RHEME UNMARKED AND MARKED THEMES THEMATIC PROGRESSION -Theme and rheme
- Theme (sometimes also called “topic”) is the point of departure of a clause and shows the addressee what the message is about; hence, changing the theme changes what the message is about, e.g.
- The boy is walking the dog in the park (The boy is the theme)
- The dog is being walked in the part (by the boy) (the dog is the theme)
- In the park, the boy is walking the dog
- In the park, the dog is being walked
- Walking the dog is what the boy is doing
- The “new information” we add to the topic is the rheme (also called “comment”)
- Theme = given information / Rheme = new information *As a writer you can chose your theme and decide what is more important. *Rheme is the new information or comment *Theme = given information /rheme = new information -Unmarked theme
- When the theme coincides with the first constituent of each mood structure, it is unmarked (the expected one):
- Subject in a declarative clause -> John went to the theater last Sunday
- Operator + Subject in polar interrogatives -> Did you like it?
- WH-element in WH-interrogatives -> Where did she go?
- Imperative in imperative clauses -> Give it back! -Marked theme
- When a clause constituent is moved to initial position (thematic fronting or thematisation):
- One she kept for herself, the other she gave it away
- What you expect from me I can’t say
- Never have I seen such a thing
- You shut up!
- Last Saturday, we went out for dinner. -Single and multiple theme
- Single theme is constituted by one element (the topical theme linked to the ideational metafunction: a process, a participant or a circumstance)
- Multiple theme is constituted by more than one element (either interpersonal and/or textual theme
- Well, now, darling, what do you think of this?
- Much to our surprise though the film was a bore
Examples: -I went to the cinema yesterday theme: I -unmarked because is the subject - single -Yesterday, I went to the cinema theme: yesterday - marked - single -To the cinema I went yesterday theme: to the cinema - marked - single -Going to the cinema is what I did yesterday theme: going - marked - single -Mary, please, can you shut up? theme: Mary, please, can you - marked* - multiple *marked because the first element should be can you shut up? -Well, now, darling, what do you think of this? theme: Well, now, darling, what - marked - multiple -Much to our surprise though the film was bore theme: much to our surprise though the film - marked - multiple -Thematic progression
- The sequence of themes selected throughout a text are not random.
- The sequence of themes in a text are chosen by the writer so as to create a coherent / cohesive text.
- This is called “Thematic progression” (Danes, 1974; Eggins, 1994) -Types of thematic progression (1) Constant theme progression Theme (1) ——-> Rheme (1). Th(1) ————> Rh (2) (2) Linear theme progression Theme (1) Rheme (1) ————————-> Theme (2) (3) Derived theme progression Theme (1: Hypertheme) ————> Rheme (1) Theme (1b) Theme (1c)
