Pragmatics and discourse
Are approaches to the study of the relation between languages and background features.
They have in common the study of:
•Context: parts of meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical and social world. It is the assumption of
knowledge that speaker and hearer share. There are three sort of context:
• What speaker know about what they can see around them: situational context
•What they know about each other and the world: background context
■Cultural: general knowledge that most people carry in their minds;
■Interpersonal: knowledge specific and private about the history of the speaker.
•What they know about what they have been saying: co-textual context
•Discourse and text: the analysis on how stretches of language become meaningful and unified. Discourse analysis calls it
Cohesion (how words relate to each other within the text, referring backwards or forwards to other words in the text); and
pragmatics calls it relevance (the study of how text is hold together meaningfully).
•Function: speakers’ purpose in speaking.
They differs in:
•Discourse’s emphasis on the structure of text
•Importance that pragmatics give to the social principles
Cohesion:
It is an approach to the study of how words relate to each other. It divides to:
•Grammatical:
•Reference: an act in which a speaker uses linguistic forms to enable the hearer to identify something. Are:
■Endophoric: is previous mention of the referent in the text.
•Anaphora: link back to something that went before
•Cataphora: link forward to something that will be after
■Exophoric: There is no previous mention in the preceding text
•Substitution: holds text together and avoids repetition
•Ellipsis: misses out a piece of text because it is not necessary, avoids repetition
•Lexical:
•Repetition: repeated words or word phrases
•Synonyms: instead of repeating the exact same word a speaker or writer can use another word
•Superordinates: general term (like flower instead of rose)
•General words: general nouns or verbs that can cover almost everything.
