Pragmatics – Joan Cutting,3rd edition – schemi riassuntivi
A) INTRODUCTION: CONCEPTS IN PRAGMATICS
1) CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE
INTRODUCTION TO PRAGMATICS
Pragmatics and discourse analysis both approaches to studying language’s relation to contextual background features, and both study
context, text and function.
1. Context: both approaches study the meaning of words on context, and how communication is influenced by socio –
psychological factors and also by the time and space in which words are uttered or written. Moreover, both pragmatics and
discourse analysis focus on how interactors communicate more information than the words they use. That’s because the
speaker and the hearer share the same cultural background/assumption of knowledge.
2. Discourse/text: both pragmatics and discourse analysis pay attention on how stretches of language become meaningful and
unified for their users, looking at the use of language (discourse) and pieces of spoken or written discourse (text).
▪discourse analysis explores the cohesion between linguistic items in the text, and calls the quality of being
meaningful unified ‘coherence’;
▪pragmatics calls the quality of being meaningful unified ‘relevance’
3. Function: both approaches study the speaker’s short-term purposes in speaking and long-term goals in interacting verbally
Pragmatics and discourse analysis are different in:
•the huge importance given to the structure of the text by discourse analysis
•the huge importance given to the social principles of discourse by pragmatics
[Notes – Confusing discourse]
Language → sometimes it’s transparent.
•Human activities are based on language:
◦when I think I want to do something I think for example “I want to cook”;
◦when I dream (while I’m sleeping) I remember the story trough language;
There’s just one thing human beings can do without using language: to distinguish between something positive and
something negative.
•Language transmits information about:
◦empirical world → report
◦perceived world → interpreting, because I’m judging something
◦ideal world → imagining (fantasy or lies)
WHAT’S LANGUAGE? It’s a symbolic system with different functions, which can be used in order to express:
1. physical object = concrete world
2. inner feelings = abstract world
3. abstract relations = comparisons, deductions…
4. what concerns language = metatext analysis which analyses language itself
The process of verbal reference
a) “I see a bunny”
b) I understand what the interlocutor wants to communicate because I know what a bunny is, I own the concept
c) But this is what he meant → a bunny drawn using computer characters
This kind of situation perfectly demonstrates the importance of the context, which is necessary to clearly understand the content of a
message, because nobody says obvious things.
This is also the demonstration that communication works only if the concept relates to a non verbal referent/reality. This isn’t the case
of “I see a bunny” → what the speaker means: computer symbols with the shape of a bunny; what I understand: fluffy animal.
Example: The symbol “beautiful girl” - which involves an evaluative judgement, thus a difficult interpretation of the communicative
act – activates the concept connected to the symbol – which is my personal idea of beautiful girl, influenced by ideology, strictly
connected with culture – and relates to a referent – who is the girl I see and I want to represent; the symbol obviously relates to this
referent.
Language as abstraction
We communicate trough mental abstraction (→ selection, definition, simplification) socially agreed upon and tacitly accepted and
recognised, because language is the result of the way I perceive world which is itself a result of an abstraction:
a) pre verbal abstraction
1. reality level → neutrons, protons, electrons…
2. experience level → what I perceive, the objects I recognise
b) verbal abstraction
3. naming level → this is a descriptive level which consists in labelling things: it helps me to understand the
difference between men and boys, mountains and hills, boredom and sadness…
Concept
activates relates to
Symbols referent
(words) (non verbal reality)
