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Pragmatics.
Context and structure.
Introduction to pragmatics.
There’s a difference between pragmatics and discourse analysis. They are both approaches to studying language’s reaction to contextual background features, they both study context, text and function. Both pragmatic and discourse analysis study the meaning of words in context, analyzing the parts of meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical and social world, the socio-psychological factors, influencing communication. Both approaches focus on the meaning of words in interaction and how interactors communicate. The speaker’s meaning is dependent on assumptions of knowledge that are shared by both speaker and hearer: the speaker contracts the linguistic message and intends a meaning, the hearer interest the message and infers the meaning. The second feature that pragmatics and discourse analysis have in common is that they both look at discourse , or the use of language, and text , or pieces of written and spoken discourse. Discourse analysis has been used to explore the cohesion between linguistic items in the text. Discourse analysis cals the quality of being “meaningful and unified” coherence, pragmatics calls it relevance. Finally, pragmatic and discourse analysis have in common that they are both concerned with function: the speaker’s short- term purposes in speaking. Speech Act Theory describes what utterance are intended to do, such as promise, apologise and threaten. Where discourse analysis differs from pragmatics is in its emphasis on the structure of text. Discourse analysis studies how large chunks of language beyond the sentence level are organized. Conversation analysis examines the structure of social interaction. Pragmatics differs from discourse analysis in the importance give to the social principles of discourse, taking a socio-cultural perspective on language usage, examining the way that the principles of social behavior are expressed is determined by the social distance between speakers. Studies with a discourse analysis or pragmatics focus can be carried out using corpus linguistic. CDA, Critical discourse analysis, is an ideological approach that examines the purpose of language in the costal context, and reveals how discourse reflects and determines power structures.
Context.
There are three sorts of context to observe:
- The situational context , what speakers how about what hey can see around them;
- The background knowledge context , what they know about each other and the world;
- The co-textual context , what they know about what they have been saying. Pragmatic competence is about rules of how to use language in socio-culturally appraise ways, taking into account the participants and the context of the interaction. The situational context is the immediate physical co -presence, the situation where the interaction is taking place at the moment of speaking. For example, “this” is a demonstrative pronoun, used for pointing to something that speaker and hearer can see. The background knowledge can be either cultural or i nterpersonal. Cultural background knowledge: if interlocutors establish that they are part of the same group, they can assume mutual knowledge of everything normally known by group members. Groups with mutual knowledge vary in size. These social groups are known as communities of practice, if they have e broadly agreed common public goals, and they have a special lexis or vocabulary. The interpersonal knowledge is knowledge acquired through pervious verbs interactions or joint activities and experiences. The co-textual context is the context of the text itself, known as the co-text. The fact of using language to refer to entities in the context is known as reference: an act in which a speaker uses linguistic forms to ante the hearer to identify something. The speaker uses linguistic forms, known as referring expressions, to enable the hearer to identify the entity being referred to, which is turn known as the referent. Some words actually point to the entity that they refer to. This is known as deixis. When we talk of person deixis we can the use of expressions to point to a person, with the personal pronouns “I” “you” “he” “she”, etc. Place deixis is words used to point to a location, time deixis is expressions used to point to a time. When the referring expression is the first mention of the referent, in the sense that there is no previous mention of the reference in the preceding text, we call it exophoric reference. Exophora is dependent on the context outside the text.
ET is rarely used today to describe classroom interaction, but it has been adapted in some research on formal and ritualistic genres in which one person controls the discourse. Unlike ET, CA has evolves over the last decades and is very much alive today. CA looks at social interaction as a linear ongoing event, which unfolds little by little and implies the negotiation of cooperation between speakers along the way. Cooperation in interaction is manages by participants through turn-taking. CA assumes that only speakers are turns, first one talking and then another. The point in an interaction where a change of turn is possible is called a Transition Relevance Place (TRP). CA studies interruptions and overlaps. When speakers do not want to wait until the TRP, this is called an interruption. When hearers predict that the turn is about to be competed and they come in before it is, this is an overlap. CA studies pauses. If the pause is intended to carry meaning, analysts call it attributable silence. A central area of interest is adjacency pairs. CA analysts say that the utterance of one speaker makes a certain response of the next speaker very likely. Adjacency pairs tend to have two parts, the first part creating an expectation of a particular second part. This is down as preference structure : each first part has a preferred response. The dispreferred responses tend to be the refusals and disagreements. Conversation analysts examine sequences , which are stretches of utterances or turns. Pre-sequences prepare the ground for a further sequence and signal the type of utterance to follow. Opening sequences tend to contain a greeting, an enquiry after health and a past reference. Closing sequences can be long and drawn out on occasions.
Speech Act Theory.
Speech acts.
Austin (19629 defined speech acts as the actions performed in saying something.
Speech Act Theory said that the action performed when an utterance is produced can be analyzed on three different levels. The first level of analysis is the rod themselves. This is the locution , what is said, the act of saying something is known as the locutionary act. The second level is what the speakers are doing with their words: this is the illocutionary force. The last level of
analysis is there result of the words: his known as the perlocutionary effect , what is done by uttering the words. Austin developed, but soon abandoned, the performative hypothesis that behind every utterance there is a perforative verb such as “to order” “to warn”, that make the illocutionary force explicit. He also realized that implicit performatives do not always have an obvious explicit perforative understood. There are words and expressions that change the world by their very utterance, such as “I bet”, “I declare”, “I resign”. These kind of acts are declarative acts. The representative acts are acts in which the words state what the speaker believes to be the case, such as “describing”, “claiming”, “hypothesising”. The commissives acts include acts in which the words commit the speaker to future action, such as “promising”, “offering”, “threatening”, “refusing”. The directives acts cover the acts in which the words are aimed at making the hearer do something, such as “commanding”, “requesting”, “inviting”, “forbidding”.
Felicity conditions. In order for speech acts to be appropriately and successfully performed, certain felicity conditions have to be met. For Austin, the felicity conditions are that the context and roles of participants must be recognized by all parties, the action must be carried out completely and the persons must have the right intentions. Much of the time, what me mean is actually not in the words themselves but in the meaning implied. Searle said that a speaker using a direct speech act wants to communicate the literal meaning that the words conventionally express: there is a direct relationships between the form and the function. Searle explained that someone using an indirect speech act wants to communicate a different meaning from the apparent surface meaning, the form and function are not directly related. There is an underlying pragmatic meaning. And one speech act is performed through another speech act. Indirect speech acts are part of everyday life in most cultures round the world, although some cultures use more indirectness than others. The classification of utterances in categories of indirect and direct speech acts is not an easy task, because much of what we say operates in both levels, and utterances have more than one macro-function
Speech acts and society.
functions. The transactional is the function which language serves the expression of content and the transmission factual information. The interactional is that function involved in expressing social relations and personal attitudes, showing solidarity and maintaining social cohesion. Speakers establishing a common ground, airing a common point of view, and negotiating role- relationships are speaking with an interactional purpose. In fact, most talk has a mixture of the two functions: there seems to be a cline from the purely transactional to the purely interactional. At the extreme end of the transactional scale is the language in use when a policeman is giving directions to a traveller. At the extreme end of the interactional is what is known as phatic communion , language with no information content used purely to keep channels of communication open. Verbal exchanges, whether interviews, tend to run more smoothly and successfully when the participants follow certain conventions.
Observing the maxims. The first maxim of the Cooperative Principle is the maxim of quantity , which says that speakers should be as informative as is required, that they should give neither too little information nor too much. People who give too little information risk their hearer not being able to identify what they are talking about because they are not explicit enough, those who give more information than the hearer needs rick boring them. The second maxim is that of quality , which says that speaks are expected to be sincere, to be saying something that they believe corresponds to reality. Some speakers like to draw their hearer’s attention to the fact that they are only saying what they believe to be true, and that they lack adequate evidence. The third maxim of relation , which says that speakers are assumed to be saying something that is relevant to what has been said before. The last maxim is the one of manner , which says that we should be brief and orderly, and avoid obscurity and ambiguity. If we always respect the maxims, we end up being boring. Grice said that hearers assume that speakers observe the Cooperative Principle, and that is it the knowledge of the four maxims that allows hearers to draw inferences about the speaker’s intentions and implied meaning. The meaning conveyed by speakers
and recovered as a result of the hearer’s inferences is known as conversational implicature.
Flouting the maxims. When the speaker appear not to follow the maxims but expect hearers to appreciate the meaning implied, we say that they are flouting the maxims. The speaker who flouts the maxim of quantity seems to give too little or too much information. The speaker flouting the maxim of quality may do it in several ways. they may quite simply say something that obviously does not represent what they think. Quality maxim flouting can be so conventionalized that it becomes built into a formula that all members of that cultural group understand. Speakers may flout the maxim by exaggerating using an hyperbole, or using a metaphor. Other ways of flouting the maxims are irony and banter. While irony is an apparently friendly way of being offensive, the type of verbal behavior known as banter is an offensive way of being friendly. In the case of irony, the speaker expresses a positive sentiment and implies a negative one. Banter, on the contrary, expresses a negative sentiment and implies a positive one. Banter can sometimes be a tease, and sometimes a flirtatious comment. The danger with banter is that it can offend if the hearers do not recover the conversational implicature, or if they suspect that there is an element of truth in the words. If the speakers flout the maxim of relation, they expect that the hearers will be able to imagine what the utterance did not say, and make the connection between their utterance and the preceding one(s). Those who flout the maxim of manner, appearing to be obscure, are often trying to exclude a third party.
Violating the maxims. A speaker can be said to violate a maxim when they know that the hearer will not know the truth and will only understand the surface meaning of the words. They intentionally generate a misleading implicature, maxim violation is unostentatiously, quietly deceiving. The speaker deliberately supplies insufficient information, say something that is insincere. If a speaker violates the maxim of quantity, they do not give the hearer enough inflation to know what is being talked about, because they do not want the hearer to know the full picture. Not all violations of the maxim of. quality are blameworthy. A lie
When hearers and readers make sense of a text, they interpret the connections between utterances as meaningful, making inferences by drawing on their own background knowledge of the world. The degree of relevance is governed by contextual effects and processing effort. Contextual effects include such things as adding a new information, strengthening or contradicting an existing assumption. The more contextual effects, the greater the reliance of a particular fact taken with something already known is worth processing. The theory says that the less effort it takes to recover a fact, the greater the reliance. The context for the interpretation of an utterance is chosen by the hearer, and the speaker assumes that the facts are relatively accessible for the hearer. The hearer interprets what is said by finding an accessible context that produces ‘the maximum amount of new information with the minimum amount of processing effort’. To understand an utterance is to prove its relevance, and proving its relevance is determined by the accessibility of its relevance to the addressee. The explicator of an utterance consists of the propositions that are explicitly communicated by the speaker, and that some of this has to be inferred by relevance- driven processes. It’s usually the context, or cognitive environment, that stops what west being ambiguous and that helps the hearer fill in any incomplete parts of the utterance or understand the connection between utterances. Sperber and Wilson say that nothing is ambiguous, taken in its proper cognitive environment. Relevance Theory has its limitations. Mey say, the fact that Sperber and Wilson feel that their principle accounts fro all of Grice’s maxims, and that it is without exception and irrefutable, means that the notion of relevance is so encompassing that it loses its explanatory force. In fact, it could be said that everything implies something that is not said, since every utterance depends on associations and background knowledge. Another limitation of the Relevance Theory is that it says nothing about interactions and does not include cultural or social dimensions. An objection that one may have to Sperber and Wilson’s model, as with Grice’s Cooperative Principle model, is that different cultures, countries and communities have their own ways of observing and expressing the maxims.
Politeness theories.
In pragmatic, when we talk of ‘politeness’, we do not refer to the social rules of behavior such as letting people go first through a door, but we refer to the choices that are made in language use, the linguistic expressions that give people space and show a friendly attitude to them. Politeness is not the same as deference. Deference is built into languages such as Korean and Japanese, and can be seen in the pronouns of many European languages.
Politeness and face. Brown and Levinson (1987) analysed politeness, and sais that in order to enter into social relationships, we have to acknowledge and show an awareness of the face , the public self-image, the sense of self, of the people that we address. This is an universal characteristic across cultures that speakers should respect each other’s expectations regarding self-image and avoid face-threatening acts (FTAs). When FTAs are unavoidable, speakers can redress the threat with negative politeness , that respects the hearer’s negative face , the need to be independent, have freedom of action and not be imposed on by others. Or they can redress FTA with positive politeness , that attends the positive face , the need to be accepted and liked by others. If you want to avoid FTS, you can avoid saying anything at all. On the other hand you can say something and then you are faced with a choice: to do the FTA on record or off record. If you do it off record , you ask for help indirectly, and say, in a voice loud enough for your neighbors to hear, something like ‘I wonder where that website is’. This particular off record communicative act is an indirect speech act, in which you are using a declarative representative functioning as a question to yourself. This off record communicative act also consists in flouting the maxim of quantity, if you consider that your not saying openly that you need help means that you are not appearing to make your contribution as informative as possible. Indirectness in the form of indirect speech acts and cooperative maxim flouting allows a speaker to make suggestions, requests, offers, without addressing to anyone in particular. The illocutionary force will most likely to be understood by hearers, but they can choose to ignore it. Indirectness also enables speakers to address particular people but be polite by giving them options and retreating behind the literal meaning of the words. A speaker can
The aim of approbation says ‘minimise dispraise of other’ and ‘maximise praise of other’. The first part of the maxim is somewhat similar to the politeness strategy of avoiding disagreement. The second part fits in with the positive politeness strategy of making other people feel good by showing solidarity. The modesty maxim, on the other hand, says ‘minimise praise of self’ and ‘maximise dispraise of other’. Modesty is possibly a more complex maxim than the others, since the maxim of quality can sometimes be violated in observing it. The maxim of agreement , ‘minimise disagreement between self and other’ and ‘maximise agreement between self and other’ is in line with Brown an Levinson’s positive politeness strategies of ‘seek agreement’ and ‘avoid disagreement’. The sympathy maxim includes such polite acts as congratulate, commiserate and express condolences. This small group of speech acts is already taken care of in Bworn and Levinson’s positive politeness strategy of attending to the hearer’s interest. Very close to this is a maxim proposed by Cruse: consideration , which is ‘minimise discomfort/displeasure of other’ and ‘maximise comfort/pleasure of other’. Impoliteness. Impoliteness is about causing face loss. It can be bald on record when the attack is intended to create maximum possible face damage. It can be positive impoliteness , which threatens positive face by refusing solidarity, or negative impoliteness , which threatens negative face by invading the other’s space. Off record impoliteness is sarcasm. Overlaps and gaps. Brown and Levinson differ from Leech, in that they are social psychologists who start from data, and he takes a philosophical approach starting from principles. There is considerable overlap between the categories of Brown and Levinson’s model and the categories Leech’s model. One utterance can contain both positive and negative politeness. Another criticism that could be leveled at leech’s model is that a new maxim could be added for every new situation that accours. There should also possibly be a patience maxim, which says ‘minimise the urgency for other’ and ‘maximise the lack of urgency forother’.
Politeness and context.
Since politeness is a pragmatic phenomenon, it is influences by elements of the context. There are two situational context factors that influence the way that we ma a request. One is the size of imposition , the routines and reasonable of tack and the rule seems to be ‘the greater the imposition, the more indirect the language is’. The other factor is the formality of the context, and here the tendency is ‘the greater the formality, the more indirect the language is’. The choice of the politeness formulation depends on the costal distance and the power relation between speakers. When there is social distance, politeness is encoded and there is more indirectness, when there is less social distance, there is less negative politeness and indirectness. The degree of familiarity between speakers is one of the most obvious social variables that affect how politeness is expressed. Differences of status, roles, age, gender, education, class, occupation and. Ethnicity can give speakers power and authority. Expressions that are able n record are used by people who assume that they have got power. To take an example, Mills (2003) examined the relationship between gender, communities of practice and politeness, looking at the way that speakers negotiate with what they see as gendered stereotypes within communities can ‘judge whether a language item or phrase is polite for them or not’ although ‘community members do nt necessary agree on which forms of behavior are the dominant ones’. As interactional sociolinguist Tannen says, the use of indirectness ‘can hardly be understood without the cross-cultural perspective’. This explains why some International students interpret the option-giving literally, when faced with British lecturer’s suggestions, negative politeness hedges and mitigation. Some cultures put less emphasis on negative politeness than on positive politeness. The use of maxims of tact and generosity cares greatly from country to country. The use of maxims of approbation and modesty are also deeply rooted in culture. In summary, politeness is related to the context, the language used, the speech acts, the structure of the conversation and the principle of cooperation. Politeness is a basic form of cooperation and it underlines all language in some way or another.
Critical discourse analysis.
certainty implied y lexical choices can also be used to persuade. Rhetorical devices, such as metaphors and metonyms, are also used to persuade and evoke emotions. Metaphors , which represent one entity in terms of another, substitution one concept with anther, are a way to create common ground and make a writer’s/speaker’s ideology appear natural and unquestionable. Metonymy , which represents an entity in terms of something associated with it, naming an attribute of the entity, representing a complex entity with a single characteristic, can be used with a similar effect. Other rhetorical devices used in oratory are the rule of three and parallelism. The rule of three feats in the French Revolution’s ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, and the parallelism , expresses several ideas in a series of similar structures. These two devices are intended to fire the audience with the ideals of the orator, and lead to unity and joint action. Sound bites, slogans and short phrases can also be used to manipulate readers/ hearers. Sound bites are quotable short pieces of discourse taken from a text (‘I have a dream’). Slogans are short punchy statements used repeatedly in many contexts, aimed at inspiring sentiments in line with those leading the state or an institution. When short phrases are used repeatedly across texts, they can penetrate people’s way of thinking and become part of their language. CDA works with bigger textual frameworks as well. At the sentence level, topicalization , the positioning of words at the beginning of a sentence, can persuade readers and hearers to take for granted the valued embedded there. Framing is the way that the writer’s angle is presented by backgrounding and foregrounding. At an intertextual level, CDA studies the way that writers/speakers refer to other texts and share interpersonal knowledge in order to achieve their ends. A recent development in the field is Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. This examines films, images and objects for the ideas, clues and attitudes that are reflected in non-linguistic elements such as body language, sound, color, layout and font. CDA, pragmatics and social identity. Fairclough (1989) criticized pragmatics for what he saw as its individualism and its idealism. He said that speakers/writers are not usually free to manipulate language to achieve their goals, but that they are constrained by social conventions. He felt that Conversation Analysis fails to take into account the fact that people do not have equal control in interactions, because there are inequalities of power. CDA
looks at who controls conversational interactions, who allows a person to speak and how they do it. Similarly, Fairclough believed that Speech Act Theory is incomplete because it oftenlacks a discussion of the power relations and social factor that influence the use of indirect speech acts. Fairclough complained that the Cooperative principle makes little mention of the fact that people do to contribute equally and that interaction in socially constrained. However, in response to Fairclough, one could say hat CDS often focuses on the inferred and indirect linguistic devices, and thus would not be possible if it were not for pragmatic theory. The twenty-first century has witnessed the development of a hybrid approach to CDA, combining language analysis with sociology, ethnography, cognitive and social psychology. CDA now concert applied linguistics to issues of gender, class, sexuality, race, ethinicity, culture, identity, politics and ideology. CDA can analyze views about national identity. Language outside the press ad politicians is also used to assert feelings of national identity. Issued of national identity can be merged with those of racial identity. Language can reflect and impose valued about gender identity , and CDA exposes inequalities. Limitations of CDA. Some have suggested that CDA in unscientific, in that lacks maxims, principles or specific framework and does not provide detailed and systematic enough analysis. CDA can be carried out by examining specific language features. CDA has been accused of being over-simplistic and conspiratorial , seeing interaction only as oppressed versus oppressors, and describing language as a conscious attempt to subvert other people. Critics accuse CDA of having a political agenda and a point to prove. They say it fails to be objective and critical about its own position, and that it provides a politically partial analysis. The very fact that CDA wears its political commitments on its sleeve means that, in principle, they are detachable, and nothing prevents its methods being applied to discourse of any sort, representing any political persuasion or none. CDA has been accused of having n inflated sense of its own importance. It can appear to suggest that people are ideologically duped and need CDA to help them see the truth.
Intercultural pragmatics.
cultural values and attitude and is ‘the heart and soul of native-like language use’ can cause pragmatic failure. Pragmatic failure can also be sociopragmatic, when different pragmatic group rules are invoked. There’s a list of the causes of learner’s sociopragmatic failure:
- Negative transfert of pragmatic norms from the L1 culture;
- Overgeneralisation of perceived L2 pragmatic norms;
- Resistance to suing perceived L2 pragmatic norms. There also causes that are nor pragmalinguistic nor sociopragmatic:
- (^) Limited L2 grammatical ability;
- The effect of instruction or materials. Indeed, it is too easy to assume that misunderstanding is a result of cultural difference. It can be down to social and situational factors, of individual attributes of speakers.
