Everything about Pragmatics totally explained
Pragmatics is the study of the ability of
natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called
pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as
metapragmatic. Another perspective is that pragmatics deals with the ways we reach our goal in communication. Suppose, a person wanted to ask someone else to stop smoking. This can be achieved by using several utterances. The person could simply say, 'Stop smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear semantic meaning; alternatively, the person could say, 'Whew, this room could use an air purifier' which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning.
Pragmatics is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to grasp, and can only truly be learned with experience.
Origins
Pragmatics was a reaction to
structuralist linguistics outlined by
Ferdinand de Saussure. In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in
synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from
signs existing purely in the abstract space of
langue. Meanwhile,
historical pragmatics has also come into being.
While
Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated
Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics, pragmatics continues its tradition. Also influential were
Franz Boas,
Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Whorf.
Non-referential uses of language
Roman Jakobson identified six functions of language, only one of which is the traditional system of
reference.
- referential: conveys information about some real phenomenon
- expressive: describes feelings of the speaker
- conative: attempts to elicit some behavior from the addressee
- phatic: builds a relationship between both parties in a conversation
- metalingual: self-references
- poetic: focuses on the text independent of reference
Émile Benveniste discussed
pronouns "I" and "you", arguing that they're fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the
subject.
Michael Silverstein has argued that the "non-referential index" communicates meaning without being explicitly attached to semantic content.
Related fields
There is a considerable overlap between pragmatics and
sociolinguistics, since both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community. However, sociolinguists tend to be more oriented towards variations within such communities.
According to
Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs and their users, while
semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas to which a word refers, and
syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships among signs.
Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied meaning of the given idea.
Suzette Haden Elgin has also written a number of books known of as the Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense series, where she extensively outlines structured methods like those surveyed in pragmatics to defend against the use of
pejoratives in various common situations, drawing parallels between
applied linguistics and
martial arts techniques.
Linguistic anthropology
Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social phenomena; it thus pervades the field of
linguistic anthropology. Because pragmatics describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts. For example, the study of
code switching directly relates to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force.
Pragmatics in philosophy
Jaques Derrida once remarked that some of linguistic pragmatics aligned well with the program he outlined in
Of Grammatology.
Linguistic pragmatics underpins
Judith Butler's theory of
gender performativity. In
Gender Trouble, she claims that gender and sex are not natural categories, but called into being by
discourse. In Excitable Speech she extends her theory of
performativity to
hate speech, arguing that the designation of certain utterances as "hate speech" affects their pragmatic function.
Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth chapter of
A Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics"). They draw three conclusions from Austin: (1) A
performative utterance doesn't communicate information about an act second-hand—it does the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) The distinction between language and speech is untenable. This last conclusion attempts to simultaneously refute
Saussure's division between
langue and
parole and
Chomsky's distinction between
surface structure and
deep structure.
Significant works
J. L. Austin's How To Do Things With Words
Paul Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims
Brown & Levinson's Politeness Theory
Geoffrey Leech's politeness maxims
Levinson's Presumptive Meanings
Jürgen Habermas's universal pragmatics
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's relevance theory
Topics in pragmatics
Entailment
Deixis
Implicature
Practical reason
Presupposition
Speech act
Footnotes
Further Information
Get more info on 'Pragmatics'.
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