Introduction to Pragmatics: Bridging the Gap Between Language and Meaning
1. Linguistics versus Pragmatics: Advances Towards Language in Use
Pragmatics is NOT interested in morphology; Pragmatics takes Morphology for granted. It is NOT interested in phonology: Pragmatics assumes that people know how to speak a language. It is NOT interested in syntax: Pragmatics assumes that people know how to organize sentences, but the way they do it has implications for communication. It is NOT interested in semantics. It is NOT interested in grammar: Pragmatics assumes that people know the grammar. Pragmatics goes beyond many of the areas of linguistic analysis.
Pragmatics IS interested in how we produce and interpret information in a context and in how we turn what people say into what they want to communicate.
We almost never communicate what we literally say. We always communicate more than what we say. It is the interlocutor’s task to discover what the person means.
The person says something and means something else, that’s why it is interesting for pragmatics: we say two things at the same time.
There are gaps in communication:
- What the speaker intends to communicate
- What the speaker actually says
- What the interlocutor hears
- What the interlocutor actually interprets.
- What the addresser user intends to communicate
- What the addresser user could have said (face to face)
- What the addresser user actually types
- What the addressee user reads
- What the addressee user could have listened to (face to face).
Sometimes utterances are intentionally ambiguous. Words don’t have a stable meaning, their meanings have to be adjusted in context.
Utterances often say one thing but imply something different:
- Speaker meaning: what a speaker means (i.e. intends to convey) when they use a piece of language
- Sentence meaning: what a sentence means given the rules of the language concerned
- Word meaning: what a word means in the lexicon of a language.
The only pragmatic thing is speaker meaning, sentence and word meaning are literal.
2. General Aspects of Pragmatics
Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/1970)
Main Thesis:
Science is not the story of how knowledge was acquired, but an accumulation of theories. It follows that old theories are not less scientific than the current one. It was challenging because there was this idea that science is constantly getting better. Kuhn’s view is that we have an opposition of theories: The history of science is a history of theories in war.
Science Develops in Paradigms:
Universally recognized scientific achievements that provide models and solutions to a community of scientists (T.K): periods in which everybody is happy with a theory, periods of stability. So we have a SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM (period of stability), and suddenly one person turns up with different ideas and makes what T.K names a SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION (instability). People consider this person a lunatic but after a certain time everybody realizes that this person’s idea was right and another SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM (period of stability) begins.
In Linguistics, Saussure caused a scientific revolution: SP (historicism, comparative grammar), SR (instability), SP (Structuralism). Then Chomsky turned up with his ideas of competence, performance, etc. So again we have SP (structuralism), SR (instability), SP (Generative Grammar). Now there should be someone making a revolution that leads to a SP (Pragmatics). But instead of creating a new paradigm, pragmatics is living side by side with other parts of linguistics and other theories. Pragmatics deals with language in use, language used in context. It’s against Saussure’s interest in langue and Chomsky’s interest in competence. Defining Pragmatics is also complicated.
- Pragmatics studies the context-dependent aspects of verbal communication and comprehension.
- Pragmatics studies the role of non-linguistic factors in verbal communication and comprehension.
- Pragmatics studies how language interacts with other cognitive systems (e.g. perception, memory, inference) in verbal communication and comprehension.
Morris – Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938)
Semiotics: Syntax (Sign <-> Sign); Semantics (Sign <-> Meaning); Pragmatics (Sign <-> Users). Putting pragmatics at the same level of syntax and semantics was a push for it to be respected as a branch of linguistics. One of the problems of pragmatics is that it analyzes context and explaining context is a very difficult task. Different pragmatic perspectives have appeared and they deal with one specific aspect of context. Instead of having a very common research project we have different projects that deal with very specific aspects, which is not good for pragmatics as a paradigm. This multiplicity has generated a feeling of lack of unity within the pragmatic paradigm. As a consequence, many authors don’t want to call pragmatics a paradigm, so they call it a perspective, a number of approximations, a dimension, a pre-paradigm. Pragmatics provides a general cognitive, social and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage, accounting for the dynamic of language and language use, as is reflected in the premise that meaning is not given but rather dynamic and negotiated in context.