Transcript pragmatics

语用学概述
Lecture 2
The scope of pragmatics
Background
The term pragmatics stems from the philospher Charles Morris (1938), who
was actually interested in semiotics (or semiotic). Morris distinguished three
branches of study within semiotics:
syntactics (or syntax), the study of the formal relation of signs to one another”,
semantics, the study of the relations of signs to the objects to which signs are
applicable”, and
pragmatics, the study of the relation of signs to interpreters” (1938:6).
background
According to Morris (1971:24), each branch of
semiotics can be further divided into pure
studies and descriptive studies. The former was
concerned with the elaboration of the relevant
metalanguage and the latter applied the
metalanguage to the description of specific
signs and their usages.
background
With his particular behavioristic theory of semiotics,
Morris defined the scope of pragmatics as follows:
It is a sufficiently accurate characterization of
pragmatics to say that it deals with the biotic
aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the
psychological, biological, and sociological
phenomena which occur in the functioning of
signs.(Morris,1938:108)
background
 Levinson(1983:2) holds that this scope of pragmatics is very
much wider than the work that currently goes on under the
rubric of linguistic pragmatics, for it would include what is
now known as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics,
neurolinguistics and much besides. The term pragmatics
have long been used in two different ways. On the one hand,
the broad use intended by Morris has been retain, dealing
mainly with matters as diverse as the psychopathology of
communication and the evolution of symbol systems.
background
 On the other hand, and especially within analytical
philosophy, the term pragmatics was subject to a
successive narrowing of scope.
 If in an investigation explicit reference is made to the
speaker, or to put it in more general terms, to the user
of the language, then we assign it [the investigation] to
the field of pragmatics...If we abstract from the user of
the language and analyze only the expressions and
their designata, we are in the field of semantics. And,
finally, if we abstract from the designata also and
analyze only the relations between the expressions,
we are in (logical) syntax.
background
 The idea that pragmatics was the study of
aspects of language that required reference to
the users of the language then led to a very
natural, further restriction of the term in
analytical philosophy. For there is one aspect
of natural languages that indubitably requires
such reference, namely the study of deitic or
indexical words like the pronouns I and you.
background
 For example,

I am Zhang Xiao, Zhang Xiao is a girl, therefore
I am a girl.
 If the first two premises are true and the speaker of
the conclusion is the same speaker as the speaker of
the first premise, then we say the statement is
necessarily true. Bar-Hillel (1954) therefore took
the view that pragmatics is the study of languages,
both natural and artificial, that contain indexical or
deictic terms.
background
 In the late 1960s, an implicit version of Carnap’s
definition--- investigations requiring reference to
the users of a language---was adopted within
linguistics. At the same time, there was a keen
interst shown by linguists in philosopher’s attempts
to grapple with problems of meaning, sometimes
from the point of view of the users of the language’.
During this period, the scope of pragmatics was
implicitly restricted.
background
 Levinson (1983) considers a set of possible
definition of pragmatics. One possible definition
goes as follows: Pragmatics is the study of those
principles that will account for why a certain set of
sentences are anomalous, or not possible utterances.
(Levinson, 1983:6) e.g.
 (1) ??Come there please!
 (2) ??Aristotle was Greek, but I don’t believe it
background
 (3)
??John’s children are hippies, and he
has no children
 (4) ??I order you not to obey this order
 (5) ??I hereby sing
 (6) ??As everyone knows, the earth please
revolves around the sun
Background
 The explanation of these anomalies might be provided by
pointing out that there are no, or at least no ordinary,
contexts in which they could be appropriately used.
Although an approach of this sort may be quite a good way
to illustrate the kind of principles that pragmatics is
concerned with, it will hardly do as an explicit definition of
the field, because the set of pragmatic anomalies are
presupposed, rather than explained. One can possibly
imagine contexts in which the alleged anomalies are quite
usable. This problem will recur when we consider the
concept of appropriateness of an utterance.
Background
 Another kind of definition would be that pragmatics
is the study of language from a functional
perspective, that is, that it explains facets of
linguistic structure by reference to non-linguistic
pressures and causes. But such a definition would
fail to distinguish linguistic pragmatics from many
other disciplines interested in functional approaches
to language, including psycholinguistics and
sociolinguitstics. Such a definition confuses the
motives for studying pragmatics with the goals or
general shape of a theory.
Background
 One quite restricted scope for pragmatics that has
been proposed is that pragmatics should be
concerned solely with the description of linguistic
structure. Or, to use Chomsky’s distinction between
competence and performance, pragmatics is
concerned solely with performance principles of
language use. Thus Katz & Fodor (1963) suggested
that a theory of pragmatics would essentially be
concerned with the disambiguation of sentences by
the contexts in which they were uttered.
Background
 One could claim that grammar is concerned with the
context-free assignment of meaning to linguistic
forms, while pragmatics is concerned with the further
interpretation of those forms in context, as Katz
(1977:19) notes:

[Grammars] are theories about the structure of sentence
types... Pragmatics theories, in contrast, do nothing to explicate
the structure of linguistic constructions or grammatical
properties and relations... They explicate the reasoning of
speakers and hearers in working out the correlation in a context
of a sentence taken with a proposition. In this respect, a
pragmatic theory is part of performance.
Background
 It seems that the term pragmatics covers both
context-dependent aspects of language structure and
principles of language usage and understanding that
have nothing or little to do with linguistic structure.
But this should not be taken to imply that
pragmatics is concerned with quite disparate and
unrelated aspects of language; rather pragmatists
are specifically interested in the inter-relation of
language structure and principles of language usage.
Background
 If we have a definition that is specifically
aimed at capturing the concern of pragmatists
with features of language structure. It might
go as follows:

Pragmatics is the study of those
relations between language and context
that are grammaticalized, or encoded in
the structure of a language.
Background
 Levinson (1983) gives some other definitions of the field:

Pragmatics is the study of all those aspects of meaning
not captured in a semantic theory.

Pragmatics is the study of the relations between language
and context that basic to an account of language
understanding.

Pragmatics is the study of the ability of language users to
pair sentences with the contexts in which they would
appropriate.

Pragmatics is the study of the deixis, implicature,
presupposition, speech acts, and aspects of discourse
structure.
the role of pragmatics
 The need for a pragmatic component in an
integrated theory of linguistic ability can be argued
for in various ways. One way is to consider the
relation of the pragmatics-semantics-syntax
trichotomy to the competence-performance
dichotomy proposed by Chomsky. In Chomsky’s
view, grammars are models of competence, where
competence is knowledge of a language idealized
away from irregularity or error and variation; to this,
Katz influentially added idealization away from
context.
the role of pragmatics
 On such a view, insofar as pragmatics is concerned
with context, it can be claimed that by definition
pragmatics is not part of competence and thus not
within the scope of grammatical descriptions. But
suppose now we require that adequate grammatical
descriptions include specifications of the meaning
of every word in a language, and such a
requirement has normally been assumed, then we
find words whose meaning-specifications can only
be given by reference to contexts of usage.
the role of pragmatics
 For example, the meaning of words like well, oh
and anyway in English cannot be explicated simply
by statements of context-independent content;
rather one has to refer to pragmatic concepts like
relevance, implicature, or discourse structure. So
either grammars must make reference to pragmatic
information, or they cannot include full lexical
description of a language.
Current interests in Pragmatics
 Pragmatic principles of language usage can be
shown systematically to ‘read in’ to utterances more
than they conventionally or literally mean. Such
regularly superimposed implications can then
become quite hard to disentangle from sentence or
literal meaning; in order to put them apart, the
theorist has to construct or observe contexts in
which the usual pragmatic implications do not hold.
Current interests in Pragmatics
 For example, it seems perfectly natural to claim that the
quantifier some in the following means ‘some and not all’:

Some ten cent pieces are rejected by this vending
machine.
 But suppose I am trying to use the machine, and I try coin
after coin unsuccessfully, and I utter the above sentence; I
might then very well communicate:

Some, and perhaps all, ten cent pieces are rejected by
this vending machine.
Current interests in Pragmatics
 Pragmatists also realized that there is a very
substantial gap between current linguistic theories
of language and accounts of linguistic
communication. When linguists talk of the goal of
linguistic theory as being the construction of an
account of a sound-meaning correspondence for the
infinite set of sentences in any language, one might
perhaps infer that such a theory would give an
account of at least the essential of how we
communicate using language.
Current interests in Pragmatics
 There is a substantial gap between a semantic
theory and a complete theory of linguistic
communication. Where are we to account for the
hints, implicit purposes, assumptions, social
attitudes and so on that are effectively
communicated by the use of language? For example,
in the following extracts from recorded
conversations, the responses to an utterance indicate
that for participants the utterance carried the
implications indicated in brackets:
Current interests in Pragmatics
 (1) A: I could eat the whole of that cake [implication: I
compliment you on the cake]

B: Oh thanks

(2) A: Do you have coffee to go? [Implication: Sell me
coffee to go if you can]

B: Cream and sugar?
 (3) A: Hi John

B: How’re you doing?

A: Say, what’re you doing [Implication: I’ve got a
suggestion about what we might do together]

B: Well, we’re going out. Why?

A: Oh I was just going to say come out ...
Understanding and Using Language
 P: What’s your name by the way
 S: Stephen
 P: You haven’t asked my name back
 S: What’s your name
 P: It’s Pat
Understanding and Using Language








Appropriacy
I think you could go in now you know
Are we all here
Non-literal or indirect meaning
Right, shall we begin
Inference
I’m a man. (a woman colleague says)
Female toilet on floor above (a sign on the door of
the gentlemen’s toilet)
Understanding and Using Language
 Indeterminacy (utterances are
underdetermined)
 I’m a man
 I really like your new haircut
 Are you here Peter
 Context
 I’m tired (say at night or in the morning)
 Relevance
 I suppose today it’s especially important to be
thinking carefully about what our students say to us
Understanding and Using Language
 Misfires (misfires are important
because they tell us that there are
expected norms for talk by showing us
the effect when the norm is not
achieved.)
 –– Will you have some more chocolate
 –– I didn’t even have any to begin with
Pragmatics in China
 胡壮麟《国外语言学》1980年第3期
 何自然《语用学概论》1988年
 何兆熊《语用学概要》1989年
 徐盛桓“新格莱斯会话含意理论”
 顾曰国“礼貌原则”
Pragmatics in China
 外语教学的语用学研究
 翻译研究
 面向汉语语法的语用学研究
 英汉对比研究
 跨文化交际研究
 1989年全国首届语用学研讨会
Pragmatics in the World
 Relevance theory (1986)
 认知语用
End of Lecture