Transcript Pragmatics and Text Analysis Lecture 6

Pragmatics and Text
Analysis
Lecture 6
• Pragmatics is the study of language usage
from a functional perspective and is
concerned with the principles that account
for how meaning is communicated by the
speaker (writer) and interpreted by the
listener (reader) in a certain context.
• Different from semantics, pragmatics
studies the contextual meaning. This
distinction can be seen in the following
example:
• Mike: What happened to that bowl of cream?
• Annie: Cats drink cream.
• Semantically, Annie's reply can be paraphrased as
"Domestic felines consume the liquid fat of milk,"
but pragmatically, Annie probably implies "That
bowl of cream was probably eaten by our cat." In
other words, semantics focuses on the meaning
that comes from linguistic knowledge, while
pragmatics concentrates on those aspects of
meaning that cannot be predicted by linguistic
knowledge alone and takes into account our
knowledge about the physical and social world.
• Pragmatics also differs from syntax in that
pragmatics is concerned with the
appropriateness of naturally occurring
utterances. For example, the four utterances
in the following dialogue are all
syntactically incomplete, but pragmatically
they are all "appropriate" in the particular
context.
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Jane: Coffee?
Steve: Sure.
Jane: White?
Steve: White.
• Like pragmatics, text analysis is also
concerned with language used in particular
contexts. It is the linguistic analysis of
naturally occurring connected spoken or
written texts. In other words, it is the study
of linguistic units larger than sentences or
clauses.
Speech Act Theory
• As pointed out by the British philosopher Austin
in 1962, sentences are not always uttered just to
say things, but rather, they are used to do things.
Based on this assumption, Austin advanced the
Speech Act Theory, which is now generally
viewed as one of the basic theories of pragmatics.
• All linguistic activities are related to speech acts.
Therefore, to speak a language is to perform a set
of speech acts, such as statement, command,
inquiry and commitment.
• When a sentence is uttered, the speaker is
performing three kinds of speech acts
simultaneously: locutionary act, illocutionary act,
and perlocutionary act .
• Among these kinds of speech acts, pragmatists are
most interested in illocutionary act. This is
because illocutionary act conforms to the speaker's
intention and is thus the focus for the study of
verbal communication.
• A locutionary act may have different illocutionary forces in
different contexts. In other words, an utterance may be
interpreted as a direct or indirect speech act.
• For example, the utterance of "Don't you think it's too
stuffy in here?" may be interpreted (a) literally as an
inquiry for the addressee's opinion of the air condition in
the place where the sentence is uttered, (b) as an indirect
statement describing the stuffy atmosphere in the place
where the utterance occurs, and (c) as an indirect request
for the addressee to open the window or to turn on the airconditioner.
• Similarly, an illocutionary act can be performed by
different locutionary acts. For example, the
illocutionary act of asking the addressee to open
the door may take, among many others, the
following three different locutionary acts:
• a. Command: Open the door please.
• b. Request: Would you please open the door?
• c. Statement: The doorbell is ringing.
Indirect Speech Act
• As mentioned previously, indirect speech
act refers to an indirect relationship between
the propositional content and illocutionary
force of an utterance. A sentence which
expresses an indirect speech act is an
indirect performative.
• Example A below is an explicit performative in which the
speech act of request is directly coded by the performative
verb request. Example B is an indirect performative in
which the speech act of request is indirectly expressed by a
question:
• A. I request that you help me with the luggage.
• B. Can you help me with the luggage?
• As revealed in Example A, the speaker's intention can be
directly identified in the performative verb in an explicit
performative, but in the indirect performative like Example
B, the speaker's intention can only be inferred through its
literal force.
The Cooperative Principle
• Thus far we have known that an utterance may
allow two or interpretations in some situations: the
literal meaning and the non-literal meaning. In
order to account for such a linguistic phenomenon,
Grice in 1967 found that tacit agreement exists
between the speaker and the hearer in all linguistic
communicative activities. They follow a set of
principles in order to achieve particular
communicative goals. Thus, Grice proposed the
term of the cooperative principle and its maxims.
• The maxim of Quality
• try to make your contribution one that is true,
especially: (i) do not say what you believe to be
false and (ii) do not say that for which you lack
adequate evidence.
• The maxim of Quantity
• (i) make your contribution as informative as is
required for the current purposes of the exchange,
and (ii) do not make your contribution more
informative than is required.
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The maxim of Relevance
make your contribution relevant.
The maxim of Manner
Be perspicuous, and specifically: (i) Avoid
obscurity of expression; (ii) Avoid
ambiguity; (iii) Be brief (avoid unnecessary
prolixity) and (iv) Be orderly.
• But in real communication, the participants often
flout the cooperative principle and its maxims.
• In this example, B flouts the quantity maxim by
not making his or her contribution as informative
as is required:
• A: When are you going to the airport?
• B: Sometime this morning.
• Here the speaker fails to provide the precise time of his or
her going to the airport. The particularized conversational
implicature, among some others, is that the speaker does
not know the precise time of his or her departure.
The Politeness Principle
• In order to explain why in many cases
people express themselves implicitly and
indirectly by flouting the four maxims of
the cooperative principle, Brown and
Levinson (1978) advanced the Face Theory.
Leech (1983:132) developed the face theory
further and formulated the politeness
principle.
The Face Theory
• According to this theory, everybody has
face wants, i.e. the expectation concerning
their public self-image. In order to maintain
harmonious interpersonal relationships and
ensure successful social interaction, we
should be aware of the two aspects of
another person's face, i.e. the positive face
and the negative face .
Exchange and Adjacency Pair
• Empirical findings reveal that some spoken texts
can be represented by variations of recursive
exchanges. The term exchange is used here to
refer to the minimal unit of interactive spoken
texts. An exchange may be of a two-part questionanswer type, like (1), or of a two-part greetingresponse type like (2). It may also be a typical
three-part teacher-pupil talk like (3), or a threepart doctor-patient talk like (4):
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A: What time is it by your watch? (Question)
B: Ten thirty. (Answer)
(2) A: Hello. (Greeting)
B: Hi. (Response)
(3) Teacher: What's the capital of France?
(Initiation)
• Pupil: Paris. (Response)
• Teacher: Right. (Feedback)
• A further analysis of the logical relationship
in spoken texts reveals some automatic
sequences. They are called adjacency pairs.
An adjacency pair always consists of a first
part and a second part, produced by
different speakers. For example:
• Anna: Hello.
• Bill: Hi.
• The utterance of a first part immediately
creates an expectation of the utterance of a
second part of the same pair. Failure to
produce the second part in response will be
viewed as a significant absence and hence
meaningful. The forms which are used to
fill the slots in adjacency pairs may vary
considerably, but there must always be two
parts.
Cohesion
• A text is not a collection of lexical items
and/or sentences in random. Instead, it must
be semantically unified. In other words, it
must have texture, i.e. the property that
distinguishes a text from a non-text. The
unity of a text can be achieved by a number
of semantic and lexicogrammatical means,
among which the most important is
cohesion .
• Cohesive ties may be either grammatical
devices such as reference, ellipsis and
substitution, and conjunction, or lexical
devices such as general words, reiteration
and collocation. We can therefore refer to
them respectively as grammatical cohesion
and lexical cohesion.
Reference
• Reference refers to the semantic relation in which
a word or words are used to enable the addressee
to identify someone or something. The word or
words used for reference are called the reference
item. The person(s) or thing(s) identified by the
reference item are called the referent. Reference is
a specific nature of information that is signaled for
retrieval. The information to be retrieved is the
referential meaning.
Substitution and Ellipsis
• Substitution refers to the replacement of one
item by another and ellipsis the omission of
an item. Unlike reference, which is a
relation between meanings, substitution and
ellipsis are a relation between linguistic
items. Substitution and ellipsis are two
closely related processes.
Conjunction
• Conjunction in grammar refers to a word or
expression like and, but, or that connects
words, phrases, clauses and/or sentences. As
one of the major grammatical cohesive ties,
however, this term is used to focus on the
inter-clausal and inter-sentential levels. In
other words, we concentrate on how the
conjunctive expressions contribute to the
cohesion of a text.
Lexical Cohesion
• Lexical cohesion refers to the cohesive effect
achieved by the choice of lexical items. By
choosing items that are related in some way to
those that have gone before, the speaker or writer
creates cohesion in the text.
• English lexical cohesive ties, according to
Halliday & Hasan (1976:318-9), fall into two
categories: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration
can take the following four forms: repetition,
synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy and
meronymy.
• End of lecture
• Thank you for your attention