PRAGMATICS

A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation. It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning (Mey 1993, Verschueren1999). In other words, semantics focuses on linguistic meaning without broader context, whereas pragmatics focuses on contextualized meaning.

Pragmatics can then be defined as “the study of speaker”, “contextual meaning”, “how more gets communicated than is said” and “the expression of relative distance”. In other words, to study pragmatics is to “study the relationships between linguistic forms and the users of those forms” (Yule 2000). According to Verschueren (1999), pragmatics is “meaning in use” or “meaning in context”.

Semantics is related to the meaning of words and sentences while pragmatics is related to the meaning of utterances, or speaker meaning. In other words, both semantics and pragmatics are concerned with the meaning of linguistic expressions, but pragmatics takes the interlocutors, the speaker and the hearer, as the focus of attention, whereas semantics focuses only on linguistic expressions. In semantics, we just pay attention to the literal meaning of a word whereas the true meaning of a phrase or a sentence is determined by the context, namely the conditions under which a speaker uses language.

(A) A mother talking to her son who has been playing outside with his friends from the sunrise to the sunset. Intended meaning: You shall come back home since you have played for a long time. (B) Husband who is not willing to go to the supermarket with his wife in the evening because of an exciting football match. Intended meaning: We can go shopping tomorrow morning. (C) A girl talking to her boyfriend who wants to spend more time with her on the beach. Intended meaning: I must go back home, since my father might get angry with me. (D) A grandmother talking to her granddaughter who has been doing her homework on the dining table. Intended meaning: Stop doing your homework and/or turn the light on. (E) A child talking to her mother who is closing the sun blinds of the sitting room. Intended meaning: Don’t close the curtains down

Context can be divided into four different kinds: 1. Physical context 2. Epistemic context 3. Linguistic context 4. Social context

We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication.

In Speech Act Theory, an utterance may comprise three different speech acts: The performance of an utterance is a locutionary act with it’s phonetic, syntactic and semantic features. Speakers in producing an utterance, say something without pragmatic meaning. However, as soon as an utterance is spoken, it has an intented meaning depending on the temporal condition and speakers’ purpose which is called illocutionary act, and in certain cases the actual effect of the utterance on the hearer comprises the perlocutionary act, that is how the hearer treats what he or she has heard.

Searle (1976) maintains five classes of speech acts, namely:

1. Representatives/Assertives: describing something, maybe states or events in the real world. For example, using a declaration, a claim, a revealment. 5. “This is Eiffel Tower.” “Buras› Topkap› Saray›.”

2. Directives: expressing speaker attempts to get listener to do something, such as suggestion, a request, or an order. 6. “You’d better not call him this afternoon.” “Bugün gelmesen iyi olur.”

3. Commissives: speaker commits him/herself to doing something in the future bypromising or a threat. 7. “I will have dinner with you tonight, I promise.” “Yar›n sana mutlaka paran› öderim.”

4. Expressives: expressing speakers’ feelings and psychological attitudes about something, such as making a apology, complaining, expressing sympathy, to thank someone. 8. “I’m sorry about the mess in your room.” “Odam›n kusuruna bakmay›n.”

5. Declarations: changing the state of affairs in the world. 9. “I now pronounce you man and wife.” “Sizi kar› koca ilan ediyorum.”

Direct speech acts means that listener can judge speaker’s intention by the literal meaning of the sentences while indirect speech acts mean that there are hidden meanings.

The direct speech acts can be declarative, interrogative or imperative. Declarative: these are propositions, such as the following: “Ali`nin arabas› var.” Propositions are things we are familiar with from semantics. We can figure out the truth conditions for these types of sentences and arrive at a truth value in many cases. Interrogative: Basically, these seek information, and “interrogative” is thus just another term for question, as in “‹stanbul’a gidiyor musun?” Imperative: These, of course, have the property of attempting to cause others to behave in particular ways. They are known more colloquially as commands. An example would be: “Gel .”

A special kind of direct speech act is called a performative. Performatives are interesting in that they are basically verbs whose action is a speech act.

1. The speech act must be between the speaker and the hearer. Speech acts involving non-present 3rd parties never occur. 2. The speech act must occur in the present.

The notion of situational inappropriateness is described in terms of what are called felicity conditions. The basic idea here is that felicity conditions allow us to determine under what circumstances it is appropriate to ask questions, give commands, and so forth. One big thing to bear in mind is that if we get the felicity conditions down explicitly enough, we can pinpoint the nature of the inappropriate use of language in terms of the particular felicity condition or conditions violated

The hallmark of an indirect speech act is that its literal meaning is different from its intended meaning.

The Gricean maxims are a framework for understanding how humans co-operate socially in their use of language.

In an attempt to better explain how speakers mean things that they do not actually say in words, the linguistic philosopher Grice (1967) makes a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” meanings of utterances. He further argues that a speaker and a hearer are guided by some “conversational principles” in order to make the right references and interpret meaning beyond the linguistic content of an utterance (Grice, 1975).

The conversational principle operates with some “maxims” in the assumption that the speaker does not say what is false, or irrelevant, or too much or too little. The maxims are quality, quantity, relation and manner.

implicature is a component of speaker meaning that constitutes an aspect of what is meant without necessarily being part of what is said. Interestingly, speakers usually mean more than they say, especially drawing upon the context of the utterance.

Expressions which are used to identify particular persons, time or place associated are called deictic expressions.

Deictic expressions used to point to persons are called person deixis, e.g. ben, o, biz, I, him, we, you etc. Place deixis is used to point to locations e.g. burası, orası, here, there, beside, etc, demonstrative deixis is used to point things e.g. bu, bunlar, su, şunlar, o, onlar this, that, while time deixis is used to point to time, e.g. şimdi, yarın, dün, now, then, this evening, tomorrow etc.

What the writer assumes the reader already knows about the subject and the context of the information is known as presupposition.

The concept of “face” in pragmatics refers to someone’s self image. Your face, therefore, is your emotional and social sense of self worth that you expect someone else to recognize (Yule, 2000).

Ethnomethodologists identify turn types, the main one being what they describe as adjacency pair. This occurs when the utterance of one speaker makes a particular kind of response likely, usually a choice of two likely responses. For example, a request will likely attract either an acceptance or refusal.