PRAGMATICS
HOW FACTORS OUTSIDE OF LANGUAGE CONTRIBUTE TO BOTH LITERAL MEANING AND
NONLITERAL MEANINGS
Presenters: Sarvenaz Zamani and Nastaran Hoseinkhani
DEFINITION
 concerns both the relationship between context of use and
sentence meaning and
 the relationships among sentence meaning, context of use, and
speaker’s meaning
KEY WORDS
 Indexicals: words whose semantic meanings depend in a direct way on the context of use e.g. I, you, here, now
 Deixis: is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context.
 Anaphora: the relationship between two words when one of them picks up its meaning from the other word
 Anaphor: A word which gets its meaning in this way.
 Antecedent: the piece of language which gives the anaphor its meaning.
e.g. Do you see that baby girl over there? She is cute.
 Discourse anaphora: when the anaphor and antecedent are in different sentences.
e.g. A baby girl lives next door to me. She is cute.
e.g. Most baby girls are born with hair. ?? She is cute.
PRESUPPOSITION
 is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is
taken for granted in discourse.
 They are often understood in terms of notion of common ground.
 Common ground: is the set of propositions which the participants in a conversation mutually
assume. Implicitly/ explicitly
THE GRICEAN VIEW OF MEANING
 Semantics views meaning from the compositional perspective: the meaning of a sentence is built up from the
meanings of its parts.
 However, not all aspects of meaning can be explained by this compositional “bottom-up” approach, and a
complementary “top down” view of meaning.
 when A says something to B, A intends for B to be affected in a certain way.
 This perspective helps us understand many aspects of speaker’s meaning.
IMPLICATURE
 meaning is based in the intentions of speakers.
 when someone says something, he or she doesn’t mean exactly what the words literally mean.
 That is, the (speaker’s) meaning differs from the (semantic) meaning.
 This “extra meaning” which goes beyond what the words literally say is an implicature of the sentence.
e.g. “There’s a bear sneaking up behind you!”
COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE
 speaker’s meaning can be calculated on the basis of semantic meaning and the
assumption that speakers are behaving rationally and cooperatively.
 Grice broke this general principle
into four conversational maxims.
e.g. There are three students in the class:
Mary, Bob, and Jill.
A: Which students passed the exam?
B: Mary and Bob.
e.g. Do you think my shirt is attractive?
CULTURE-SPECIFIC IMPLICATURE
 Cultural assumptions can be crucial in determining speaker’s meaning.
 e.g. if two Chinese people are looking at the dessert display in a French restaurant, and one says to the other,
“That tart is not too sweet,”
SPEECH ACTS
 speaker using an utterance to signal his/her intention to accomplish some action and
the hearer inferring that action from the utterance.
A) I promise to visit tomorrow.
B) she promised to visit tomorrow.
 Sentences which perform actions like A are known as Performatives.
 Other sentences are called Constatives.
 Insert the word hereby before the verb to test if a sentence is performative
I hereby promise/ challenge/ bet…
I hereby walk/ see/ like…
LEVELS OF SPEECH ACTS
 Locutionary acts: grammar-internal actions like articulating a certain sound, using a certain morpheme,
referring to a particular person. (These are the “acts” which fall under phonetics, phonology, morphology,
syntax, and semantics.
 Illocutionary acts: actions of communication like asserting a fact, asking a question, requesting an action,
making a promise, or giving a warning.
 Perlocutionary acts: actions which go beyond communication, like annoying, frightening, or tricking
someone by what you tell them.