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.
