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LINGUISTICS: TIMELINE, GRAMMAR,
SEMANTICS, AND PRAGMATICS
语言学：历史线条、语法、语义与语用
Shaozhong Liu, Ph.D. (Pragmatics) / Ph.D. (Higher Education)
College of Foreign Studies, Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Homepage: www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu
Blog: cyrusliu.blog.163.com
Email: shaozhong@hotmail.com
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Teaching Plan
• Objectives
1) To prepare students with background knowledge
2) To discuss the place of pragmatics in linguistics
3) To distinguish the key terms and concepts
• Content
1) Definition of language
2) Definition of linguistics
3) Scope of linguistics
4) Progression of linguistics in timeline
5) Division of work between grammar, semantics, and
pragmatics
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Teaching Plan (cont’)
• Strategies
1) Lecture
2) Video-clip watching
3) Interactions
4) Comparison
5) Exemplification
6) Definition
7) Reading
8) Take-home assignment
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Defining Language
• “Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols for
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human communication.”
Language = human language; not animal language
System = wholeness
Arbitrary = no logical linkage between word and the object
it refers to
Vocal = sound to be pronounced and heard
Symbols = highly abstract; sign not suggestive of meaning
Human communication = exclusive of animal
communication
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Defining Linguistics
• “Linguistics is a scientific study of language.”
• -tics
• -ist (linguist = one that professes at language study)
• Scientific = resort to declarative and procedural means
• Study = exploratory and inquisitive in nature
• Language = mainly human language / form and meaning;
structure and function
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Scope of Linguistics
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Scope of Linguistics (cont’)
• Phonetics = the branch of linguistics that studies the
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physical properties of speech production and perception
Phonology = the branch of linguistics that studies sounds
as discrete, abstract elements or patterns that disitnguish
meaning.
Morphology = the branch of linguistics that studies word
formations
Lexicology = the branch of linguistics that studies words
Grammar = the branch of linguistics that studies the
structures and rule of words
Syntax = the branch of linguistics that studies relationship
of words to make up grammatical sentences
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• Semantics = the branch of linguistics that studies ideal
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speaker’s / context-free meanings of words and
sentences.
Stylistics = the branch of linguistics that studies language
use features relative to people, context, etc.
Pragmatics = the branch of linguistics that studies
context-dependent / actual speaker’s meanings of words
and utterances.
Discourse = the branch of linguistics that studies
structures and functions of texts
…
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Progression of Linguistics
• Linguists were bothered by 3 questions over history:
1) Where does language come from? Plato first raised this
question, hence Plato or Platonic question. *No ending!
2) What is the relationship between form and meaning?
(lightening = natural = the Stoics; wedding ceremony =
manmade = Plato’s student Aristotle) * Should be both!
3) What makes up a sentence? / What are the elements of
a sentence? (Study language within the framework of logic;
Plato assumes 2 basic elements in a sentence: a subject
and a verb, the latter coming after the former. Aristotle
looks into the parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, adjectives,
verbs, static words, linking devices, and prepositions), the
core of traditional grammar!
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• Along the line, there appeared several themes in enquiry:
1) Traditional grammar
2) Historical linguistics
3) Structuralism
4) Transformational grammar
5) Functional grammar
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Division of Work: Grammar, Semantics,
Pragmatics
• Leech (1983), etc.
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Grammar quotes
• A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good
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grammar.' A. P. Martinich
Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as
those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke
versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs. Jack Lynch
At age 11 in 1960, I moved to an academic state
secondary school, Harrow County Grammar School for
Boys. Paul Nurse
Be able to correctly pronounce the words you would like
to speak and have excellent spoken grammar. Marilyn
vos Savant
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about
grammar is its power. Joan Didion
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• Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the
grammar of reason. Richard Chenevix Trench
• Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy.
Tony Parsons
• Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.
Moliere
• Greek was very much a live language, and a language
still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by
definitions and trained upon dictionaries. Gilbert Murray
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• Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed
merely towards correcting grammar. Ferdinand de
Saussure
• His eyes so dim, so wasted each limb, that, heedless of
grammar, they all cried, that's him! Richard Harris
Barham
• I am the Roman Emperor, and am above grammar.
Emperor Sigismund
• I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity,
by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar
and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of
my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
Louis Aragon
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• I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to
persuade people to do something, or buy something, it
seems to me you should use their language, the language
they use every day, the language in which they think. We
try to write in the vernacular. David Ogilvy
• I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and
as soon as I done it I seen it. Carl Sandburg
• I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his
old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to
his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.
Anthony Holden
• I studied at a grammar school and later at the University
of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine. Karl von Frisch
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• I used to go with him and I'd sometimes play, take over
from him. That was my first taste of the music business, I
suppose, but I was also in the youth orchestra at
Johnston Grammar. Trevor Horn
I was raised in Hollywood and knew, from as early as
grammar school, classmates who were in the business.
Mike Farrell
• I went to the local schools, the local state primary school,
and then to the local grammar school. A secondary
school, which technically was an independent school, it
was not part of the state educational system. John Hume
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• In general, the philological movement opened up
countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating
them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for
instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But
not yet in the spirit of linguistics.
Ferdinand de Saussure
• It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language
fluently until you find out who you are in that language,
and that has as much to do with your body as it does with
vocabulary and grammar. Fred Frith
• It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I
haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a
word in place of a word and when I discovered how
difficult the grammar was and learning that was very
discouraging for me. Bo Derek
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• Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and
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nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genius a better discerning. Oliver Goldsmith
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between
thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the
language. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Social criticism begins with grammar and the reestablishing of meanings. Octavio Paz
Statistics is the grammar of science. Karl Pearson
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by
the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It
never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
Ferdinand de Saussure
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• Then when I was in grammar school I played the clarinet,
and then, after clarinet I played the flute in college
orchestra - besides singing in the college chorus and
things like that.
Bobby McFerrin
• This African American Vernacular English shares most of
its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English.
But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from
standard English than any other dialect spoken in
continental North America. William Labov
• What that book does for me is give me the tools in the
same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular
scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the
syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to
write Ulysses.
David Baker
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• When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar
lesson seems an impertinence. Thomas W. Higginson
• Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. White
• You see so many movies... the younger people who are
coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials
and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real
sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut,
cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.
Peter Bogdanovich
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Semantics quotes
• All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics,
because words are the tools with which we work, the
material out of which laws are made, out of which the
Constitution was written. Everything depends on our
understanding of them. Felix Frankfurter
• I think that, on the reconciliation issue, if they had the
votes, we wouldn't have had the summit. And if they try to
go through reconciliation, it will be a change in semantics.
Instead of the American people saying 'stop the bill' or 'kill
the bill,' it's all going to be about repealing the bill. That's
not the kind of discussion that they want.
Marsha Blackburn
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If we're for one another, we're feminists. The rest is
semantics. Betty Buckley
• Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained
undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and
even came to occupy the central place in the scientific
study of language. Roman Jakobson
• Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the
exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch
languages is to change the labels. Willard Van Orman
Quine
• When someone writes to tell me something I've written
made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well.
The rest is all semantics. Len Wein
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Pragmatic quotes
• Dream in a pragmatic way. Aldous Huxley
• For pragmatic reasons, I love the routine. I love the
structure of it. I love knowing that my days are free. I know
where I'm going at night. I know my life is kind of orderly. I
just like that better.
Andrea Martin
• I am a very pragmatic person. Gloria Swanson
• I don't have this fantasy about marriage anymore.
Everyone says it takes hard work. Well, it kind of does and I'm much more pragmatic about romance than I used
to be. Jennifer Garner
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• I grew up with Scientology - my parents at one point were
clerical. It's a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief
system. Yeah, it's had media exposure because certain
luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who
are not celebrities. It's not a threat or some cult. Giovanni
Ribisi
• I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works,
works. Linus Torvalds
• I'm not asking any of you to make drastic changes to
every single one of your recipes or to totally change the
way you do business. But what I am asking is that you
consider reformulating your menu in pragmatic and
incremental ways to create healthier versions of the foods
that we all love. Michelle Obama
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• I'm optimistic because I'm pragmatic: Neither of the two
sides, the military government nor the Islamic front, is
capable of winning. If they continue to fight, they will both
bleed to death. Ahmed Ben Bella
• In any architecture, there is an equity between the
pragmatic function and the symbolic function. Michael
Graves
• Keeping small nations enslaved because of the deals
between the great nations or because of any pragmatic
considerations that might have been there are totally
unacceptable. Mikhail Saakashvili
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• The purpose of this study is to offer a logical, practical,
pragmatic proof of the existence of God from a purely
scientific perspective. John Clayton
• We need a government that is what we are at our best.
Smart, efficient, pragmatic and compassionate. Deval
Patrick
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What is pragmatics?
• “We human beings are odd compared with our nearest
animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what we want,
when we want. All normal humans can produce and
understand any number of new words and sentences.
Humans use the multiple options of language often
without thinking. But blindly, they sometimes fall into its
traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but
themselves get caught in the sticky strands.”
Jean Aitchison
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• “Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of
language in social interaction and the effects of our choice
on others.”
David Crystal
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• “Pragmatics is all about the meanings between the lexis
and the grammar and the phonology...Meanings are
implied and the rules being followed are unspoken,
unwritten ones.”
George Keith
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• “Pragmatics is a way of investigating how sense can be
made of certain texts even when, from a semantic
viewpoint, the text seems to be either incomplete or to
have a different meaning to what is really intended.
Consider a sign seen in a children's wear shop window:
“Baby Sale - lots of bargains”. We know without asking
that there are no babies are for sale - that what is for sale
are items used for babies. Pragmatics allows us to
investigate how this “meaning beyond the words” can be
understood without ambiguity. The extra meaning is there,
not because of the semantic aspects of the words
themselves, but because we share certain contextual
knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text.”
Steve Campsall
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• “Pragmatics is an important area of study for your course.
A simplified way of thinking about pragmatics is to
recognise, for example, that language needs to be kept
interesting - a speaker or writer does not want to bore a
listener or reader, for example, by being over-long or
tedious. So, humans strive to find linguistic means to
make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting, more
relevant, more purposeful or more personal. Pragmatics
allows this. ”
Steve Campsall
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• Pragmatics is a systematic way of explaining language
use in context. It seeks to explain aspects of meaning
which cannot be found in the plain sense of words or
structures, as explained by semantics. As a field of
language study, pragmatics is fairly new. Its origins lie in
philosophy of language and the American philosophical
school of pragmatism. As a discipline within language
science, its roots lie in the work of (Herbert) Paul Grice on
conversational implicature and the cooperative principle,
and on the work of Stephen Levinson, Penelope Brown
and Geoff Leech on politeness.
• We can illustrate how pragmatics works by an example
from association football (and other field sports). It
sometimes happens that a team-mate will shout at me:
“Man on!” Semantic analysis can only go so far with this
phrase.
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• For example, it can elicit different lexical meanings of the
noun “man” (mankind or the human race, an individual
person, a male person specifically) and the preposition
“on” (on top of, above, or other relationships as in “on
fire”, “on heat”, “on duty”, “on the fiddle” or “on the telly”).
• And it can also explain structural meaning, and account
for the way this phrase works in longer sequences such
as the “first man on the moon”, “a man on the run” or “the
man on top of the Clapham omnibus”.
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• None of this explains the meaning in the context of the
football game. This is very complex, but perhaps includes
at least the following elements:
• My team-mate has seen another player's movement, and
thinks that I have either not seen it, or have not
responded to it appropriately.
• My team-mate wants me to know that I am likely to be
tackled or impeded in some way.
• My team-mate wants me to respond appropriately, as by
shielding the ball, passing it to an unmarked player, laying
it off for another team-mate and so on.
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• My team-mate has an immediate concern for me, but this
is really subordinated to a more far-sighted desire for me,
as a player on his team, to protect the ball or retain
possession, as this will make our team more likely to gain
an advantage.
• My team-mate understands that my opponent will also
hear the warning, but thinks that his hearing it will not
harm our team's chances as much as my not being aware
of the approaching player.
• My team-mate foresees that I may rebuke him (and the
other players on our team collectively) if no-one, from a
better vantage point, alerts me to the danger.
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• If this (or even part of it) is right, it is clear that my team-
mate could not, in the time available, (that is, before the
opponent tackles me) communicate this information in the
explicit manner above. But it also relies on my knowing
the methods of language interchange in football. “Man on”
is an established form of warning. For all I know,
professional players may have their own covert forms, as
when they signal a routine at a free kick, corner or throwin, by calling a number or other code word.
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• Also, though my team-mate is giving me information, in
the context of the game, he is chiefly concerned about my
taking the right action. If response to the alert becomes
like a conditioned reflex (I hear the warning and at once
lay the ball off or pass), then my contribution to the team
effort will be improved. (Reflection on how I play the game
is fine after the match, but not helpful at moments when I
have to take action.) Note also, that though I have
assumed this to be in a game played by men, the phrase
“Man on” is used equally in mixed-gender and women's
sports - I have heard it frequently in games of field
hockey, where the “Man” about to be “on” was a female
player. “Woman on” would be inefficient (extra syllable
and a difficult initial “w” sound), and might even lead the
uncritical player to worry less about the approaching
tackle - though probably not more than once.
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• We use language all the time to make things happen. We ask
someone to pass the salt or marry us - not, usually at the same
time. We order a pizza or make a dental appointment. Speech
acts include asking for a glass of beer, promising to drink the
beer, threatening to drink more beer, ordering someone else to
drink some beer, and so on. Some special people can do
extraordinary things with words, like baptizing a baby, declaring
war, awarding a penalty kick to Arsenal FC or sentencing a
convict.
• Linguists have called these things “speech acts” - and
developed a theory (called, unsurprisingly, “speech act theory”)
to explain how they work. Some of this is rooted in common
sense and stating the obvious - as with felicity conditions.
These explain that merely saying the words does not
accomplish the act. Judges (unless they are also referees)
cannot award penalty kicks to Arsenal, and football referees
(unless they are also heads of state) cannot declare war.
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• Speech act theory is not the whole of pragmatics, but is
perhaps currently the most important established part of
the subject. Contemporary debate in pragmatics often
focuses on its relations with semantics. Since semantics
is the study of meaning in language, why add a new field
of study to look at meaning from a novel viewpoint?
• This is an elementary confusion. Clearly linguists could
develop a model of semantics that included pragmatics.
Or they could produce a model for each, which allows for
some exploration and explanation of the boundary
between them - but distinguishes them as in some way
different kinds of activity. However, there is a consensus
view that pragmatics as a separate study is necessary
because it explains meanings that semantics overlooks.
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• 你懂的 （啊）！
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The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction
• In early work, the semantics-pragmatics distinction was
often seen as coextensive with the distinction between
truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning
(Gazdar 1979). On this approach, pragmatics would deal
with a range of disparate phenomena, including (a)
Gricean conversational inference, (b) the inferential
recognition of illocutionary-force, and (c) the conventional
meanings of illocutionary-force indicators and other nontruth-conditional expressions such as but, please,
unfortunately (Recanati 1987). From the cognitive point of
view, these phenomena have little in common.
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• Within the cognitive science literature in particular, the
semantics-pragmatics distinction is now more generally
seen as coextensive with the distinction between
decoding and inference (or conventional and
conversational meaning). On this approach, all
conventional meaning, both truth-conditional and nontruth-conditional, is left to linguistic semantics, and the
aim of pragmatic theory is to explain how the gap
between sentence meaning and utterance interpretation is
inferentially bridged. A pragmatic theory of this type is
developed in D. Sperber and D. Wilson (1986).
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summary
• Grammar vs. pragmatics
1) Grammar = rules + correctness
2) Pragmatics = principles + appropriateness
• Semantics vs. pragmatics
1) Semantics = ideal speaker / context free meaning
2) Pragmatics = meaning – semantics (i.e. meanings that
semantics does not cover)
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Extended Readings
• Outline of linguistics
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics)
• Berkeley Linguistics
1(http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzQ4MDU2NA==.html)
• What is linguistics
(http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTYzODQ5NTI0.html)
• After-class reading “What is pragmatics?” (Peccei, 1999)