 Focuses on the literal meanings of words,

phrases and sentences;

 concerned with how grammatical processes
build complex meanings out of simpler ones
 Focuses on the use of language in particular
situations;
 aims to explain how factors outside of
language contribute to both literal meaning
and nonliteral meanings which speakers
communicate using language
 The study of meaning in use
 Provides tools to help us understand the
meaning in a given social context, including
the effect that language has on those
involved in the speech situation
 Semantics – the study of meaning outside of
its contextualized use with a focus on the
literal meaning of words and phrases
 Semantics – concerned with what language
says
 Pragmatics – concerned with what language
can do
 Semantics – sense
 Pragmatics – force
 Semantics: words or lexemes are central to
the study
 Pragmatics: events or potential events are of
main interest
 Speech act theory
 Conversational implicature
 Deixis
 Presupposition
 We often think that the role of language is to
explain, inform, describe, and say sth about
the world
 Language – also used to do things, such as
promise, bet, request, threaten, warn,
apologize, swear (in court), etc.
 J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words
(1955)
 "It was for too long the assumption of
philosophers that the business of a
'statement' can only be to 'describe' some
state of affairs, or to 'state some fact', which
it must do either truly or falsely.„
 Wittgenstein: „Don't ask for the meaning, ask
for the use." - language as a vehicle for social
activity
 Austin suggested that most utterances are
created not to ‘describe’, but to perform
action
 His approach was not of „What do sentences
mean?” but „What kind of act do we perform
when we utter a sentence?”
 Austin emphasized the contexts in which
utterances take place and suggested that
they should be defined as felicitous or not,
rather than false or true
 Felicity conditions: describe all the
circumstantial properties of an utterance
which are relevant to its successful
accomplishment
 Austin questioned the truth value of
statements, a view which centered on the
conditions of an utterance that can be
declared true or false
 Austin examined performatives: sentences
that are used to do things, rather than
declare or state sth
 Performatives: „I now pronounce you husband
and wife”
 Only certain people in certain conditions can
do this kind of pronouncing; if the conditions
are right, then a change has taken place
through the uttering the words
 Make a list of performative utterances.
 What new state of affairs do the utterances
create?
 What conditions must be present for the new
state of affairs to come about?
 A) I promise to visit tomorrow
 B) She promised to visit tomorrow
 Sentences which perform actions –
performatives (A); other sentences (B) –
constatives
 A good test of whether a sentence is a
performative is whether you can insert the
word hereby before the verb (I hereby
promise; *I hereby walk)
 Syntactic markers of a performative
utterance:
 1) the subject is in the 1st person
 2) the verb is in the simple present tense
 3) the indirect object is ‘you’
 4) it is possible to insert the adverb ‘hereby’
 5) the sentence is not negative
 Speech acts which in themselves constitute
an action
 This aspect of language – illocutionary force
 The illocutionary force of an utterance is its
ability to carry out an act
 Locutionary act: the act of saying sth
 Illocutionary act: the act of doing sth by
saying sth
 Perlocutionary act: the act of achieving sth by
saying sth
 John Searle took work on speech acts further
by introducing direct ad indirect speech acts
 "In indirect speech acts the speaker
communicates to the hearer more than he
actually says by way of relying on their
mutually shared background information,
both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together
with the general powers of rationality and
inference on the part of the hearer”
 There are speech acts which are so
fundamental to communication that they are
captured through the mood of our utterance:
 Indicative mood: giving information
 Interrogative mood: request for information
 Imperative mood: command to do sth
 The mood of each utterance signals its
illocutionary force
 Context – key in explaining what people are
trying to do with the language they use
 Scenario 1:(in an elevator, 3 people, A and B
know each other, C is smoking:
 A (to B): Ahem, did I ever tell you that I am
allergic to cigarette smoke?
 Scenario 2: (A is filling in a form for a dating
service): A (writing on form): I am allergic to
cigarette smoke.
 1. Would you mind handing me the salt?
 2. Go ahead, try it. See where that’ll get you!
 3. Honey, the phone’s ringing!
 4. I have always wanted to have a pair of
earrings just like those.
 5. I’m sure I must look awful.
 1. DSA = requesting information ISA =
commanding or requesting service
 2. DSA = commanding ISA = warning
 3. DSA = informing ISA = requesting a
service
 4. DSA = informing ISA requesting (a gift?)
 5. DSA = informing ISA fishing for
complement/apologizing for state
 The function of the legal language – usually
seen as directive: used to impose obligations
or to confer rights, to command or empower:
mandatory and discretionary law
 Law uses language as a tool, an instrument
for achieving things in the world; linguistics –
language as an object of study
 In the communication process, whenever acts
become formalised, they involve rules and
conventions, or ‘shared group commitments’,
which seem to correspond to J. Austin’s
felicity conditions and allow to recognise
whether the act is valid or not
 H.L.A. Hart commented on linguistic speech
acts and pointed to their correspondence with
formal legal acts such as the transfer of
property or making of a will
 Suggested that performative utterances
should be called operative utterances,
evoking the analogy with what lawyers called
‘operative words’ in legal language
 Acts in law presuppose that the performer, in
order to perform the act, needs to be able to
exercise their legal power
 These powers, e.g. to enter a contract, to
make a will, or even to enact a law,
presuppose ‘power conferring rules’ which
stipulate which persons and under which
conditions can perform the act
 The interpretation of any legal document
requires analysis of a relevant intention which
has been incorporated into the text
 The notion of intentionality relates to the
problem of implicitness and explicitness in
language
 Grice’s conversational implicatures (1975)
 Imagine you overhear the following
conversation:
 A: Are John and Mary back together again?
 B: I saw a red Porche parked outside 1128
Green Street last night…and it was still there
this morning!
 In the exchange above, we might assume that
B’s response is providing A with the
information requested.
 We can make the connection between the
question and the answer by relying on
presupposition: B presupposes that A also
knows the following:
 John has a red Porche
 Mary lives at 1128 Green Street
 In order to help us understand how context
works in deciphering meaning in a given
situation, we can look to Grice’s Cooperative
Principle, which explains how people act in
conversation: ‘Make your conversational
contribution such as is required, at the stage
at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose
or direction of the talk exchange in which you
are engaged’
 Grice is not telling us what to do, but rather
providing an explanation for how we behave
in communicative situations ad how we
assume other people behave
 Grice further divided his Cooperative Principle
into sub-principles of:
 Quantity
 Relevance
 Quality
 Manner
 Quantity:
 Maxim 1. Make your contribution as
informative as is required
 Maxim 2. Do not make your contribution
more informative than is required.
 Relevance:
 Maxim 1. Be relevant.
 Quality:
 Maxim 1: Do not say what you believe to be
false.
 Maxim 2. Do not say that for which you lack
adequate evidence.
 Manner:
 Maxim 1: Avoid obscurity of expression.
 Maxim 2. Avoid ambiguity.
 Maxim 3. Be brief.
 Maxim 4. Be orderly.
 When we break any of the sub-principles, we
create an instance of conversational
implicature:
 A: I heard you did well on the exam
 B: Yes, and pigs fly.
 Flouting the maxim of quality, as I am telling
an obvious untruth
 Observing the maxims
 Violating one or more maxims (e.g. lying)
 Opting out (e.g. refusing to answer a direct
question)
 Not fulfilling one maxim because of a clash
with another
 Flouting a maxim in order to make a
conversational implicature
 1. The speaker deliberately flouts a
conversational maxim to convey additional
meaning not expressed literally, e.g. a speaker
responds to the question: „How did you like the
guest speaker?” with the following utterance:
„Well, I’m sure he was speaking English”.
 If the speaker is assumed to be following the
cooperative principle in spite of flouting the
Maxim of Quantity, the utterance must have an
additional nonliteral meaning, such as: „The
content of the speech was confusing.”
 2. The speaker’s desire to fulfil two conflicting
maxims results in his flouting one maxim to
invoke the other, e.g. when he responds to the
question „Where is John?” by saying: He’s either
in the cafeteria or in his office
 The Maxim of Quantity and the Maxim of Quality
are in conflict: a cooperative speaker doesn’t
want to be ambiguous but also doesn’t want to
give false information by giving a specific answer
in spite of his uncertaity. By flouting the Maxim
of Quantity, he invokes the Maxim of Quality
 A. How’s your work coming along?
 B. It sure is sunny outside.
 B is flouting the maxim of relevance. Given
that B responds with an utterance which is
clearly irrelevant, A can assume that work is
NOT coming along
 1. In a recommendation letter for a sales job:
 Dear Sir, I have been asked to write a few
lines in suport for Jon Smith’s application for
work in sales within your company. What
perhaps is most ipressive about John is that
his appearance is impeccable, and his class
attendance has been faultless. Sincerely, A.
 The maxim of quantity, the letter is not very
informative. This seems t ocommunicate that
A does not have very much to say that is
positive about John, and to avoid violatind the
maxim of Quality and lying, and to avoid
attacking John, A is not as informative as the
situation requires
 2. A. Do you like Anne’s new shoes? B: I can’t
imagine where she’s got them from.
 B flouts the Maxime of Relevance, as the
utterance does not answer A’s question,
perhaps to avoid either disagreeing with A or
violating the Maxim of Quality and lying
about liking the shoes
 Do you think the kids would like some of that
freezing cold creamy concoction that could
be served in an edible dylinder-like
container?
 A flouts the Maxim of Manner, as it would be
much clearer and briefer to say ‘ice-cream’.
The hearer can thus understand that A does
not want the kids to know about the
possibility
 A: How did Mary and John do on their exam?
B: Mary did fine.
 B flouts the Maxim of Quantity, as no
information is provided about John. Thus A
will assume that John did not do well, and
that B does not want to provide displeasing
information.
 A. Were you invited to John’s party? B: Were
you?
 B flouts the Maxim of Relevance in not
providing an answer to A’s question. A might
thus understand that B does not want to hurt
his/her feelings
 A. Are you free this evening? B: I have had so
much work lately! I had to finish a 20-pages
paper, my dog has been sick and I had to
take him to the vet, and now my mother says
she’s coming to visit this weekend!
 B flouts the Maxim of Quantity/Manner – the
answer is more informative than required,
and it is not brief. A will probably get the
picture that B is not free that evening, and
will probably not follow through with a
suggestion or invitation
 words and phrases that cannot be fully
understood without additional contextual
information
 Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is
fixed but their denotational meaning varies
depending on time and/or place.
 Words or phrases that require contextual
information to convey any meaning – e.g.,
English pronouns – deictic
 Person
 Place
 Time
 The center of the deictic system
 The most salient English examples are the
adverbs“here” and “there” and the
demonstratives “this” and “that”, e.g.:
 I enjoy living in this city
 Here is where we will place the statue
 She was sitting over there
 Time, or temporal, deixis concerns itself with
the various times involved in and referred to
in an utterance.
 This includes time adverbs, e.g. "now",
"then", "soon", etc. and also different tenses
 Example: tomorrow denotes the consecutive
next day after every day. The "tomorrow" of a
day last year was a different day from the
"tomorrow" of a day next week.
 Discourse
 Social
 concerns the social information that is encoded
within various expressions, such as relative social
status and familiarity.
 Two major forms of it are the so-called T–V
distinctions and honorifics.
 T–V distinctions, named for the Latin “tu” and “vos” -
the name given to the phenomenon when a language
has two different second-person pronouns.
 The varying usage of these pronouns indicates
something about formality, familiarity, and/or
solidarity between the interactants, e.g. the T form
might be used when speaking to a friend or social
equal, whereas the V form would be used speaking to
a stranger or social superior - common in European
languages
 Discourse deixis, also referred to as text
deixis, refers to the use of expressions within
an utterance to refer to parts of the discourse
that contains the utterance — including the
utterance itself: e.g. This is a great story
 .
 An anaphoric reference refers to something
within a text that has been previously identified,
e.g. "Susan dropped the plate. It shattered loudly"
the word "it" refers to the phrase "the plate".
 A cataphoric reference refers to something within
a text that has not yet been identified, e.g. in "He
was very cold. David promptly put on his coat"
the identity of the "he" is unknown until the
individual is also referred to as "David".
 A. Do you see that baby girl over there? She is
cute.
 When a word or phrase picks up its meaning
from some other piece of language nearby,
the relationship between the two – anaphora
 A word which gets its meaning in this way –
an anaphor, and the piece of language which
gives the anaphor its meaning – its
antecedent
 Presupposition - when a speaker’s choice of
words shows that he is taking sth for granted
 E.g.: John stopped crying at noon – makes
sense if it is assumed that John was crying
just before noon.
 an implicit assumption about the world or
background belief relating to an utterance
whose truth is taken for granted, e.g.:
 Jane no longer writes fiction.
◦ Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction.
 Have you stopped eating meat?
◦ Presupposition: you had once eaten meat.
 Have you talked to Hans?
◦ Presupposition: Hans exists.
 A presupposition must be mutually known or
assumed by the speaker and addressee for
the utterance to be considered appropriate in
context.
 Presuppositions – often understood in terms
of the notion of common ground
 The common ground – a set of propositions
which the participants in a conversation
mutually assume
 The common ground - a major part of the
context of use, and helps us make explicit
the role of presupposition
 Indexicality and presupposition – aspects of
pragmatics which have to do with the
relationship between context of use and
semantic meaning
 Cultural assumptions can be crucial in
determining speaker’s meaning
 Example: 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”, she
intends this comment as praise of the tart. She
might intend to implicate that her dinner partner
should order the tart. This meaning arises, in
part, from the fact that it is common knowledge
among Chinese people that most of them find
western desserts too sweet. Among some other
groups, the same comment could be interpreted
as a criticism, rather than a compliment
 The cultural specificity of the speaker’s
meaning is not a fact about the Chinese
language
 The implicature could arise regardless of the
language they are speaking
 Pragmatics – about how the context of use
contributes to meaning
 Core topics: indexicality, presupposition,
implicature, speech acts