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Welcome back to the World of Pragmatics

Welcome back to the World of Pragmatics. Your host Professor E. Aminudin Aziz Department of English Education Indonesia University of Education. From Previous Lecture. Pragmatics is the backbone of the study of language in use

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Welcome back to the World of Pragmatics

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  1. Welcome back to the World of Pragmatics Your host Professor E. Aminudin Aziz Department of English Education Indonesia University of Education

  2. From Previous Lecture Pragmatics is the backbone of the study of language in use Pragmatics has come to existence as one of the trichotomy in the study of Semiotics Pragmatics was considered as the ‘waste-basket’ of linguistics Various definitions have been offered to describe pragmatics, all of which suggest inclusions of participants, context, and the utterance

  3. Our participants (S-H): • are reasonable men in law; • have no personal idiosyncrasies; • are not omniscient, nor clairvoyant, nor foolish. • Our Context includes • Setting • The World Spoken of • Co-text (Textual environment) • Utterance vs Sentence

  4. Using and Understanding Language • People use language in everyday conversation for transacting business, planning meals and vacations, debating politics, gossiping. • Teachers use language for instructing students, preachers to parishioners, and comedians for amusing audiences. • Lawyers, judges, juries, and witnesses use it in carrying out trials, diplomats in negotiating treaties, and actors in performing Shakespeare.

  5. Novelists, reporters, and scientists rely on the written word to entertain, inform, and persuade. All are instances of language use - activities in which people do things with language. Language use is really a form of joint action - carried out by an ensemble of people acting in coordination with each other.

  6. E.g. People waltzing, paddling a canoe, playing a piano duet, or making love. These are realised not as the sum of their individual actions. Doing things with language is likewise different from the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners - or writers and readers - perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles.

  7. Language use, therefore, embodies both individual and social processes. Speakers and listeners, writers and readers, must carry out actions as individuals if they are to succeed in their use of language. But …. They must also work together as participants in the social units called ensembles.

  8. Some facts Language use, in some quarters, has been studied as if it were entirely individual processes, as if it lay wholly within the cognitive sciences - cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy. In other quarters, it has been studied as if it were entirely a social process, as if it lay wholly within the social sciences - social psychology, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology.

  9. While …. We believe that it belongs to both. We cannot hope to understand language use without viewing it as joint actions built on individual actions.

  10. Setting of language use: spoken and written • Personal settings: free exchange of turns among the two or more participants; E.g. conversations when gossiping, transacting businesses, or talking scientific matters. • Nonpersonal settings: people speak for themselves, uttering words they formulated themselves for the audience before them, and the audience is not expected to interrupt; E.g. lectures, preaches, class presentations.

  11. Institutional settings: participants engage in speech exchanges that resemble ordinary conversation, but are limited by institutional rules. E.g. a politician holding a news conference, a lawyer interrogating a witness in court, a mayor chairing a city council meeting a professor directing a seminar discussion

  12. Prescriptive settings: the words spoken are completely, or largely, fixed beforehand. E.g.  members of a church or synagogue reciting responsive readings from a prayer book;  a bride and groom reciting vows in a marriage ceremony;  a basketball referee calling foul.

  13. Fictional settings: the person speaking is not always the one whose intentions are being expressed. Speakers are vocalising words prepared by someone else and are openly pretending to be speakers expressing intentions that are not necessarily their own. E.g.  Christine Hakim plays TjoetNjakDien in TjoetNjakDien.

  14. Mediated settings: there are intermediaries between the person whose intentions are being expressed and the target of those intentions. E.g.  A dictates a letter for B to a secretary;  a telephone company recording tells me of the time and weather;  a television news reader reads the evening news; etc.

  15. Private settings: people speak for themselves without actually addressing anyone else. E.g.  I exclaim silently to myself, or talk to myself about solving a mathematics problems, or rehearse what I am about to say in a seminar, or curse another driver who cannot hear me.  These are not intended to be recognised by other people, but rather of use to myself.

  16. Conversation as basic setting Not all settings are equal. According to Charles Fillmore (1981: 152) the language of face-to-face conversation is the basic and primary use of language, all others being best described in terms of their manner of deviation from the base

  17. Features of face-to-face conversation (Clark & Brennan 1991)

  18. Meaning and Understanding • People begin their conversation with a great mass of knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions they believe they share, i.e.common ground. • Their common ground may be vast. As members of the same cultural communities, they take as common ground such general beliefs as that objects fall when unsupported, that the world is divided into nations, that most cars run on gasoline, etc.

  19. Every social activity people engage in takes place on this common ground. Shaking hands, smiling at one another, waltzing, and even walking past each other without bumping all require them to coordinate their actions, and they cannot coordinate them without rooting them in their common ground. • When language is an essential part of the social activity, there is an additional element of coordination b/w what Ss mean and Hs understand them to mean: S’s meaning and H’s meaning

  20. Participants • Consider the following When Rudy asks Rini about his cat, Anne may also be taking part in the conversation, and Iqbal may be overhearing from nearby. Rudy, Rini, Anne, and Iqbal each bears a different relation to Rudy’s question: participants(Rudy, Rini, and Anne), non-participants(Iqbal), side participants(Anne), andoverhearers(bystanders and eavedroppers)

  21. All listenersEavedroppers Bystanders Speaker Addressee Side participants All participants

  22. We just wandered around the jungle of Language in Use. Hope you enjoy it! But … that’s just the beginning of our adventures. Be prepared for more challenging experiences. Ta’. eaa

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