Pragmatics and Text Analysis

1. Pragmatics and Text Analysis Lecture 6

2. Pragmatics is the study of language usage from a functional perspective and is concerned with the principles that account for how meaning is communicated by the speaker (writer) and interpreted by the listener (reader) in a certain context.

3. Different from semantics, pragmatics studies the contextual meaning. This distinction can be seen in the following example: • Mike: What happened to that bowl of cream? • Annie: Cats drink cream.

4. Semantically, Annie's reply can be paraphrased as "Domestic felines consume the liquid fat of milk," but pragmatically, Annie probably implies "That bowl of cream was probably eaten by our cat." In other words, semantics focuses on the meaning that comes from linguistic knowledge, while pragmatics concentrates on those aspects of meaning that cannot be predicted by linguistic knowledge alone and takes into account our knowledge about the physical and social world.

5. Pragmatics also differs from syntax in that pragmatics is concerned with the appropriateness of naturally occurring utterances. For example, the four utterances in the following dialogue are all syntactically incomplete, but pragmatically they are all "appropriate" in the particular context.

6. Jane: Coffee? • Steve: Sure. • Jane: White? • Steve: White.

7. Like pragmatics, text analysis is also concerned with language used in particular contexts. It is the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected spoken or written texts. In other words, it is the study of linguistic units larger than sentences or clauses.

8. Speech Act Theory • As pointed out by the British philosopher Austin in 1962, sentences are not always uttered just to say things, but rather, they are used to do things. Based on this assumption, Austin advanced the Speech Act Theory, which is now generally viewed as one of the basic theories of pragmatics. • All linguistic activities are related to speech acts. Therefore, to speak a language is to perform a set of speech acts, such as statement, command, inquiry and commitment.

9. When a sentence is uttered, the speaker is performing three kinds of speech acts simultaneously: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act . • Among these kinds of speech acts, pragmatists are most interested in illocutionary act. This is because illocutionary act conforms to the speaker's intention and is thus the focus for the study of verbal communication.

10. A locutionary act may have different illocutionary forces in different contexts. In other words, an utterance may be interpreted as a direct or indirect speech act. • For example, the utterance of "Don't you think it's too stuffy in here?" may be interpreted (a) literally as an inquiry for the addressee's opinion of the air condition in the place where the sentence is uttered, (b) as an indirect statement describing the stuffy atmosphere in the place where the utterance occurs, and (c) as an indirect request for the addressee to open the window or to turn on the air-conditioner.

11. Similarly, an illocutionary act can be performed by different locutionary acts. For example, the illocutionary act of asking the addressee to open the door may take, among many others, the following three different locutionary acts: • a. Command: Open the door please. • b. Request: Would you please open the door? • c. Statement: The doorbell is ringing.

12. Indirect Speech Act • As mentioned previously, indirect speech act refers to an indirect relationship between the propositional content and illocutionary force of an utterance. A sentence which expresses an indirect speech act is an indirect performative.

13. Example A below is an explicit performative in which the speech act of request is directly coded by the performative verb request. Example B is an indirect performative in which the speech act of request is indirectly expressed by a question: • A. I request that you help me with the luggage. • B. Can you help me with the luggage? • As revealed in Example A, the speaker's intention can be directly identified in the performative verb in an explicit performative, but in the indirect performative like Example B, the speaker's intention can only be inferred through its literal force.

14. The Cooperative Principle • Thus far we have known that an utterance may allow two or interpretations in some situations: the literal meaning and the non-literal meaning. In order to account for such a linguistic phenomenon, Grice in 1967 found that tacit agreement exists between the speaker and the hearer in all linguistic communicative activities. They follow a set of principles in order to achieve particular communicative goals. Thus, Grice proposed the term of the cooperative principle and its maxims.

15. The maxim of Quality • try to make your contribution one that is true, especially: (i) do not say what you believe to be false and (ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. • The maxim of Quantity • (i) make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange, and (ii) do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

16. The maxim of Relevance • make your contribution relevant. • The maxim of Manner • Be perspicuous, and specifically: (i) Avoid obscurity of expression; (ii) Avoid ambiguity; (iii) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) and (iv) Be orderly.

17. But in real communication, the participants often flout the cooperative principle and its maxims. • In this example, B flouts the quantity maxim by not making his or her contribution as informative as is required: • A: When are you going to the airport? • B: Sometime this morning. • Here the speaker fails to provide the precise time of his or her going to the airport. The particularized conversational implicature, among some others, is that the speaker does not know the precise time of his or her departure.

18. The Politeness Principle • In order to explain why in many cases people express themselves implicitly and indirectly by flouting the four maxims of the cooperative principle, Brown and Levinson (1978) advanced the Face Theory. Leech (1983:132) developed the face theory further and formulated the politeness principle.

19. The Face Theory • According to this theory, everybody has face wants, i.e. the expectation concerning their public self-image. In order to maintain harmonious interpersonal relationships and ensure successful social interaction, we should be aware of the two aspects of another person's face, i.e. the positive face and the negative face .

20. Exchange and Adjacency Pair • Empirical findings reveal that some spoken texts can be represented by variations of recursive exchanges. The term exchange is used here to refer to the minimal unit of interactive spoken texts. An exchange may be of a two-part question-answer type, like (1), or of a two-part greeting-response type like (2). It may also be a typical three-part teacher-pupil talk like (3), or a three-part doctor-patient talk like (4):

21. A: What time is it by your watch? (Question) • B: Ten thirty. (Answer) • (2) A: Hello. (Greeting) • B: Hi. (Response) • (3) Teacher: What's the capital of France? (Initiation) • Pupil: Paris. (Response) • Teacher: Right. (Feedback)

22. A further analysis of the logical relationship in spoken texts reveals some automatic sequences. They are called adjacency pairs. An adjacency pair always consists of a first part and a second part, produced by different speakers. For example: • Anna: Hello. • Bill: Hi.

23. The utterance of a first part immediately creates an expectation of the utterance of a second part of the same pair. Failure to produce the second part in response will be viewed as a significant absence and hence meaningful. The forms which are used to fill the slots in adjacency pairs may vary considerably, but there must always be two parts.

24. Cohesion • A text is not a collection of lexical items and/or sentences in random. Instead, it must be semantically unified. In other words, it must have texture, i.e. the property that distinguishes a text from a non-text. The unity of a text can be achieved by a number of semantic and lexicogrammatical means, among which the most important is cohesion .

25. Cohesive ties may be either grammatical devices such as reference, ellipsis and substitution, and conjunction, or lexical devices such as general words, reiteration and collocation. We can therefore refer to them respectively as grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.

26. Reference • Reference refers to the semantic relation in which a word or words are used to enable the addressee to identify someone or something. The word or words used for reference are called the reference item. The person(s) or thing(s) identified by the reference item are called the referent. Reference is a specific nature of information that is signaled for retrieval. The information to be retrieved is the referential meaning.

27. Substitution and Ellipsis • Substitution refers to the replacement of one item by another and ellipsis the omission of an item. Unlike reference, which is a relation between meanings, substitution and ellipsis are a relation between linguistic items. Substitution and ellipsis are two closely related processes.

28. Conjunction • Conjunction in grammar refers to a word or expression like and, but, or that connects words, phrases, clauses and/or sentences. As one of the major grammatical cohesive ties, however, this term is used to focus on the inter-clausal and inter-sentential levels. In other words, we concentrate on how the conjunctive expressions contribute to the cohesion of a text.

29. Lexical Cohesion • Lexical cohesion refers to the cohesive effect achieved by the choice of lexical items. By choosing items that are related in some way to those that have gone before, the speaker or writer creates cohesion in the text. • English lexical cohesive ties, according to Halliday & Hasan (1976:318-9), fall into two categories: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration can take the following four forms: repetition, synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy and meronymy.

30. End of lecture • Thank you for your attention