What Is Pragmatics
What Is Pragmatics
What Is Pragmatics
by Shaozhong Liu
Definition
A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how people
comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech
situation which is usually a conversation (hence *conversation analysis). It distinguishes
two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal
communication. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the
communicative intent or speaker meaning (Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986). The
ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic
competence (Kasper, 1997) which often includes one's knowledge about the social
distance, social status between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as
politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.
History
Criticisms
A traditional criticism has been that pragmatics does not have a clear-cut focus, and in
early studies there was a tendency to assort those topics without a clear status in
linguistics to pragmatics. Thus pragmatics was associated with the metaphor of 'a
garbage can' (Leech, 1983). Other complaints were that, unlike grammar which resorts to
rules, the vague and fuzzy principles in pragmatics are not adequate in telling people
what to choose in face of a range of possible meanings for one single utterance in
context. An extreme criticism represented by Marshal (see Shi Cun, 1989) was that
pragmatics is not eligible as an independent field of learning since meaning is already
dealt with in semantics.
However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is more than
necessary because it handles those meanings that semantics overlooks (Leech, 1983).
This view has been reflected both in practice at large and in Meaning in Interaction: An
Introduction to Pragmatics by Thomas (1995). Thus in spite of the criticisms, the impact
of pragmatics has been colossal and multifaceted. The study of speech acts, for instance,
provided illuminating explanation into sociolinguistic conduct. The findings of the
cooperative principle and politeness principle also provided insights into person-to-
person interactions. The choice of different linguistic means for a communicative act and
the various interpretations for the same speech act elucidate human mentality in the
relevance principle which contributes to the study of communication in particular and
cognition in general. Implications of pragmatic studies are also evident in language
teaching practices. Deixis, for instance, is important in the teaching of reading. Speech
acts are often helpful for improving translation and writing. Pragmatic principles are also
finding their way into the study of literary works as well as language teaching
classrooms.
References
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words, New York: Oxford University Press
Blakemore, D. (1990) Understanding Utterances: The Pragmatics of Natural Language,
Oxford: Blackwell.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1978) 'Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena',
in Goody, E. (ed.) Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, pp56~311,
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Green, G. (1989) Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Grice, H. P. (1975) 'Logic and Conversation', in Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds.) Syntax and
Semantics 3: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press.
Grundy, P. (1995) Doing Pragmatics, London: Edward Arnold.
Kasper, G. & Blum-Kulka, S. (eds.) (1993) Interlanguage Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kasper, G. (1995) 'Interlanguage Pragmatics', in Verschueren, J. & Östman Jan-Ola &
Blommaert, J. (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics 1995, pp1~7, Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Co.
Kasper, G. (1997) 'Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught?' (Network #6:
http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/sltcc/F97NewsLetter/Pubs.htm), a paper delivered at the 1997
TESOL Convention.
Leech, G. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman.
Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mey, J. (1993) Pragmatics. An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.
Morris, C. (1938) 'Foundations of the Theory of Signs', in Carnap, R. Et al (eds.)
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 2:1, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Shi Cun (1989) 'Speeches at the IPrA Roundtable Conference' (1, 2,3), Xi'an: Teaching
Research Issues 2,3,4.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Thomas, J. (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics, London:
Longman.
Verschueren, J. (1987) Pragmatics as a Theory of Linguistic Adaptation, Working
Document #1, Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association.
Further reading
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