ON TAP PHAN READING UNIT9-16LOP10

Greek “Pragma”, meaning deed
Pragmatic: practical or realistic
Pragmatics: the field of enquiry that deals with how language can be used to do things and mean things in the real-world situation
Jenny Thomas: the study of meaning in interaction
Speaker’s meaning
Utterance interpretation
Speech acts: when we say something, we are always doing something
Austin’s three-part framework
How to work out the illocutionary force?
Examples:
The relation of form to function is:
Not one-to-one
But many-to-many

Still a PROBLEM
E.g.: the use of tag questions by women
There is a general idea that people involved in a conversation will co-operate with each other.
Paul Grice:
When people interact with one another, a “co-operative principle” is in force.
Make your 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 1975:45)
In other words, the listener presumes that the speaker is being co-operative and is speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly, perspicuously, and appropriately
When Grice uses the term co-operative about conversation, he means it in a special and limited sense - he is talking only about the kind and degree of co-operation that is necessary for people to make sense of one another’s contribution.
However, some utterances are uninformative or over-informative or evasive or obscure, etc. The speaker is obviously flouting normal expectations regarding quantity, quality, relevance or manner – something s/he cannot or will not say directly, but expects us to infer. So the maxims are flouted implicature.

Interviewer: Will you condemn the violence on the picket lines?
Arthur Scargill: I condemn the violence of the police and the National Coal Board.

The answer:



Not to supply YES or NO
YES
NO
Under-informative and ambiguous
He denies that the pickets have engaged in violent actions – in which case there is nothing for him to pass judgment on.
Perhaps he intended listeners to infer that miners did not deserve to be condemned for “the violence on the picket lines” because even granting that they were involved in it, they were only responding to provocation by their opponents, the police and the employers.
He wanted his audience to infer that whereas he condemned the actions of the police and the National Coal Board, he actually approved of violent actions taken by members of his union on picket lines.

Definition of Face: Face refers to the respect that an individual has for him or herself, and maintaining that "self-esteem" in public or in private situations.
Two kinds of Face:
Not attempt to minimize the threat to the hearer’s face, these provide no effort to reduce the impact of the FTA’s
Examples
An Emergency: HELP!!
Task oriented: Give me that! Or Do the dishes, it’s your turn!
Alerting: Turn your headlights on! (When alerting someone to something they should be doing)
Request: Put your coat away
Use indirect language and removes the speaker from the potential to being imposing
Example
Wow, it’s getting cold in here
-> insinuating that it would be nice if the listener would get up and turn up the air-conditioner or close the door without directly asking the listener to do so
Both the co-operative principles and the politeness principles are being applied very generally cross cultures.
- The politeness principles with their model are claimed to have universal application. Variations in politeness behavior may arise because of different cultures; however, the same ones are operative in all, and people’s face – wants themselves are fundamentally the same everywhere.
- The co-operative principle captures something about the intrinsic nature of human communication and the reasoning faculty that underpins it.
-> The existence of variation does not undermine the general argument that successful linguistic communication depends on participants’ capacity for rational, purposeful and co-operative action.
-> Human communication practices are similar to one another in some ways, and different in others.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION