Unit 7 Pragmatics

Though strict semantic analysis can provide many insights into linguistic meaning, most semantic models necessarily examine the meaningfulness of sentences rather than utterances. That is, semantics is interested in the possible meanings of isolated forms of language in principle, without regard to the complex variations that are brought into effect if that sentence is considered in its context of use. The consideration of meaningfulness in social context is the concern of pragmatics.

You will need to read Peter Grundy's (2000) Doing Pragmatics (2nd edition), London: Arnold, in order to complete this Unit and further your understanding of pragmatics. Start now by reading the entertaining introduction to the book in Chapter 1 of Grundy (2000).

 

Speech Act Theory

Modern pragmatics developed out of the work of language philosophers such as J.L. Austin, H. Paul Grice and John Searle. They were all interested in the systematic reasons why sentences that denoted one particular thing were often used (and understood) to mean something completely different. Austin developed the notion of speech acts, to foreground the idea that when we say something we are actually doing something in the world that will have an intended and an actual effect in the world. He differentiated three dimensions involved in the act of uttering:

• locutionary act - this is the act of saying something that is grammatically well-formed. The uttered sentence (the locution) has an evident truth-value and refers to something.
  
  
• illocutionary act - this is the social force of the utterance. For example, the locutions 'I'm sorry' or 'pick that up' or 'can you help me?' represent the illocutionary acts of apology, command and question respectively. As locutions, they are framed as declarative, imperative, and interrogative, as appropriate.
  
  
• the perlocutionary act is the actual effect of the utterance, its social consequences. Usually this will match the intended meaning, but of course the perlocution might not be exactly what the utterer intended to convey.

There is not always a direct locutionary form for an illocutionary act, and the perlocution actually performed might be different from the intended utterance. For example, 'Can you pass the salt?' is usually taken to be a request for the salt to be passed straight away, not as an inquiry about the addressee's physical abilities. Occasionally some witless pedant might reply 'yes', and then do nothing, deliberately taking the locution not as having the illocutionary force of a request for the salt but as having the speech act value of an inquiry about ability. Such people do not understand that this sort of indirectness is part of the pragmatics of politeness (see more below), and they do not deserve to have friends.

 

Activity

Fill in the blanks in this table:

Locutionary form	Illocutionary act	Example
Interrogative	Question	Is he singing?
Imperative	Command	Sing!
Declarative	Statement	He is singing
....	Insult	You call that singing?
....	Promise	....
....	....	Please help me!
....	....	Can you help me?
....	Threat	....
....	Proposal	....
....	....	I bet it wins
....	....	Can I place a bet?
....	....	Put this £10 on number 6 to win

 

Austin also pointed out a special kind of speech act that enacts its illocutionary force in the process of utterance. These are called performatives. For example:

I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth
I do (uttered at a wedding)
I promise I'll be there
I bet you £10 I get there before you
I am writing to inform you that...
I sentence you to 10 years in prison.

Of course, these can only function as performatives if certain conditions are true. The last example must be uttered by a judge in a court room at the end of a trial in which a jury has found the accused person guilty of a serious crime. It is not a performative if uttered by one of my students at the end of a seminar, or by my local greengrocer when selling me some bananas, or even by the judge while relaxing in a bar with some legal mates. Only if these felicity conditions are satisfied is the performative 'happy'.

'Happy' performatives, then, depend on the fact that

• the circumstances under which the speech act is performed are felicitous (e.g. the bride is unmarried, the speaker is standing in front of a ship with a bottle of champagne on a rope, and so on), and
  
  
• the speaker is 'authorised' to perform the act (e.g. is a qualified judge, is able to keep the promise, has £10 and is willing to hand it over, and so on), and
  
  
• the person involved in the speech act is sincere (e.g. saying 'I apologise' and not meaning it, or making a promise that you know you cannot keep).

Again, there could be a mismatch between the intended meaning and the perlocutionary effect if these felicity conditions are not met. Such breakages of pragmatic 'rules' can be known as 'lying', 'fraud', 'deceit', 'irony', 'sarcasm', 'acting', 'joke-telling', 'impersonating', and 'fiction'.

 

Indirect Speech Acts and Implicatures

A mismatch in locution, perlocution and felicity conditions is one way of identifying indirect speech acts. 'Can you pass the salt? is an interrogative ostensibly about ability but is actually a request for action. Saying 'it's chilly in here' is a declarative statement that can be correctly interpreted as a command to close the window, especially if the utterer is more socially powerful than the addressee.

At this point, you should read Chapter 3 in Grundy (2000). Make sure you understand the argument thoroughly, and complete the 'checking understanding' sections if you feel you need to, before proceeding.

According to Grice, mutual understanding of pragmatic meaning works successfully mainly because a co-operative principle (CP) operates. This is a basic assumption that interlocutors normally intend to accomplish purposeful and effective communication in conversation. Grice developed a means of accounting for indirect meanings using the notion of conversational maxims. These are a set of principles which constitute the co-operative principle:

• Maxim of Quality
  - do not say that which you believe to be false
  - do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
  
  
• Maxim of Quantity
  - make your contribution as informative as is required for the purpose of the exchange
  - do not make your contribution more informative than is required
  
  
• Maxim of Relation
  - make your contribution relevant in the context
  
  
• Maxim of Manner
  - avoid obscurity
  - avoid ambiguity
  - be brief
  - be orderly

The point about Gricean maxims is not that they are linguistic 'rules' at all, but that in fact they are often and routinely broken or 'flouted'. When the maxims are flouted, the interlocutor assumes the CP still holds, and assumes that some intention is being represented that is indirect but nevertheless still meaningful. These meanings are known as implicatures. For example:

• flouting the maxim of quality:
  Juliet is the sun (spoken of a person called Juliet)
  What a beautiful day! (said on a rainy, windy, miserable day)
  
  
• flouting the maxim of quantity:
  He attended my classes (being the sum total of a written character reference)
  A: Where are you going? B: Out!
  
  
• flouting the maxim of relation:
  A: What time is it? B: The bar's just closed
  (A is complaining to B about C when C suddenly enters behind A, and B interrupts) 'Yes the holiday was lovely, we had a marvellous time...'
  
  
• flouting the maxim of manner:
  (such as deliberately ambiguous poetry or advertising)

All of these generate implicatures and can be interpreted as being meaningful. The social force of such implicatures can often be understood as expressing humour, irony, exasperation, annoyance, a poetic metaphor, a fictional moral, and so on.

For detail on implicatures you should now read Chapter 4 in Grundy (2000).

 

Supermaxims: Relevance and Politeness

Several linguists have proposed qualifications and critiques of the standard pragmatic account of maxims and implicatures. It has been suggested that a 'supermaxim' be polite determines the form of all the other maxims, or that being relevant subsumes other details of maxim and implicature.

At this point you should read Chapter 5 in Grundy (2000), in which he outlines Sperber and Wilson's model of Relevance Theory. Notice how this theory makes some attempt to develop pragmatics into the area of cognitive processing, and thus broaden the field of concern even further. You should make sure you understand Relevance Theory by answering for yourself the 'checking understanding' sections in the chapter.

Chapter 7 in Grundy (2000) deals with politeness as a supermaxim. You should also read this now.

The chapter focuses on the model of politeness developed by Brown and Levinson, which is based on the notion of face. Like Sperber and Wilson, this also makes some theoretical moves into psychological and cognitive processing areas, though in both cases there is little empirical evidence or actual recorded data presented in support of the theories. Furthermore, pragmatic models from Grice onwards and including Sperber and Wilson and Brown and Levinson have been criticised for being insufficiently open to the inequities in social status, power and wealth of interlocutors. Much recent sociolinguistic work has highlighted this oversight in traditional pragmatic frameworks.

For example, the social phenomenon known as phatics or phatic communion manifests social power differences quite well. Phatic tokens are those units of language whose primary purpose is not their content so much as their effect in social solidarity. Greetings, terms of address and farewells are the most obvious examples of phatic token: 'good morning', 'how are you', 'nice to have met you', 'lovely weather we're having', 'beautiful view', 'yours faithfully', and so on, are all typical examples.

According to work done by Laver (1975), phatic choices reveal strong indicators of social status. Phatic tokens, by definition:

• have positive polarity (they tend not to use negatives)
  
  
• are emotionally and ideologically uncontroversial (such as talking about the weather)
  
  
• expect a positive but fairly non-committal response (mild agreement is the norm)

Any alteration from these norms will (like implicatures) generate certain effects. Compare:

A: Nice weather we're having
B: Hmm, beautiful

with

A: Nice weather we're having
B: Rubbish. It's going to pour with rain. You're an idiot

and

A: (said to a complete stranger on the street) You look terrible

and

A: (said to a stranger) Are you interested in politics?

Only the first of these would count as a successful phatic opening. All of the non-phatic tokens are nevertheless in the position normally occupied by phatics. They generate effects such as aggressive hostility, over-intimacy and a pushy beginning of a political discussion (this last is a favourite ploy of political newspaper sellers, since it is difficult to say 'no').

Laver also developed a further social dimension to the token-type used. He identified three types of phatic token:

• neutral tokens: reference is to the context of situation that is common to both participants ('nice weather', 'great view', 'these trains need cleaning')
  
  
• other-oriented tokens: reference is to the addressee ('that looks like hard work', 'you're looking well', 'how do you do')
  
  
• self-oriented tokens: reference is to the speaker ('hard work, this', 'I'm warm today', 'I'm pleased to meet you').

In Laver's framework, neutral tokens are used between complete strangers. When a socially more powerful participant speaks first, they will use an other-oriented token. When a socially inferior person speaks first, they will use a self-oriented token. (With the added point that it is more often the social superior who will assert their superiority by being the first to speak in any case). Laver's extreme example for illustration concerns a peasant building a wall and a baron riding past. The baron would say, 'That looks like hard work', but the peasant is more likely to start, 'Hard work, this'.

Again, like implicatures, these social and pragmatic norms can be exploited so that people can claim apparent social power by using the stereotypical patterns associated with power.

 

Activity

What has gone wrong - or 'misfired' - in each of these (invented!) exchanges, according to Laver's framework? What is the effect that is consequently generated?

You: Beautiful day!
Stranger: Well no, actually, I think you'll find that there is an approaching cold front bringing heavy precipitation from the north-west, followed by high winds tonight.

You [in passing along the road]: Alright?
Passer-by: No, I've just got out of hospital, had a terrible time of it, the old problem playing me up again, still, mustn't grumble I suppose, I'll tell you all about it.... [and so on, and on]

[On meeting the Queen of England] You: By God, your Majesty, that's a terrible boil on your neck there!

[On meeting the Queen of England] Queen: I'm completely knackered after that!

Someone rings your doorbell, you open the door, and the person standing there says: Yes?

Your bank manager begins a meeting with you by saying that his cat has just died.

Held at gunpoint by terrorists, you comment to your fellow hostage on how good the weather has been recently.

 

Further Reading

Austin. J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Brown, G. and Levinson, S.C. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grice, H. Paul (1975) 'Logic and conversation', in P. Cole and J.L. Morgan (eds) Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3, New York: Academic Press, pp.41-58.

Grundy, Peter (2000) Doing Pragmatics (2nd edition), London: Arnold

Laver, John (1975) 'Communicative functions of phatic communion', in A. Kendon, R.M. Harris and M.R. Key (eds) Communication in Face to Face Interaction, Berlin: Mouton.

Leech. G.N. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman.

Levinson, S.C. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, John R. (1969) Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, John R. (1979) Expression and Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd edition), Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Thomas, J.A. (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics, London: Longman.

Yule, George (1996) Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

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