Pragmatics and Text Analysis

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Pragmatics and Text Analysis

• Lecture 6

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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 (1983132) developed the face
  theory further and formulated the politeness
  principle.

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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 .

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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)

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• 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)

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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 .

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• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 (1976318-9), fall into two
  categories reiteration and collocation.
  Reiteration can take the following four forms
  repetition, synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy and
  meronymy.

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• End of lecture
• Thank you for your attention