National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
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- 2.0 Unit Objective
| 1.0 Introduction The use of language in asocial situation is a major concern of linguists in contemporary times. This is a departure from the earlier practice that concentrated so much the forms of language and neglects the functions the language performs in the social context in which it is used. Our concern in this Unit will be on the functions that language performs when it is used. A discipline emerged in the s to adequately account for this, and it is generally referred to as Pragmatics. Pragmatics looks at the aspect of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker and the addressee. It focuses on the context of the utterance, and the generally observed principles language users obey to be able to cooperate in any speech situation. The major focus of 86 Pragmatics is to examine how language functions in the social situations in which it is used. 2.0 Unit Objective At the end of this Unit, you should be able to do the following • explain clearly what Pragmatics is • identify the basic principles of Pragmatics in any natural conversation • show how utterances can be explained with reference to the context in which they are produced 3.0 MAIN CONTENT 3.1 What is pragmatics Pragmatics is a sub-field of Linguistics, which, as mentioned earlier emerged in the s. The major proponents were philosophers, who took the position that when we make utterances, such utterances are used to perform certain acts (See Austin, 1962 and Searle, 1969). They also believe that since our utterances are situated in a particular context, such context affect what we produce. We can only produce utterances that obey the principles that guide speech behaviour in the context of our speech. As we will soon see in this module, there are principles that guide our cooperation with other users of language when we use language. Such principles help us to produce relevant utterance to the situation. We can only be understood if our utterances are relevant to the situation. Pragmatics 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 orb speaker meaning (Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986). Speakers of any language possess what is called pragmatic competence, ie, his/her knowledge of the social status of the speakers involved in an utterance, knowledge of the social distance between the speakers, knowledge of the culture, such as politeness, knowledge of how one can infer from an utterance the intended meaning of the speaker as opposed to the surface form produced, and so forth. Pragmatics is the study of how contextual factors interact with linguistic meaning in the interpretation of utterances. As we mentioned earlier, the whole idea of Pragmatics has philosophical origin. One of the earliest references to Pragmatics in Philosophy can be found in the work of Charles Morris (1938), who defined it as the study of the relations between signs and their interpreters however, it was the philosopher Paul Grice’s William James lectures at Harvard in 1967 that led to the real development of the field. Grice introduced the notion of implicature. According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an implicature is something meant, implied, or suggested distinct from what is said. Implicatures can be part of sentence meaning or dependent on conversational context, 87 and can be conventional or unconventional. Conversational implicatures have become one of the principal subjects of pragmatics. We will discuss more on this in the sections that follow. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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