National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
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- 3.2.1 Utterance and Context
- 3.2.2 Entailment
| 3.2 Some Basic Pragmatic Principles In this section, we shall be looking at some basic concepts in Pragmatics. These concepts are so central to Pragmatics that they represent the foundations for the study of Pragmatics. They are the basic issues that underlie the study of Pragmatics. They include concepts like utterance, context, entailment, implicature, deixis and presupposition. They are discussed in the subsections below. 3.2.1 Utterance and Context An utterance is a unit of speech generally but not always bounded by breaths and pauses. It may also be described as a complete unit of talk, sometimes bounded by the speaker’s silence. Every utterance is made within some specific context. By context, we do not just refer to the physical context, but to everything that surrounds the making of the utterance. These include what is going on in the place where the utterance is made, the knowledge of the speaker and the addressee of the culture in which they are operating (cultural context), knowledge of the expectations and discursive practices of the people among whom the utterance is being made, especially as it relates to the social roles and relationships (social context) Context also includes the knowledge of the world of the speaker (epistemic context) and the utterances that precede and follows the one under consideration (linguistic context). According to Taiwo (2007: 2), studying an utterance without consideration for the context in which it is produced is like studying the cardiovascular system as a complete separate entity from any other part of human or animal anatomy. Language creates contexts and contexts creates the possibilities for interpretation and remove multiple ambiguities that utterances would have had if they had occurred in isolation. 3.2.2 Entailment Entailment is also known as logical implication. For most utterances we made to be properly interpreted, we made need the knowledge of entailment, Entailments are deductions and inferences we have about particular utterances that make us to interpret them appropriately. For instance, two sentences are related in the sense that the truth of one requires the truth of the other. For instance, utterance 4.1. The President was assassinated yesterday. entails that 4.2. The President is dead 88 If is false, then 4.2. will necessarily be false and vice versa. So, the addressee will know that the fact that somebody was assassinated means that the person is dead. Download 0.49 Mb. Share with your friends:
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