The Pragmatic Aspects of the Sentence Essay Example

the linguistic approach to pragmatics; however, an adequate monograph presenting the logical contributions to the area is still lacking. Since then the main results in the area have been achieved mainly by linguistically-oriented logicians and logically-oriented linguists. This stresses the fact that pragmatics lies on the borderline between logic and linguistics.

When it is manifest that one individual is producing an ostensive stimulus (e. g. n utterance) in order to communicate with another individual, it is manifest that intends to find this stimulus worth his attention (or else, manifestly, communication would fail). Humans are good at predicting what will attract the attention of others. So when one person understands that another person intends him to find her ostensive stimulus worth his attention, we can unpack his understanding in terms of the notion of relevance: one person intends another person to find the stimulus relevant enough to secure his attention.

Thus, every utterance (or other type of ostensive stimulus, though we will talk only of utterances from now on) conveys a presumption of its own relevance. John Austin is the person who is usually credited with generating interest in what has since come to be known as pragmatics and speech act theory. His ideas of language were set out in a series of lectures which he gave at Oxford University. These lectures were later published under the title “How to do things with words”. His first step was to show that some utterances are not statements or questions but actions.

He reached this conclusion through an analysis of what he termed ‘performative verbs’.  If pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the

contexts in which they are performed, speech-act theory constitutes a central subdomain. It has long been recognized that the propositional content of utterance can be distinguished from its illocutionary force, the speaker's intention in uttering. The identification and classification of speech acts was initiated by Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle. In an explicit performative utterance (e. g. I hereby promise to marry you*), the speaker does something, i. e. performs an act whose character is determined by her intention, rather than merely saying something. Austin regards performatives as problematic for truth-conditional theories of meaning, since they appear to be devoid of ordinary truth value; an alternate view is that a performative is automatically self- verifying when felicitous, constituting a contingent a-priori truth like *I am here now*.

Of particular linguistic significance are indirect speech acts, where the form of a given sentence (e. . the yes-no question in *Can you pass the salt? *) belies the actual force (here, a request for action) characteristically conveyed by the use of that sentence. [6; 4] Pragmatic interpretation of sentences Pragmatics is often defined as the theory of the way we use language. Theories of pragmatics then link the language and its user while semantics links the syntactical entities of language with their meanings. One may think that a semantics for a language is a sufficient basis for the capacity to use that language.

Through having knowledge of an appropriate semantics a competent would user know the meanings of words and sentences and this should be enough to use the language properly. The reality appears to be much more complicated.  Very often, especially where common-sense language is

concerned, sentences are uttered in a way which seems to have no relation to their meaning. Let us consider such example. Somebody asks you: e. g. Would you be so kind to tell me what time is it? Somebody can recognize that it is a yes-no question.

She/he has at hand an appropriate theory of questions of this kind and knows that the speaker expects from him one of the answers: "yes" or "no". A logical analysis of this question, even if proper in the logical sense, would give us no chance to answer the question in the proper and commonly-known way. We all know that the speaker is not expecting an answer of the form "yes" or "no". Thus the problem arising in the situation described above consists in the difference between the literal meaning of and the meaning conveyed by the speaker.  The conveyed meaning of is simply "Tell me what time is it". A great part of the achievements made in contemporary logic comes from the investigations of the language of mathematics and has the result of work by mathematicians or, more precisely, mathematically-educated logicians. As a consequence the first-order predicate language is often considered as a good first approximation of natural language. Moreover, the properties of this formal language are, in a sense, projected on natural language causing the illusion that some typical natural language phenomena are paradoxical.

There are two apparent influential paradoxes (in fact typical natural language phenomena): intentionality and indexicality. Their recognition and explanation were milestones along the hard path from classical logic to natural language. According to the contemporary paradigm of logic, the meaning of

a sentence is its truth value. Thus to get the meaning of a sentence it suffices to interpret the symbols occurring in the sentence.  Let’s consider another aspect of the structure of interpreting sentences. The sentence “Now I am here. cannot be uttered without being true. We must admit that it is always true. Hence the rule of necessitation makes us accept the sentence: “It is necessary that now I an here. ” However the last one seems to be impossible to accept. It is purely accidental whether I am here or elsewhere. Because of the problems arising from interpreting such sentences logicians invented the notion of an eternal sentence.

An eternal sentence is a sentence whose meaning doesn't depend on who utters it (or where/when it was uttered, etc. Indexicality Deixis is the study of deictic or indexical expressions in language , like You, now, today. It can be thought about as a special kind of grammatical property, in turn instantiated in the more familiar grammatical categories of person, tense, (deictic) place, and so on. Indexicality involves so called "the dynamical coexistence" of an indexical sign with its object of reference. It is normally associated with linguistic expressions that are semantically insufficient to achieve reference without contextual support.

That support is provided by the mutual attention of the interlocutors and their ability to reconstruct the speaker's referential intentions given clues in the environment.  One such clue is gesture or gaze, which then becomes a part of the indexical sign. All this may seem coherent, but it does not suffice to establish clear boundaries to the phenomena. One problem is so called Deixis

am Phantasma ('deixis in the imagination') in which one imagines oneself somewhere else, and shifts the deictic origo by a series of transpositions.

Much deixis is relativized to text, as in reported speech, or as in the opening line of one of Hemingway's short stories: "The door of Henry's lunchroom opened and two men came in", where Henry has become the deictic origo. Then there is anaphora, which is so closely linked to deixis that it is not always separable, as in "I've been living in San Francisco for 5 years and I love it here" (where here is both anaphoric and deictic), bridged by the intermediate area of textual deixis (as in "Harry said 'I didn't do that' but he said it in a funny way", where it does not refer to the proposition expressed but to Harry's utterance itself).  An additional boundary problem is posed by the fact that the class of indexical expressions is not so clearly demarcated. For example, in "Let's go to a nearby restaurant", nearby is clearly used deictically, but in "Churchill took De Gaulle to a nearby restaurant" it is clearly being used non-deictically - is this deixis relativized to text. The pragmatic character of indexicality is not the only central issue for a pragmatic theory of deictic expressions. For the organization of the semantic field of contrastive deictic expressions is often itself determined by pragmatic factors.

The analysis of demonstratives is much complicated by their multi-functional role in language - they are often used not only to point things out, but to track referents in discourse and more generally to contrast with other referring expressions.

Kaplan about Indexical and Demonstratives The most influential treatment of indexicals and demonstratives has probably been David Kaplan's monograph “Demonstratives”, versions of which were circulated in the seventies. Kaplan's basic concepts are context, character, and content.

Character is what is provided by sentences with indexicals, like “I am sitting” or “You are sitting”, a function from contextual features to contents. For Kaplan, a context is a quadruple of an agent, location, time and world; intuitively, these are the speaker of an utterance, the time and location of the utterance, and the possible world in which it occurs; the beliefs of the speaker as to who he is, where he is, and when it is, and what the real world is like are irrelevant to determining content, although not of course to explaining why the speaker says what he does.

A proper context is one in which the agent is at the location at the time in the world, which is of course the characteristic relation among the speaker, time, location and world of an utterance.  Kaplan did not officially take his theory to be a theory of utterances. He thought of his account, or at least of the formal theory he supplies, as a theory of occurrences, or sentences-in-context, which are abstract objects consisting of pairs of contexts and expression types. Utterances are an unsuitable subject matter for logical investigation.

Utterances take time, for one thing, so it would not be possible to insist that all of the premises of an argument share the same context, but this stipulation is needed for logic. For another, since any utterance of “I am not

speaking” would be false, we might have to conclude that “I am speaking” is a logical truth, an unwelcome result.  Kaplan does not call what he is doing “pragmatics” but the semantics of indexicals and demonstratives. Gricean conversational maxims In social science generally and linguistics specifically, the cooperative principle describes how people interact with one another.

As phrased by Paul Grice, who introduced it, it states, "Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Though phrased as a prescriptive command, the principle is intended as a description of how people normally behave in conversation.  Listeners and speakers must speak cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way. The cooperative principle describes how effective communication in conversation is achieved in common social situations.

The cooperative principle can be divided into four maxims, called the Gricean maxims, describing specific rational principles observed by people who obey the cooperative principle; these principles enable effective communication. The work of H. P. Grice is a milestone of pragmatics. Grice was a student of conversation, and he enunciated the basic principle that, outside of the theater of the absurd, most conversationalists seem to hold to: the Cooperative Principle. It has four sub-parts or maxims, that conversationalists are enjoined to respect ?

The maxim of quality. Speakers' contributions ought to be true? The maxim of quantity. Speakers' contributions should be as informative as required; not saying either too little or too much? The maxim of relevance. Contributions should relate to the purposes

of the exchange ? The maxim of manner. Contributions should be orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.  The maxims work in two modes: the speaker mode and the hearer mode. The speaker mode has a normative sense: Formulate an utterance in such a way as to keep to all the maxims.

The hearer mode is more sophisticated: When interpreting an utterance remember that an speaker kept to all the maxims. So when you find out that an speaker has flouted some maxims you have to interpret the utterance anew. These maxims may be better understood as describing the assumptions listeners normally make about the way speakers will talk, rather than prescriptions for how one ought to talk. Philosopher Kent Bach wrote: “We need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate.

Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit. ”  Gricean Maxims generate implicatures. If the overt, surface meaning of a sentence does not seem to be consistent with the Gricean maxims, and yet the circumstances lead to think that the speaker is nonetheless obeying the cooperative principle, a person tends to look for other meanings that could be implied by the sentence.  Let us consider the following examples.

S: Where is Bill?
H: There is a yellow Porsche outside Sue's house.
S: Can you tell me the time?
H: Well, the mail has just

come.

In both examples the simplest hearer interpretation of what H has said is that he did break the communication. So, according to the hearer mode of exploiting the maxims of relevance S should interpret the utterance anew appealing to their common knowledge that Bill is a friend of Sue and has a yellow Porsche and that postman comes always at 11 am. Grice was using observations of the difference between "what is said" and "what is meant" to show that people actually do follow these maxims in conversation. 9;46] We can see how this works in considering the maxim of quantity at work in the following made-up exchange between parent and child: e. g. Parent: "Did you finish your homework? " Child: "I finished my algebra". Parent: "Well, get busy and finish your English, too! " The maxim of manner is crucial for understanding the difference between the following two utterances: e. g. Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an aria from Rigoletto. Miss Singer sang an aria from Rigoletto.

The content of both the sentences is more or less the same. The latter utterance expresses it direct way. While interpreting the former utterance, the hearer must ask herself why the speaker expresses so simple a matter in such a complicated way. The hearer mode of maxim of manner suggests that there must be some reasons for such an utterance. The speaker wants to avoid of using the word sing, stressing singing isn't what Miss Singer is doing. This means Miss Singer is a bad singer. e. g. This volume is well-bound and free of

typographical errors.

This example flouts the maxim of quantity saying less than is normal for a book review, and probably the maxim of relevance as well, since binding and typographical errors are less significant to potential readers than the book's contents. What is implied is: "This volume stinks! ". Grice did not, however, assume that all people should constantly follow these maxims. Instead, he found it interesting when these were not respected, namely either "flouted" (with the listener being expected to be able to understand the message) or "violated" (with the listener being expected to not note this). Flouting would imply some other, hidden meaning. The importance was in what was not said.

Levinson's Theory of Utterance-Type-Meaning

Levinson's work is a good representative of grammar-oriented pragmatics. Levinson is only marginally a neo-Gricean. He is not committed to Grice's fundamental two-fold division between what is said, on the one hand, and implicatures, on the other — he proposes a third level of default or preferred interpretation.

He does not provide a theory of utterance comprehension based primarily on recognition of communicative intentions, for default interpretations are not concerned with that. However, he does assume conversational principles and maxims, formulating a series of heuristics inspired in Grice's maxims of quantity and manner for a theory of Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs) that, as important as they were in Grice's program, have been neglected by many post-Gricean authors.  Levinson's GCI theory is not a philosophical theory of human communication, nor a psychological theory of utterance understanding, but a partial theory of utterance-type meaning with its focus on linguistics. As he puts it: In the composite theory

of meaning, the theory of GCIs plays just a small role in a general theory of communication… It is just to linguistic theory that GCIs have an unparalleled import.  The two-layered view of utterance content consisting, according to Levinson, of a level of encoded meaning (sentence-meaning) and a level of inferential meaning (speaker's or utterance-(token)-meaning), must be supplemented by a third intermediate layer of utterance-type-meaning which is not based “on direct computations on speaker-intentions but rather on general expectations about how language is normally used”. These expectations are formulated by Levinson as a series heuristics, which have a clear connection with Grice's maxims of quantity and manner: First (Q) Heuristic: What isn't said, isn't .

This is related to Grice's first maxim of quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as required”) and is held responsible for the inference of so-called scalar implicatures, among others. So from an utterance of “Some students came to the party” it is inferable by default that not all the students came. It is not part of the meaning of ‘some,’ yet, in general — by default from the utterance-type — it is what one would infer in absence of evidence to the contrary.

In this case, the heuristic has to be restricted to a set of alternates in a ‘scale,’ so that the use of one implicates the non-applicability of the other. Second (I) Heuristic: What is expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified. This is related to Grice's second maxim of quantity (“Do not make your contribution more informative than necessary”), and is taken to be involved in cases of interpretation of conditionals as bi-conditionals, the enrichment of conjunctions

with the expression of temporal and causal relations among the conjuncts, ‘bridging’ inferences, collective reading of plural noun phrases, and so on.

Third (M) Heuristic: What is said in an abnormal way, isn't normal. This heuristic is related to Grice's maxim of manner and, specially, to the first submaxim (“Avoid obscurity of expression”) and the fourth (“Avoid prolixity”). If according to the second heuristic an unmarked utterance gives rise to a stereotypical interpretation, now we have that this interpretation is overruled if a marked utterance is produced. One of the clearest examples is double negation versus simple positive assertion.

Compare “It's possible the plane will be late” with “It's not impossible that the plane will be late.  When conflict among these three heuristics arise, Levinson argues that these are resolved in the following way: Q defeats M, and M defeats I. So, there are some logical systems, which explain a large number of language phenomena from the pragmatic viewpoint. And different pragmatic peculiarities of the communicative situation determine the character of the sentence and its speech reasisation.

Such peculiarities are time, space characteristics, individual characteristics of interlocutors and others.

Conclusion

Well, pragmatics deals with utterances, by which specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language, are meant. Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as dealing with the effects of context. The problems of pragmatics and different properties of utterances were investigated by different scolars.

Pragmatics deals with various tasks, including facts about the objective facts of the utterance, including who the speaker is, when the utterance occurred, and where; facts about the speaker's intentions: what

language the speaker intends to be using, what meaning he intends to be using, whom he intends to refer to with various shared names, or what he intends to achieve by saying what he does; facts about beliefs of the speaker and those to whom he speaks, and the conversation they are engaged in; what beliefs do they share; what is the focus of the conversation, what are they talking about, tc. Well, from the viewpoint of pragmatics, sentences can be conceived as utterance-types, resulted from abstracting all elements except the linguistic expressions used. An utterance in pragmatics is most often taken to be a linguistic action performed by a certain speaker in a certain place at a certain moment.

So, the pragmatic aspect of the sentence is determined by pragmatic peculiarities of the communicative situation, that include time and space characteristics of the communicative process, individual characteristics of both, the speaker and the listener, their social status, status in the process of communication, age, level of education, psychological characteristics and other aspects.