1.1 What is pragmatics?
1.1.1 A definition
Pragmatics is the systematic study of meaning by virtue of, or dependent on, the use of language. The central topics of inquiry of pragmatics include implicature, presupposition, speech acts and deixis.
1.1.2 A brief history of pragmatics
Pragmatics as a modern branch of linguistic inquiry has its origin in the philosophy of language. Its philosophical roots can be traced back to the work of the philosophers Charles Morris, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Pierce in the 1930s. Influenced by Pierce, Morris(1938:6-7), for example, presented a threefold division into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics within semiotics---a general science of signs.
(Levinson 1983:1, Horn and Ward 2004a)
Syntax is the study of the formal relation of one sign with another. Semantics deals with the relation of signs to what they denotes, and Pragmatics addresses the relation of signs to their users and interpreters.
Carnap (1942) posited an order of degree of abstractness for the three branches of inquiry: Syntax is the most and pragmatics is the least abstract, with semantics lying somewhere in between. Consequently, syntax provides input into semantics, which provides input into pragmatics. (Recanati 2004b)
1950s: two opposing schools of thought emerged within the analytic philosophy of language: the school of ideal language philosophy
(originated by the philosophers Gottlob Ferge, Alfred Tarki, and Bertrand Russell; interested in the study of logic systems of artificial languages; successful application of its theory and methodology to natural language in the 1950s and 1960s ---today's formal semantics)
and the school of ordinary language philosophy
(By contrast, within the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, emphasis was placed on natural language rather than the formal languages studied by the logicians. Under the leadership of ordinary language philosophy flourished principally at Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s. Other leading thinks included the philosophers H. P. Grice, Peter Strawson, John Searle, and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein(Huang 2003, Recanati 2004a, 2004b). It was within the tradition of ordinary language philosophy that Austin developed his theory of speech acts, and Grice his theory of conversational implicature. Both theories have since become landmarks on the path towards the development of a systematic, philosophically inspired pragmatic theory of language use.
in the late 1960s and early 1970s: a campaign was launched by some of Noam Chomsky's disaffected pupils in generative semantics(as it was then called), notably Jerry Katz, J. R. Ross and George Lakoff, to challenge his teacher's treatment of language as an abstract, mental device divorced from the uses and functions of language. They helped to empty the "pragmatic wastebasket". A great deal of important research was done in the 1970s by linguistics such as Laurence Horn, Charles Fillmore, and Gerald Gazdar to "bring some order into the content of the pragmatic wastebasket". The publication of Stephen Levinson's celebrated textbook Pragmatics in 1983 systematized the field and marked the coming age of pragmatics as a linguistic discipline in its own right.
in the last two decades: new developments such as Laurence Horn's and Stephen Levinson's neo-Gricean pragmatic theories, Dan Sperber's and Deidre Wilson's relevance theory, and etc.
more recently: a newly published Handbook of Pragmatics declared--- work in pragmatic theory has extended from the attempt to rescue the syntax and semantics from their own unnecessary complexities to other domains of linguistic inquiry, ranging from historical linguistics to the lexicon, from language acquisition to computational linguistics, from intonational structure to cognitive science(Horn and Ward 2004a: xi).
1.1.3 Two main schools of thought in pragmatics: Anglo-American versus European Continental
As pointed out in Huang(2001 a), two main schools of thought can be identified in contemporary pragmatics: Anglo-American and European Continental.
see 1.1.1 above, it is known as the component view of pragmatics, namely, the view that pragmatics should be treated as a core component of a theory of language, on a par with phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. By contrast, other areas such as anthropological linguistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics would lie outside this set of core components.
Within the Continental tradition, pragmatics is defined in a far broader way, encompassing much that goes under the rubric of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis. Under this approach, pragmatics is general conceived of a theory of linguistic communication, including how to influence people through verbal messages(Prucha 1983) .
The Continental tradition is closer to the original view of pragmatics expressed by Morris, that pragmatics should study "the relation of signs to interpreters" . Given the degree of overlap among the phenomena dealt with in other relatively well-established interdisciplinary fields of linguistics, it is rather difficult to see how a coherent research agenda of pragmatics can be made within the wider Continental tradition. To say that "everything is pragmatics" amounts to saying that "nothing is pragmatics".(Levinson 1987a)
By contrast, the narrower Anglo-American, component view of pragmatics, which focuses on topics emerging from the traditional concerns of analytical philosophy, delimits the scope of the discipline.
1.2 Why Pragmatics?
1.2.1 Linguistic underdeterminacy
It is widely accepted that there is a huge gap between the meaning of a sentence and the messages actually conveyed by the uttering of that sentence. In other words, the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence radically underdetermines the proposition the speaker expresses when he or she utters that sentences. This is generally known in the literature as the linguistics underdeterminacy thesis. In order to fill the gap created by linguistic underdeterminacy, pragmatic has to be included as a component in an overall theory of linguistic study.
1.2.2 Simplification of semantics and syntax
The second reason why we need a pragmatic component is because its inclusion can effect a radical simplification of other core components, such as semantics and syntax.
1.3 Some basic notions in semantics and pragmatics
1.3.1 sentence, utterance, proposition
A sentence is a well-formed string of words put together according to the grammatical rules of a language. As a unit of the language system, it is an abstract entity or construct defined within a theory of grammar.
Sentence-meaning refers to those aspects of meaning that are ascribed to a sentence in the abstract, that is a sentence independent of its realization in any concrete form.( semantics)
By contrast, an utterance is the use of a particular piece of language---a phrase, a sentence, or a sequence of a sentence---by a particular speaker on a particular occasion.
Utterance meaning, or speaking-meaning is definable as what a speaker intends to convey by making an utterance.(pragmatics)
Proposition: is what is expressed by a sentence when that sentence is used to make a statement, that is, to say something, true or false, about some state of affairs in the external world. Put the other way round, a sentence, when uttered to make a statement, is said to convey a proposition.
Relationship between sentence and proposition: the same proposition can on the one hand be expressed by different sentences; the same sentence can be used to convey different propositions on different occasions.
The relationship between sentence, utterance, and proposition may be represented schematically in the tree diagram(adapted from Hurford and Heasley 1983: 23)
A proposition, being the most abstract of the three notion, can be expressed by different sentences. A given sentence, being the next most abstract of the three notions, can itself be instantiated by different utterances, which are the least abstract of the three notion.
1.3.2 Context
From a relatively theory-neutral point of view, context may in a broader sense be defined as referring to any relevant features of the dynamic setting or environment in which a linguistic unit is systematically used. Furthermore, context can be seen as composed of three different sources:
physical context---the physical setting of the utterance;
linguistic context---the surrounding utterances in the same discourse;
the general knowledge context
1.3.3 Truth value, truth condition, entailment
The notion of truth value is associated with that of proposition, and the notion of truth condition is linked to that of sentence.
As mentioned, a proposition may be true or false. But the truth or falsity of a proposition may vary from utterance occasion to utterance occasion. However, on a particular occasion, a proposition has a definite truth value, that is, it is either true or false. It is true if and only if it corresponds to some state of affairs that obtains on that occasion, and it is false if and only if it does not. This is known variously as the "corresponding", "realistic", or "simple" theory of truth.(Bradley & Swartz 1979)
Truth conditions are the conditions that the world must meet for the sentence to be true.(S is true if and only if p).
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