University of Babylon

College of Education for Human Sciences

Department of English

In 2021/2022

PRAGMATICS

What is Pragmatics
By

Haneen Abdul .Kareem Khdhair

Supervised by

Asst. Prof. Nasa'm Al Adilli (PhD)

Table of Contents
Introduction

What is Pragmatics-1

1-1Context

1-2Sentence vs. Utterance

A Brief History of Pragmatics-2

Semantics vs Pragmatics -3

Coverage of Pragmatics-4

Presupposition 4-1

Implicature 4-2

4-3Speech Act

Deixis 4-4
INTRODUCTION

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and the study of

linguistics typically

includes, among other things, the study of our knowledge of sound

systems

word structure (morphology), and sentence structure ,)phonology(

(syntax). It is

also commonly pointed out that there is an important distinction to be

made

between our competence and our performance. Our competence is our (in
.principle flawless) knowledge of the rules of our own idiolect

Pragmatics may be roughly defined as the study of language use in

context

as compared with semantics, which is the study of literal meaning independent –

of context (although these definitions will be revised below). If I’m having a hard

day, I may tell you that my day has been a nightmare – but of course I don’t

intend you to take that literally; that is, the day hasn’t in fact been something

”I’ve had a bad dream about. In this case the semantic meaning of “nightmare

differs from its pragmatic meaning – that is, the meaning I intended )a bad dream(

in the context of my utterance. Given this difference, it might appear at first

glance as though semantic meaning is a matter of competence, while pragmatic

meaning is a matter of performance. However, our knowledge of pragmatics, like all of

.our linguistic knowledge, is rule-governed

The bulk of this bookdevoted to describing some of the principles we follow in producing
and interpreting language in light of the context, our intentions, and our beliefs about our

interlocutors and their intentions. Because speakers within a language community

share these pragmatic principles concerning language production and interpretation

in context, they constitute part of our linguistic competence, not merely

matters of performance. That is to say, pragmatic knowledge is part of our

knowledge of how to use language appropriately. And as with other areas of

linguistic competence, our pragmatic competence is generally implicit – known

.at some level, but not usually available for explicit examination

Pragmatics, then, has to do with a rather slippery type of meaning, one that

isn’t found in dictionaries and which may vary from context to context. The same

utterance will mean different things in different contexts, and will even mean

different things to different people. The same noun phrase can pick out different

things in the world at different times, as evidenced by the phrase this clause in

This clause contains five words; this clause contains four. All of this falls under

the rubric of pragmatics. In general terms, pragmatics typically has to do with

:meaning that is

,non-literal •

,context-dependent •

inferential, and/or •

not truth-conditional. (Berner 2013 :2-3) •

1-WHAT IS PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics is a rapidly growing field in contemporary linguistics. In recent

years, it has not only become a centre of intense interest in linguistics and

the philosophy of language, it has also attracted a considerable amount of

attention from anthropologists, artificial intelligence workers, cognitive

scientists, psychologists, and semioticians. But what is pragmatics? This is a question whose
: answer is notoriously but simply propose a working definition of pragmatics

,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.'' (Haung , 2007 :2)

A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how people
comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation
which is usually a conversation . It 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 or speaker meaning (Leech,
1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986)

Yule (2010: 128) defines pragmatics as the study of “invisible” meaning, or how we
recognize what is meant even when it isn’t actually said or written. In order for that to
happen, speakers (or writers) must be able to depend on a lot of shared assumptions and
expectations when they try to communicate. The investigation of those assumptions
and expectations provides us with some insights into how more is always being
communicated than is said

In the above picture, assuming things are normal and this store has not gone into the

business of selling young children, we can recognize an advertisement for a sale of

,clothes for those babies and toddlers. The word clothes doesn’t appear in the message

but we can bring that idea to our interpretation of the message as we work out what the

advertiser intended us to understand. We are actively involved in creating

an interpretation
of what we read and hear. (ibid ,129)

1-1 Context
.Yule(2010 :) states that There are different kinds of context

linguistic context, also known as co-text. The co-text of a word is the set of other -
words used in the same phrase or sentence. The surrounding co-text has a strong effect on
what we think the word probably means. For example , we identified the word bank as a
homonym, a single form with more than one meaning. How do we usually know which
meaning is intended in a particular sentence? We normally do so on the basis of linguistic
context. If the word bank is used in a sentence together with words like steep or
overgrown, we have no problem deciding which type of bank is meant. Or, if we hear
someone say that she has to get to the bank to withdraw some cash, we know from this
.linguistic context which type of bank is intended

:Physical Context-

More generally, we know how to interpret words on the basis of physical context.
-If

we see the word BANK on the wall of a building in a city, the physical location will

influence our interpretation. While this may seem rather obvious, we should keep in

mind that it is not the actual physical situation “out there” that constitutes “the

context” for interpreting words or sentences. The relevant context is our mental

representation of those aspects of what is physically out there that we use in arriving

at an interpretation. Our understanding of much of what we read and hear is tied to this

processing of aspects of the physical context, particularly the time and place, in which

:Social context: This refers to the social-A third Type of context is Social Context
.relationship of the people involved in communication

:For instance

Mr. President, stop bugging me and go home. (This sentence is only shocking because you
.cannot talk like this to the President of the US)

The use of contextual information for interpreting utterances qua function is also the basis
of dealing with indirect speech acts and other pragmatic issues as pointed out earlier.
(Unubi, 2016:39)

Sentence vs. Utterance 1-2

Pragmatics studies how utterances are used and what speakers mean.. So it is
important to illustrate the distinction beteen sentence and utterance .

The distinction between sentence and utteranc is of fundamental

.importance to both semantics and pragmatics

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. For

.example, (1) is a sentence in English, but (2) is not

.Lance Armstrong won the centenary Tour de France-1

Lance Armstrong the centenary Tour de France won *-2

Sentence-meaning, then, 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. The study of sentence-meaning

normally

.belongs to semantics

By contrast, an utterance is the use of a particular piece of language—be

it a word, a phrase, a sentence, or a sequence of sentences—by a

particular speaker on a particular occasion. For example, (3-6)

.are all utterances in English

’’!Hello‘‘ )3(

’’.A cappuccino, please‘‘ )4(

’’.Lance Armstrong won the centenary Tour de France ‘‘ )5(

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few ‘‘ )4(
to be

chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts;
others

to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, with
diligence

and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts
made
of them by others.’ ’(Haung 2007 :10)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PRAGMATICS-2

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

,Peirce in the 1930s. Influenced by Peirce, Morris (1938: 6–7), for example

presented a threefold division into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.(Haugn 2007: 2)

Morris distinguished three distinct branches of inquiry:

1) Syntax (or syntactics), being the study of the formal relation of

signs to one another.

2)Semantics, which is the study of "the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs
are applicable" (their designata).

3)Pragmatics which is the study of "the relation of signs to interpreters". Livenson

(1983:1,2 ) .
Also, the famous philosopher, Carnap, had very similar ideas with Morris but made some
supplement. He suggested that the study of Pragmatics should have relationship between
language users and words as well as the reference of words. By this, he makes the aims of

the study of Pragmatics more specific. In addition, Bar- Hiller, the student of Carnap,
suggested that studies of Pragmatics should have definite aims and he claims that

.”the definite aims should be deictic, such as “I”, “Here''“Now

On their part, Austin and Searle put forward the Speech Act Theory, which is the most -
influential topic in the study of Pragmatics. Grice also made contribution to the study of
.speech act theory but famous for his conversational implicature

Furthermore ,Pragmatics and Principles of Pragmatics by Levinson and Leech in1983 and
the establishment of International Pragmaticssociation (IPrA) in 1987 .

Chomsky (1957) through his notorious example Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
points out that this sentence is perfectly correct but strictly meaningless because the
meaning of green, which is a colour, is cancelled out by colourless. Since syntax has nothing
to do with meaning, such consideration is meaningless too and should be left to people
.dealing with meaning, the semanticists. In this way, semantics came to be called

the waste-basket of syntax. However, the semantic basket was filled to the brim, and
,another waste-basket had to be created to catch the overflow. As time went by

linguists kept dropping more and more of their unresolved questions into this new,
. pragmatic basket giving rise to the linguistics discipline of Pragmatics

Lastly, Pragmatics has been developing very quickly and soundly since the 1980s. So far,
it has made some delightful progress, and attracted more students as well as scholars to
.conduct researches in it. (Unubi 2016 :37-38)
-

3- Semantics vs Pragmatics

Yule (2010 : 113) defines Semantics as the study of the meaning of words, phrases
and sentences. In semantics analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the
words conventionally mean, rather than on what an individual speaker (like George Carlin)
might want them to mean on a particular occasion. This approach is concerned with
objective or general meaning and avoids trying to account for subjective or local meaning.
Doing semantics is attempting to spell out what it is we all know when we behave as if we
share knowledge of the meaning of a word, a phrase, or a sentence in a language.
Semantics focused on conceptual meaning and the relationships between words.On the
other hand ,pragmatics deals with aspects of meaning that depend more on context and
the communicative intentions of speakers. Communication clearly depends on not only
recognizing the meaning of words in an utterance, but recognizing what speakers mean
by their utterances. Pragmatics is the study of what speakers mean, or “speaker meaning,” .
(ibid :127)

Like pragmatics ,Semantics of one of the core fields linguistics also concerns meaning of
various linguistic components as its focal area of investigations. But these two associated
branches of linguistics deal with meaning from totally different perspectives. While
.semantics incorporates sentence meaning or the grammatical meaning of a sentence
Grice states that Pragmatics extracts the meaning of utterance which includes both
.)sentence and context
Semantics is concerned with those elements of meaning that can be directly decoded
from the words of sentence itself, and pragmatics is concerned with those elements of
meaning that depend on contextual information beyond the words of sentence itself and
..on the interpreter’s inferential ability

Semantics deals with the literal meaning of words and the meaning of the way they are
combined, which taken together from the core of meaning, or the starting point from which
the whole meaning of a particular utterance is constructed. Pragmatics deals with all the
ways in which literal meaning must be refined, enriched or extended to arrive at an
.understanding of what a speaker meant in uttering a particular expression

A sharp
borderline can be identified of both semantics and pragmatics, though these two
human sciences commonly describe the meaning of language Put clearly, the discipline
investigated narrates the literal meaning, and the meaning achieved from the combined
expression of a group of linguistic components of a language whereas pragmatics points out
speaker intended meaning modified by contextual factors and variations (Arif 2012). For
:example, the semantic meaning of the sentence

I feel cold now

.indicates a statement a person catching cold due to staying in an icy place

But if someone utters this statement inside the air-cooled room, the pragmatic meaning
will definitely be a request by the speaker to stop the air cooler machine or to reduce the
.volume of air cooler. (Arif ,2013:29)
4-Coverage of Pragmatics
There are many words that have different meaning, concept and reference. Some
words have clear semantically meaning but no specific meaning pragmatically because the
reference is not constant. For examples ,some pronouns like that, this, those, these, or
.temporal terms such as now yesterday or phrases cannot be defined the reference clearly

For understanding the meaning pragmatically, Yule divided the coverage of

pragmatics into five elements those are presupposition implicature, speech act, and deixis
(Yule, 2010). Therefore deixis appears for this kind of problem.

4-1 Presupposition
A presupposition as Yule ( 2010:133) defines is something the speaker
assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. That is to say speakers, not sentences,
have presuppositions. Thus, it identifies some of the potentially assumed information .

If someone tells you Your brother is waiting outside, there is an

obvious presupposition

that you have a brother. If you are asked Why did you arrive late?, there
is a presupposition

that you did arrive late. And if you are asked the question When did you
stop

.smoking?, there are at least two presuppositions involved

Implicature 4-2
Implicature is a term in which an utterance proposes an implied meaning behind what is
literally said. That means there is an implicated meaning behind what is being said which
.must to be interpreted by the addressee depending on his\her understanding

Grice (1957)coined the term ''Implicature''and distinguishes two types of implicature and
. which are conventional implicature and conversational implicature

4-3Speech Act
We can usually recognize the type of “action” performed by a speaker with the
utterance. We use the term speech act to describe actions such as “requesting,”
“commanding,” “questioning” or “informing.” We can define a speech act as the action
performed by a speaker with an utterance. If you say, I’ll be there at six, you are not
”.just speaking, you seem to be performing the speech act of “promising

We usually use certain syntactic structures with the functions listed

beside them in the

.following table

Structures Functions

Did you eat the pizza? Interrogative Question

Eat the pizza (please)! Imperative Command (Request)

You ate the pizza. Declarative Statement

When an interrogative structure such as Did you…?, Are they…? or Can

we…? is used

.with the function of a question, it is described as a direct speech act

On the other hand ,indirect speech act is an action in which the form used
(e.g. interrogative) does not directly match the function (e.g. request) performed
.by a speaker with an utterance, in contrast to a direct speech act

The utterance You left the door open has a declarative structure and, as a direct

speech act, would be used to make a statement. However, if you say this to someone

who has just come in (and it’s really cold outside), you would probably want

that person to close the door. You are not using the imperative structure. You are

using a declarative structure to make a request. It’s another example of an indirect

speech act. (Yule 2010: 134)

4-4 Deixis

Deictic expressions come from a Greek word and its original meaning is “pointing
through language. There are some very common words in our language that
can’t be interpreted at all if we don’t know the context, especially the
physical context of the speaker. These are words such as here and there,
this or that, now and then, yesterday, today or tomorrow, as well as
pronouns such as you, me, she, him, it, them. Some sentences of English
are virtually impossible to understand if we don’t know who is speaking,
:about whom, where and when. For example

You’ll have to bring it back tomorrow because she isn’t here

.today
Out of context, this sentence is really vague. It contains a large number of
expressions

that rely on knowledge of the )you, it, tomorrow, she, here, today(
immediate

physical context for their interpretation

) Yule 2010:130 ( .

References

-. Arif, Hakim .(2013). A brief skitch on the Origin and the development of Pragmatics
.Philosoph and Progress: Vols . LIV, January

- .Berner .(2013).Introduction to Pragmatics .Wiley Blackwell

Grice, H. (1975). Logic and Conversation. in Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (Eds), Syntax and -
.semantic, Vol 3 Speech act p.p. (41-58) New York: Academic press

-.Huang, Y. (2007). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press

.
-Levinson, Stephen C.(1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge :Cambridge University Press.
Unubi, Sunday Abraham. (2016). Pragmatics: Historical Development, Scope and Subject -
Matter or Object of Study. Int. J. Adv. Multidiscip. Res. 3(12): 37-43. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.22192/ijamr.2016.03.12.007

-Yule , George .(2010). The Study of language. London: Oxford University. 21