Understanding Pragmatics: The Study of Language in Social Interaction - Prof. García, Apuntes de Lingüística

¡Descarga Understanding Pragmatics: The Study of Language in Social Interaction - Prof. García y más Apuntes en PDF de Lingüística solo en Docsity! Posted on June 20, 2007 by Samia Adnan (a.k.a Samia Sharif Khan) http://echoingmemories.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/pragmatics/ What is pragmatics? “We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what we want, when we want. All normal humans can produce and understand any number of new words and sentences. Humans use the multiple options of language often without thinking. But blindly, they sometimes fall into its traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but themselves get caught in the sticky strands” Jean Aitchison “Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.” David Crystal “Pragmatics is a way of investigating how sense can be made of certain texts even when, from a semantic viewpoint, the text seems to be either incomplete or to have a different meaning to what is really intended. Consider a sign seen in a children’s wear shop window: “Baby Sale – lots of bargains”. We know without asking that there are no babies are for sale – that what is for sale are items used for babies. Pragmatics allows us to invest gate how this “meaning beyond the words” can be understood without ambiguity. The extra meaning is there, not because of the semantic aspects of the words themselves, but because we share certain contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text. Pragmatics is an important area of study for your course. A simplified way of thinking about pragmatics is to recognise, for example, that language needs to be kept interesting – a speaker or writer does not want to bore a listener or reader, for example , by being over-long or tedious. So, humans strive to find linguistic means to make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting, more relevant, more purposeful or more personal. Pragmatics allows this.” Steve Campsall We use language all the time to make things happen. We ask someone to pass the salt or marry us – not, usually at the same time. We order a pizza or make a dental appointment. Speech acts include asking for a glass of beer, promising to drink the beer, threatening to drink more beer, ordering someone else to drink some beer, and so on. Some special people can do extraordinary things with words, like baptizing a baby, declaring war, awarding a penalty kick to Arsenal FC or sentencing a convict. Linguists have called these things “speech acts” – and developed a theory (called, unsurprisingly, speech act theory) to explain how they work. Some of this is rooted in common sense and stating the obvious – like felicity conditions. These explain that merely saying the words does not accomplish the act. Judges (unless they are also referees) cannot award penalty kicks to Arsenal, and football referees (unless they are also heads of state) cannot declare war. Speech act theory is not the whole of pragmatics, but is perhaps currently the most important established part of the subject. Contemporary debate in pragmatics often focuses on its relations with semantics. Since semantics is the study of meaning in language, why add a new field of study to look at meaning from a novel viewpoint?