Definition
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 (hence *conversation analysis). 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). The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper, 1997) which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social status between the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.
Focus and content
Some of the aspects of language studied in pragmatics include:
--Deixis: meaning 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication
however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of
pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular
utterance in a given speech context.
--Presupposition: referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or
meanings logically associated with or entailed by a sentence.
--Performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only
says something but also does certain things: giving information, stating
a fact or hinting an attitude. The study of performatives led to the hypothesis
of Speech Act Theory that holds that a speech event embodies three acts:
a locutionary act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act (Austin,
1962; Searle, 1969).
--Implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance
derived from context that is not present from its conventional use.
Pragmaticians are also keen on exploring why interlocutors can successfully
converse with one another in a conversation. A basic idea is that interlocutors
obey certain principles in their participation so as to sustain the conversation.
One such principle is the Cooperative Principle which assumes that interactants
cooperate in the conversation by contributing to the ongoing speech event
(Grice, 1975). Another assumption is the Politeness Principle (Leech, 1983)
that maintains interlocutors behave politely to one another, since people
respect each other's face (Brown & Levinson 1978). A cognitive explanation
to social interactive speech events was provided by Sperber and Wilson
(1986) who hold that in verbal communication people try to be relevant
to what they intend to say and to whom an utterance is intended.
The pragmatic principles people abide by in one language are often
different in another. Thus there has been a growing interest in how people
in different languages observe a certain pragmatic principle. Cross-linguistic
and cross-cultural studies reported what is considered polite in one language
is sometimes not polite in another. Contrastive pragmatics, however, is
not confined to the study of a certain pragmatic principles. Cultural breakdowns,
pragmatic failure, among other things, are also components of cross-cultural
pragmatics.
Another focus of research in pragmatics is learner language or *interlanguage.
This interest eventually evolved into interlanguage pragmatics, a branch
of pragmatics which specifically discusses how non-native speakers comprehend
and produce a speech act in a target language and how their pragmatic competence
develops over time (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Kasper, 1995). To date,
a handful of cross-sectional, longitudinal and theoretical studies on classroom
basis have been conducted and the potentials along the interface of pragmatics
with SLA research have been widely felt. Topics of immediate interest to
which language teachers at large may contribute seem just numerous. What
are some of the pragmatic universals underlying L2 acquisition? What influences
L1 exerts on the learner's L2 acquisition? How shall we measure the learner's
pragmatic performance with a native pragmatic norm? These are but a few
of the interesting ones and for more discussions see Kasper & Schmidt
(1996), Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford (1996), Takahashi (1996), House (1996)
and Cohen (1996).
History
Although pragmatics is a relatively new branch of linguistics, research
on it can be dated back to ancient Greece and Rome where the term pragmaticus’
is found in late Latin and pragmaticos’ in Greek, both meaning of being
practical’. Modern use and current practice of pragmatics is credited to
the influence of the American philosophical doctrine of pragmatism. The
pragmatic interpretation of semiotics and verbal communication studies
in Foundations of the Theory of Signs by Charles Morris (1938), for instance,
helped neatly expound the differences of mainstream enterprises in semiotics
and linguistics. For Morris, pragmatics studies the relations of signs
to interpreters’, while semantics studies the relations of signs to the
objects to which the signs are applicable’, and syntactics studies the
formal relations of signs to one another.’ By elaborating the sense of
pragmatism in his concern of conversational meanings, Grice (1975) enlightened
modern treatment of meaning by distinguishing two kinds of meaning, natural
and non-natural. Grice suggested that pragmatics should centre on the more
practical dimension of meaning, namely the conversational meaning which
was later formulated in a variety of ways (Levinson, 1983; Leech, 1983).
Practical concerns also helped shift pragmaticians' focus to explaining
naturally occurring conversations which resulted in hallmark discoveries
of the Cooperative Principle by Grice (1975) and the Politeness Principle
by Leech (1983). Subsequently, Green (1989) explicitly defined pragmatics
as natural language understanding. This was echoed by Blakemore (1990)
in her Understanding Utterances: The Pragmatics of Natural Language and
Grundy (1995) in his Doing Pragmatics. The impact of pragmatism has led
to crosslinguistic international studies of language use which resulted
in, among other things, Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory which
convincingly explains how people comprehend and utter a communicative act.
The Anglo-American tradition of pragmatic study has been tremendously
expanded and enriched with the involvement of researchers mainly from the
Continental countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium.
A symbol of this development was the establishment of the IPrA (the International
Pragmatic Association) in Antwerp in 1987. In its Working Document, IPrA
proposed to consider pragmatics as a theory of linguistic adaptation and
look into language use from all dimensions (Verschueren, 1987). Henceforward,
pragmatics has been conceptualized as to incorporate micro and macro components
(Mey, 1993).
Throughout its development, pragmatics has been steered by the philosophical
practice of pragmatism and evolving to maintain its independence as a linguistic
subfield by keeping to its tract of being practical in treating the everyday
concerned meaning.
Criticisms
A traditional criticism has been that pragmatics does not have a clear-cut
focus, and in early studies there was a tendency to assort those topics
without a clear status in linguistics to pragmatics. Thus pragmatics
was associated with the metaphor of 'a garbage can' (Leech, 1983).
Other complaints were that, unlike grammar which resorts to rules, the
vague and fuzzy principles in pragmatics are not adequate in telling people
what to choose in face of a range of possible meanings for one single utterance
in context. An extreme criticism represented by Marshal (see Shi Cun, 1989)
was that pragmatics is not eligible as an independent field of learning
since meaning is already dealt with in semantics.
However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study
is more than necessary because it handles those meanings that semantics
overlooks (Leech, 1983). This view has been reflected both in practice
at large and in Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics by
Thomas (1995). Thus in spite of the criticisms, the impact of pragmatics
has been colossal and multifaceted. The study of speech acts, for instance,
provided illuminating explanation into sociolinguistic conduct. The findings
of the cooperative principle and politeness principle also provided insights
into person-to-person interactions. The choice of different linguistic
means for a communicative act and the various interpretations for the same
speech act elucidate human mentality in the relevance principle which contributes
to the study of communication in particular and cognition in general. Implications
of pragmatic studies are also evident in language teaching practices. Deixis,
for instance, is important in the teaching of reading. Speech acts are
often helpful for improving translation and writing. Pragmatic principles
are also finding their way into the study of literary works as well as
language teaching classrooms.
(See also: communicative competence, sociolinguistics as a source of discipline, psycholinguistics as a source of discipline, competence and performance, discourse analysis, interlanguage, negotiation of meaning, sociolinguistic/sociocultural competence, procedural/declarative knowledge)
References
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words, New York: Oxford University
Press
Blakemore, D. (1990) Understanding Utterances: The Pragmatics of Natural
Language, Oxford: Blackwell.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1978) 'Universals in language usage:
Politeness phenomena', in Goody, E. (ed.) Questions and Politeness: Strategies
in Social Interaction, pp56~311, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Green, G. (1989) Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Grice, H. P. (1975) 'Logic and Conversation', in Cole, P. & Morgan,
J. (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press.
Grundy, P. (1995) Doing Pragmatics, London: Edward Arnold.
Kasper, G. & Blum-Kulka, S. (eds.) (1993) Interlanguage Pragmatics,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kasper, G. (1995) 'Interlanguage Pragmatics', in Verschueren, J. &
Östman Jan-Ola & Blommaert, J. (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics 1995,
pp1~7, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Kasper, G. (1997) 'Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught?' (Network #6:
http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/sltcc/F97NewsLetter/Pubs.htm), a paper delivered
at the 1997 TESOL Convention.
Leech, G. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman.
Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mey, J. (1993) Pragmatics. An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.
Morris, C. (1938) 'Foundations of the Theory of Signs', in Carnap,
R. Et al (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 2:1, Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Shi Cun (1989) 'Speeches at the IPrA Roundtable Conference' (1, 2,3),
Xi'an: Teaching Research Issues 2,3,4.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition,
Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomas, J. (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics,
London: Longman.
Verschueren, J. (1987) Pragmatics as a Theory of Linguistic Adaptation,
Working Document #1, Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association.
Further reading
Bardovi-Harlig, K. & Hartford, B. S. (1996) 'Input in an institutional
setting', in Studies of Second Language Acquisition, vol. 18,
pp171~188.
Blum-Kulka, S., Kasper, G. & House, J. (eds.) (1989) Cross-Cultural
Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Cohen, A. D. (1996) 'Developing the ability to perform speech acts',
in Studies of Second Language Acquisition, vol. 18, pp253~267.
Davis, S. (ed.) (1991) Pragmatics. A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
House, J. (1996) 'Developing pragmatic fluency in English as a foreign
language: Routines and metapragmatic awareness', in Studies of Second Language
Acquisition, vol. 18, pp225~252.
Kasper, G. & Schmidt, R. (1996) 'Developmental issues in interlanguage
pragmatics', in Studies of Second Language Acquisition, vol. 18,
pp149~169.
Kasper, G. (1996) 'Introduction: interlanguage pragmatics in SLA',
in Studies of Second Language Acquisition, vol. 18, pp145~148.
Takahashi, S. (1996) 'Pragmatic transferability', in Studies of Second
Language Acquisition, vol. 18, pp189~223.