Department of English

MA English 1st (2020-2022)

Course: Introduction to General Linguistics

Semester: First Credit hours:3
Instructor: Muhammad Ishaq Malik
Lecture: #
What is Pragmatics? An Introduction.
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.
This is an elementary confusion. Clearly linguists could develop a model of semantics that
included pragmatics. Or they could produce a model for each, which allows for some exploration
and explanation of the boundary between them – but distinguishes them as in some way different
kinds of activity. However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is
necessary because it explains meanings that semantics overlooks.
As pragmatics is the study of language use and its object, and their meaning in use. The main
hypothesis of contemporary pragmatics is that semantic interpretation is underspecified and must
be enriched at the pragmatic stage. While semantics studies the meaning conveyed by words,
pragmatics studies the meaning as conveyed by the speaker and interpreted by the listener. This
so-called speaker's meaning has become the subject of many theories in pragmatics, namely speech
act theory, Grice's maxims and Penelope's Politeness principle.
The first theory which attempted to explain speaker's meaning is the so-called speech act theory
by Austin and Searle. The basic definition of a speech act is the action we can do with language.
The different actions we do by language have been classified into taxonomies, namely assertives,
directives, commisssive, expressives and declaratives. These speech acts can be analyzed by three
levels locutionary, perlocutionary and illocutionary. The locutionary aspect refers to the syntactic
and semantic structure of an utterance. The perlocutionary aspect is the real intended meaning.
The perlocutionary aspect is the effect the utterance has on the hearer. However, speech act theory
was harshly criticized for not showing any cooperation between participants in a conversation.
The second theory which appeared in reaction to the speech act theory is the so-called cooperative
principle by Grice. The latter argued that when people are speaking, they are cooperating between
each other to reach meaning. This cooperation is achieved through four maxims, namely quantity,
quality, relation and manner. The maxim of quantity requires the participants to make their
contribution as informative as required; the maxim of quality requires participants not to say what
they believe to be false or for which they lack evidence; the maxim of relation requires from
participants to be relevant; the maxim of manner requires from participants to be clear and orderly.
Although the cooperative principle went so far as to define the relationships between participants,
it paid a little attention to the notion of politeness in linguistic interaction.
The third theory in pragmatic studies is the notion of Politeness Principle by Goffeman, Penelope
and Levinson. The latter came up with the concepts of face which is the public self-image the
speaker intends to protect in communication. There is a negative and a positive face. While the
positive face involves a desire for connection with others, negative face means the freedom from
imposition or impingement. However, there are some speech acts like order and request which are
face-threatening acts. A face threatening act is an act that inherently damages the face of the
addressee by acting against his wants or desires. The opposite of a face-threatening act is a face-
saving act. There are four politeness strategies for face-saving, namely bald on-record, positive
politeness, negative politeness, off-record (indirect) strategies. Generally speaking, these strategies
seek to minimize damage and maximize esteem. However, the whole theory of politeness has been
criticized for not accounting for the paralinguistic features of speech interaction.
Pragmatics has been described by different language analysts in different ways but almost with
similar interpretations as follows;
"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 investigate 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 recognize, 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