Introducing Pragmatics in Use

Anne O'Keeffe, Brian Clancy, Svenja Adolphs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136825866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Introducing Pragmatics in Use is a lively and accessible introduction to pragmatics, which both covers theory and applies it to real spoken and written data.

Pragmatics is the study of language in context, yet most textbooks rely on invented language examples. This innovative textbook systematically draws on language corpora to illustrate features such as creativity in small talk or how we apologise in English. The authors investigate the pragmatic implications of the globalisation of the English language and focus on the applications of pragmatics for teaching languages. In addition, a practical chapter on researching pragmatics aimed at developing students' research skills is included.

With a range of tasks aimed at putting theory into practice and chapter by chapter further reading recommendations, this is the ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate or postgraduate students of pragmatics and corpus linguistics within applied language/linguistics or TEFL/TESOL degrees.

CHAPTER 1

1. Introduction

1.1 WHAT IS PRAGMATICS?

The term pragmatics is often used in linguistic research to refer to the study of the interpretation of meaning. Although it has proven difficult to determine an exact definition for the term pragmatics (Levinson discusses the issue over more than 50 pages in his influential 1983 work Pragmatics), a user-friendly definition is suggested by Fasold (1990: 119): ‘the study of the use of context to make inferences about meaning’. In this definition, inferences refer to deductions made by participants based on available evidence (Christie, 2000). This available evidence is, according to pragmaticists, provided by the context within which the utterance takes place. Cutting (2008: 3–11) distinguishes between three different types of spoken context: situational, what speakers know about what they can see around them; background knowledge, what they know about each other (interpersonal knowledge) and the world (cultural knowledge); and co-textual, what they know about what they have been saying (see also Chapter 3). Therefore, the pragmatic choices made by conversational participants can simultaneously encode indications of position and time and interpersonal and cultural indicators such as power, status, gender and age. Thus, as Christie (2000: 29) maintains, pragmatics provides ‘a theoretical framework that can account for the relationship between the cultural setting, the language user, the linguistic choices the user makes, and the factors that underlie those choices’.

The modern usage of the term pragmatics in the study of language is attributable to the philosopher Charles Morris (1938), who envisaged a three-part distinction: syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

For example, the utterance I’ve got a headache carries a variety of meanings according to when it is used, who uses it, who the person is talking to, where the conversation takes place, and so forth:

• If a patient said it to a doctor during a medical examination, it could mean: I need a prescription.

• If a mother said it to her teenage son, it could mean: Turn down the music.

• If two friends were talking, it could mean: I was partying last night.

• If it were used as a response to an invitation from one friend to another, such as Do you fancy going for a walk?, it could simply mean: No.

Therefore, depending on the context it occurs in, the utterance I’ve got a headache can function as an appeal, an imperative, a complaint or a refusal, and so on. In any language, what is said is often quite distinct to what is meant, or to put it another way, form is often very different to content. As such pragmatics does not assume a one-to-one relationship between language form and utterance function, but is concerned instead with accounting for the processes that give rise to a particular interpretation of an utterance that is used in a particular context. As Romero-Trillo (2008) lyrically puts it, pragmatics sails the sea between sentence meaning and intended meaning.

There are many other single utterances that can have a variety of meanings according to the contexts in which they occur. Consider the number of meanings that can be attributed to:

The door is open.

It’s raining.

Utterances such as these provide evidence that speakers frequently mean more than they say. Rühlemann (2010) claims that pragmatics is particularly interested in this ‘more’, while Mey (1991: 245) refers to pragmatics as ‘the art of the analysis of the unsaid.’

Hymes (1974) refers to two different types of competence: the first, grammatical competence, relates to the ability to create and understand grammatically correct sentences; and the second, communicative competence, is associated with the ability to produce and understand sentences that are appropriate and acceptable in a particular situation. Christie (2000) notes that it is axiomatic to pragmatics that our grammatical competence does not provide conversational participants with sufficient knowledge to be able to understand examples of language use. Therefore, it is within Hymes’ notion of communicative competence that the study of pragmatics is located.

1.2 PRAGMATICS IN USE

The title of this book places a strong focus on the notion of in use both from the point of view of the linguistic data used and the study of pragmatics. In terms of language in use, traditionally, research within the area of pragmatics has not used attested, or ‘real-life’, examples of language in use and has not been concerned with the link between language form and function. Recently, however, there has been a marked shift towards the use of real-life, naturally-occurring data, as evidenced in journals such as the Journal of Pragmatics or Historical Pragmatics (see Chapter 2). Indeed, one of the major developments in pragmatics in recent years has been the advent of language corpora (i.e. large databases of naturally-occurring spoken and written language available on computer for empirical study) which provide the researcher with access to naturally-occurring data. Romero-Trillo (2008: 1) maintains that ‘pragmatics and corpus linguistics have not only helped each other in a relationship of mutualism, but, they have also made common cause against the voices that have derided and underestimated the utility of working with real data to elucidate the patterns of language use.’

Despite this, many areas of pragmatics which address how language is used do not actually use real language, for example in interlanguage pragmatics (see Chapters 2 and 6), Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) or role-plays (see Chapter 2) are the norm. DCT data are elicited by the researcher, which results in parameters which are focused, specific and confined. There can be valid reasons for this, for example when one is examining a widely used but difficult to record speech act, such as (face-to-face) complaining. The naturally-occurring language evident in many modern corpora is precisely that, authentic, spontaneous, unrehearsed and uncensored. The extent to which DCT data is different to corpus data has not been explored sufficiently to assess the value of these different approaches. However, as Schauer and Adolphs (2006) illustrate in a study of expressions of gratitude in DCT data versus corpus data, the fact that data generated through DCTs is based around single utterances distorts the overall picture of a speech act which is often negotiated and developed over a number of turns in a dynamic discourse event. It is therefore unclear whether DCT or role-play data displays the same patterns and attributes as naturally-occurring data stored in a spoken corpus. We will return to this discussion in greater detail in Chapter 2.

When we look at language in use, we find that it is highly context-dependent and many of its forms and uses have to be explained beyond the sentence, in other words within the realms of pragmatics. As previously stated, pragmatics can be defined as the study of the relationship between context and meaning. This book approaches context and meaning as features of authentic language in use and employs corpus data as an evidential base for their exploration. Through this corpus data, some of the major areas of investigation associated with pragmatics such as deixis, Speech Act Theory and politeness are covered. Our aim is to operationalise pragmatics for those interested in the study of empirical data, by drawing on real contexts of use from language corpora. Therefore, by providing the critical theoretical knowledge required to access the area and by applying this to real data, we investigate how to research pragmatics using corpus linguistic techniques. In Chapter 2, we survey a number of approaches to eliciting data in the study of pragmatics, including DCTs, interviews and role-plays as well as using language corpora. We also give practical advice on how to build your own corpus and transcribe it.

The main corpora that we draw on are described in Table 1.1 (more details of many of these corpora are provided throughout the book).

Table 1.1 Description of frequently referred to corpora in this volume

1.3 THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

This book is organised into eight chapters. This introductory chapter has already presented the term pragmatics and outlined our rationale for writing the book. It also mentioned, in brief, some of the corpora we will refer to throughout. This chapter proceeds to set out in detail some of the essential information needed to apply corpus linguistics to the study of pragmatics. We will explain what a corpus is and explore the development of corpora in the digital age. In addition, we will demonstrate how corpus tools such as frequency lists can contribute to the study of pragmatics.

Each chapter also features a series of ‘information boxes’ such as this one (all marked with the notebook symbol). These are designed to complement the material presented in the main body of the text. In addition, at the end of each chapter is an annotated bibliography that points towards further key readings.

The rest of the book is structured in the following way:

Chapter 2 Researching pragmatics

This chapter builds on the introduction. We review the major research methods commonly used in pragmatics and the different ways in which these intersect with other sub-disciplines of linguistics. We go into detail on the many ways in which data can be collected and discuss the pros and cons of different approaches to eliciting data. We look at DCTs, role-plays, interviews and corpus data. Key to this chapter is the section Corpus data which outlines the fundamental considerations involved in the building and transcribing of a corpus.

Chapter 3 Deixis

This chapter furthers our exploration of key concepts within the study of pragmatics. We deal with an area that is integral to the study of pragmatics – that of deixis. Deixis represents the intersection of grammar and pragmatics and the chapter explores many of these grammatical items such as the personal pronouns you and I and the demonstratives this and that. This chapter demonstrates how corpus linguistics can be used to examine the relationship between the context of the utterance and the referential practices therein. This relationship is shown to characterise the very nature of our pragmatic systems.

Chapter 4 Politeness in context

This chapter introduces two of the seminal theories in politeness research. Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness is compared and contrasted with Watts’ by demonstrating key features of these models using corpus linguistic techniques. It also presents Grice’s notion of conversational implicature, one of the foundation stones of pragmatic research. In addition, we address the growing literature on impoliteness.

Chapter 5 Speech acts in context

Chapter 5 examines the link between linguistic forms in the shape of speech acts and their function in context. We provide an overview of Speech Act Theory and discuss the main arguments and underlying assumptions on which this theory is based. This includes a discussion of direct and indirect speech acts, and the broad taxonomy of different speech act categories such as directives or commissives. The chapter also looks at the way in which context and co-text impact on the analysis of speech acts in a discourse framework.

Chapter 6 Pragmatics across languages and cultures

This chapter addresses the distinction between cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics and it surveys some of the many studies in this area. We consider the notion of the universality of pra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Researching pragmatics
• 3. Deixis
• 4. Politeness in context
• 5. Speech acts in context
• 6. Pragmatics across languages and cultures
• 7. Pragmatics in specific discourse domains
• 8. Pragmatics and language teaching
• References
• Index