Pragmatics and the English Language

Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781350308688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

How do we interpret language and expose its meanings? How does pragmatics describe the English language? Where can we go to acquire a deeper understanding of pragmatics? Pragmatics and the English Language is a bold new textbook that presents an innovative and exciting way of looking at the subject. This new perspective, called integrative pragmatics, steers a course between what have historically been considered irreconcilable perspectives. With an emphasis on empirical data, the book is filled with examples from cartoons, films and historical sources, as well as face-to-face and digitally-mediated interactions, all of which are used to help the reader develop a better understanding of the theory. Pragmatics and the English Language:
- Focuses on both the pragmatic aspects of English and how pragmatics is shaped by English
- Synthesizes traditional ideas with state-of-the-art pragmatics research
- Goes far beyond the coverage found in other pragmatics textbooks Shedding light on the English language in highly original ways, Pragmatics and the English Language is essential reading for advanced students of the English language and linguistics, along with anybody else who wishes to develop a more in-depth knowledge of pragmatics.

CHAPTER

1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Meaning can kill you. In the UK in 1952, Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig broke into a warehouse. Craig was armed with a revolver. They had been seen entering, and the police were called. One police officer managed to grab hold of Bentley. At this point, witnesses claimed that Bentley said: Let him have it, Chris. Craig fired, but only grazed the police officer. Nevertheless Bentley was arrested, while Craig managed to get away. Upon the arrival of more police officers, Craig was apprehended, but not before shooting one of them dead. Craig and Bentley were charged with murder, which for Bentley carried the possibility of the death sentence (Craig was underage). Much of the court case, and the subsequent appeals, focused on the ambiguity of the words Bentley had spoken. Do they mean “let the police officer have the gun, Chris”, or do they have the more idiomatic meaning “shoot the police officer, Chris” (presumably derived by metonymy from “let the police officer have a bullet, Chris”, assuming it refers to a bullet)? The judge and jury decided on the latter, and Bentley was sentenced to death and hanged. The fact that they made this decision perhaps reflects the cursory way in which ambiguities and indeterminacies of meaning are generally treated. The folk belief is that language fixes meanings, and their recovery is easy – you just need to know the code. In fact, humans determine meanings, and their recovery is far from easy – certainly not just a simple matter of decoding. In 1998 the Court of Appeal overturned Bentley’s conviction. The judge, Lord Bingham, made it clear that the summing up of the original judge, Lord Goddard, had not given adequate attention to the possible ambiguity of the Let him have it, Chris, or even whether he had actually said it (R v. Derek William Bentley 1998, paragraphs 74 and 86). In fact, scholars of traditional linguistics would not fare much better in accounting for Bentley’s utterance. Phonology, morphology, syntax and even semantics would have little to contribute to our understanding of why Bentley’s utterance was ambiguous, part of which is understanding to whom or what him and it are referring, and also understanding the presence of literal and non-literal meanings. In contrast, such issues lie at the heart of pragmatics. Let us begin this chapter by working through some examples illustrating issues which are pertinent to pragmatics. After this, we will briefly outline our view of pragmatics, and then conclude by introducing the chapters of this book.

1.2 Meanings in context

1.2.1 Beyond the linguistic code

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in possession of a fine dictionary must be able to access the correct meaning of a piece of language. The previous sentence was intended to be ironic, but alas many people would not understand it as such. People place great reliance on dictionaries to decode language and expose its meanings. But how far will this actually get us in understanding the language people use? Let us work through some of the problems that one encounters. In doing so, we will simultaneously explore a number of jokes, not least because jokes often exploit the construction of meaning.

The assignment of sense

Polysemy, when a lexeme has multiple related senses, is a normal feature of many words (in this book, technical terms relating to pragmatics are emboldened and defined; they are also listed in the index). The English word set, for example, has 36 senses listed in the Collins Cobuild Dictionary of the English Language (1987), plus various usages in expressions. There is also the issue of homonymy, two or more different lexemes with the same form. For example, in the sentences Catch the ball and We’re going to the ball, the senses of ball are not the same. Note that when you read those sentences, you assign a sense that fits the understanding you construct in your head. People can, of course, exploit your assignment of sense. Consider this joke:

[1.1]	A:	Why can’t a man’s head be twelve inches wide?
	B:	Er ... don’t know.
	A:	Because if it was, it would be a foot.

Here, the words twelve inches wide prime your mind to expect an answer relating to measurement (even if you had no knowledge of the notion of “inch”, you might well infer that it is the unit of measurement given that the number twelve is applied to the width of something). Indeed, A’s solution to the joke does relate to measurement: twelve inches on one scale of measurement are equivalent to a foot on another. However, this does not easily fit the meaning speaker A is constructing. If twelve inches is the same as a foot, then why can it not be the width of a man’s head? The solution is in another meaning of foot, namely, the part of your leg below the ankle. And of course a head is not a foot. This joke exploits the polysemic word and the target’s assignment of sense; it is a pun. This joke is lost on people who are not familiar with imperial measurements. For them, the most readily accessible meaning of the word foot is likely to be that it is the part of the body below the ankle. The humour falls flat.

The assignment of structural meaning

Although certainly not as frequently an issue as sense assignment, there will be occasions when the structure of a sentence offers more than one meaning. A classic example, and one grammarians love poring over, is Can you see the man with the telescope? Is the question about seeing the man with the aid of a telescope (in which case, with the telescope is an (instrumental) adverbial working with the verb see), or about seeing the man who has a telescope (in which case, with the telescope is a prepositional phrase post-modifying the head noun man)? Consider this joke:

[1.2]	Q:	How do you make a cat drink?
	A:	Easy, put it in a liquidiser.

The joke exploits the two different ways in which you can parse the question. In one, drink is the main verb of the embedded noun clause a cat drink; in the other, drink is the head noun of the noun phrase and pre-modified by cat. However, part of the success of this joke, just as with the previous joke, relies on the target understanding the sentence in the first way, at least initially. That we are predisposed to do this is not surprising, because this interpretation fits a plausible, non-extraordinary scenario of one’s cat being dehydrated. In contrast, a “cat drink” as a kind of beverage is bizarre. The realisation in one’s mind of the alternative reading is how the joke works. Incidentally, the joke is more likely to fall flat if it is spoken and heard rather than written and read. The different grammatical parsings would sound different: they have different prosodies (try saying them to get an idea of this).

The assignment of reference

In the previous examples, the words and structures flag potential meanings from which we can choose, a choice we make on the basis of how we understand the context. However, some linguistic expressions – notably, referring expressions – do not carry with them multiple senses from which we select, but rely to a greater extent on the target enriching their meaning with information drawn from the context. This is a matter of reference. Consider this joke:

[1.3] A man and a friend are playing golf one day. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: “Wow! That is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You are truly a kind man.”

The other man replies, “Yeah, well, we were married thirty-five years.”

Clearly, the success of the joke relies on one working out the referent (what is referred to) of the word we. Given the subsequent use of the word married, we work out that we refers to a married couple consisting of the man and his wife, for whom the funeral procession is being held. The realisation that the man playing golf is the husband of the person whose funeral it is and that he is not part of the long funeral procession clashes with previous thoughts that this man is thoughtful or kind.

The assignment of utterance meaning

Having assigned relevant senses to words and worked out the relevant referents of referring expressions, you may think that we are home and dry. This is not the case, as the following joke illustrates:

[1.4]I was coming back from Canada, driving through Customs, and the guy asked, “Do you have any firearms with you?” I said: “What do you need?”

What this joke illustrates is that the whole utterance Do you have any firearms with you? can have more than one meaning: is it an enquiry about whether the driver has firearms or a request for firearms? The difference between the two relates in part to understandings of what the speaker is trying to do, and what they are trying to do is a matter of speaker intention. Of course, the humour lies in the fact that the reader expects the former meaning, not least because they know that the driver is in Customs, a place commonly associated with searches for firearms and other dangerous weapons or devices, yet the person driving the car answers as if it were the latter.

Collectively, these different levels of meaning and assignment illustrate the fact that dictionaries do not get us very far in understanding the full meaning of language used in context. This is not to say that they are of no use. Indeed, they are useful in identifying a limited number of potential senses. But we still need to work out which sense is relevant, and much more besides. Speakers of utterances use language to flag potential meanings – that is, meanings which they think are likely to be understood in a particular context; while hearers infer potential meanings – that is, meanings which they think are likely to have been meant in a particular context. Meaning in interaction involves both speakers and hearers (we adopt the traditional labels “speaker” and “hearer” here; in section 5.2 we explain their limitations). Interactional meaning is what the speaker means by an utterance and what the hearer understands by it (which could, of course, be two different things), and how these emerge and are shaped during interaction. We will have more to say about interactional meaning in every chapter of this book.

Jokes, as we saw, often exploit the fact that meanings cannot be straightforwardly decoded from words and structures. Many deploy a “garden path” tactic; that is to say, you are led into expecting one thing, only to find that it is another thing. That clash between what we expect and what we discover is the trigger for the potential humour. This is accounted for by an important theory in humour studies, namely, Incongruity theory, a theory that has evolved in various guises since Aristotle. Immanuel Kant, for example, comments: “Laughter is an affectation arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” ([1790] 1951:172). More specifically, note that the jokes exploit interactional meaning: they exploit how understandings of the joke unfold in the interaction between not just the characters in the joke, but also the author of the joke and the reader. Clearly, the discourse situation – the configuration of discourse roles (e.g. authors, mouthpieces, addressees, overhearers; see section 5.2) relating to a particular interaction – needs to be taken into consideration.

1.2.2 The scope of pragmatics

Views about what the field of pragmatics encompasses and what its main thrust should be are controversial. Two principal camps can be identified, one involving a relatively narrow view and the other a relatively broad view.

The narrow view: syntax, semantics and pragmatics

Many notions in pragmatics can be seen in the work of early writers like Plato and Kant, but especially in that on pragmatism by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). However, it was another American philosopher, Charles Morris (1901–1979), drawing on Peirce’s work along with that of Rudolph Carnap, who provided a point of departure for the field of pragmatics. In his Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938: 6–7), he argues for the following three-way distinction:

• Syntax (or syntactics) = mono relationship (relationships between linguistic signs)

• Semantics = dyadic relationship (relationships between linguistic signs and the things in the world that they designate)

• Pragmatics = triadic relationship (relationships between linguistic signs, things they designate, and their users/interpreters)

This has provided linguists with a way of understanding how pragmatics relates to other key areas of linguistics.¹ Specifically, it distinguishes pragmatics as the area that deals with context, but also makes clear that it has some aspects in common with syntax and semantics. Morris seems to take a “micro” view of context, mentioning just users and interpreters, and not, for example, social relations or situations. Indeed, this kind of micro context has characterised foundational works in pragmatics such as Grice’s (1975) Conversational Implicature or Sperber and Wilson’s ([1986]1995) relevance theory, with their focus on users’ intentions and interpreters’ inferences.

Pragmatics in this view is often seen as another component in a theory of language, adding to the usual phonetics, phonology, morphology, grammar/ syntax and semantics. Sometimes the objective is to get pragmatics to “rescue” other more formal areas of linguistic theory. This is especially true of scholars whose main interest is not pragmatics: they can dispose of problematic areas into the “pragmatics dustbin”, leaving their theories unsullied by contextual ambiguities, indeterminacies and the like. Scholars whose main interest is pragmatics are often set on bringing formal order to these contextual meanings, a case in point being Searle’s work on speech act theory (e.g. 1969). Although such efforts encounter many problems, as we shall see in the case of speech act theory, for example, in Chapter 6, many insights can be gained from their attempted solution.

This view of pragmatics is usually identified as the Anglo-American view. The topics typically discussed within it include reference, deixis, presupposition, speech acts, implicature and inferencing – all of which will be extensively treated in the following chapters.

The broad view: pragmatic functions

What is often identified as the Continental European view of pragmatics does not exclude the kind of topic areas discussed in the Anglo-American view, but it encompasses much beyond them and has a rather different perspective – in fact, it might be considered in terms of a particular perspective on language. In this view pragmatics is the superordinate field, with disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and psychology as sub-fields. Thus, the range of topic areas is potentially huge. Moreover, pragmatics is not simply about adding a contextual dimension to a theory of language, but a “general cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behaviour” (Verschueren 1999: 7). The first part of this quotation indicates that pragmatics is not simply sited within linguistics, but could equally be within cognitive, social or cultural fields of study. The fina...