Chapter 6 PRAGMATICS
1. What does pragmatics study? How does it differ from traditional semantics? 答： Generally speaking, pragmatics is the study of meaning in the context. It studies meaning in a dynamic way and as a process. In order to have a successful communication, the speaker and hearer must take the context into their consideration so as to effect the right meaning and intention. The development and establishment pragmatics in 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study semantics. However, it is different from the traditional semantics. The major difference between them lies in that pragmatics studies meaning in a dynamic way, while semantics studies meaning in a static way. Pragmatics takes context into consideration while semantics does not. Pragmatics takes care of the aspect of meaning that is not accounted for by semantics.
2. Why is the notion of context essential in the pragmatic study of linguistic communication?
答： The notion of context is essential to the pragmatic study of language. It is generally considered as constituted by the knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer. Various continents of shared knowledge have been identified, . knowledge of the language they use, knowledge of what has been said before, knowledge about the world in general, knowledge about the specific situation in which linguistic communication is taking place, and knowledge about each other. Context determines the speaker's use of language and also the heater's interpretation of what is said to him. Without such knowledge, linguistic communication would not be possible, and without considering such knowledge, linguistic communication cannot be satisfactorily accounted for in a pragmatic sense. Look at the following sentences: (1) How did it go?
(2) It is cold in hem.
(3) It was a hot Christmas day so we went down to the beach in the afternoon and had a good time swimming and surfing.
Sentence (1) might be used in a conversation between two students talking about an examination, or two surgeons talking about an operation, or in some other contexts; (2) might be said by the speaker to ask the hearer to turn on the heater, or leave the place, or to put on more clothes, or to apologize for the poor condition of the room, depending on the situation of context; (3) makes sense only ii the hearer has the knowledge that Christmas falls in summer in the southern hemisphere. 3. How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ? 答： A sentence is a grammatical concept, and the meaning of a sentence is often studied as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of predication. But if we think of a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of communication, it becomes an utterance, and it should be considered in the situation in which it is actually uttered (or used). So it is impossible to
tell if “The dog is barking” is a sentence or an utterance. It can be either. It all depends on how we look at it and how we are going to analyze it. If we take it as a grammatical unit and consider it as a self-contained unit in isolation from context, then we are treating it as a sentence. If we take it as something a speaker utters in a certain situation with a certain purpose, then we are treating it as an utterance.
Therefore, while the meaning of a sentence is abstract, and decontextualized, that of an utterance is concrete, and context-dependent. The meaning of an utterance is based on sentence meaning; it is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context. Now, take the sentence \meaning of the sentence results in the one-place predication BAG (BEING HEAVY). Then a pragmatic analysis of the utterance meaning of the .sentence varies with the context in which it is uttered. For example, it could be uttered by a speaker as a straightforward statement, telling the hearer that his bag is heavy. It could also be intended by the speaker as an indirect, polite request, asking the hearer to help him carry the bag. Another possibility is that the speaker is declining someone's request for help. All these are possible interpretations of the same utterance “My bag is heavy”. How it is to be understood depends on the context in which it is uttered and the purpose for which the speaker utters it. While most utterances take the form of grammatically complete sentences, some utterances do not, and some cannot even be restored to complete sentences. 4. Try to think of contexts in which the following sentences can be used for other purposes than just stating facts: a) The room is messy. b) Oh, it is raining!
c) The music of the movie is good.
d) You have been keeping my notes for a whole week now.
答：a) A father entered his son’s room and found it is very messy. Then when he
said, “The room is messy,” he was blaming his son for not tidying it up. b) A son asked his father to play with him outside. So when the father said, “Oh,
it’s raining”, he meant they couldn’t play outside.
c) Two persons just watched a movie and had a discussion of it. One person said,
“The story of the movie is very moving”, so when the other person said, “The music of the movie is good”, he meant he didn't think the story of the movie was good.
d) A person wanted his notes back, so when he said, “you have been keeping my
notes for a whole week now”, he was demanding the return of his notes. 5. According to Austin, what are the three acts a person is possibly performing while making an utterance. Give an example.
答： According to Austin's new model, a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.
A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention; it is the act performed in saying something. A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something. Let's look at an example:
You have left the door wide open.
The locutionary act performed by the speaker is his utterance of the words “you”, “have”, “door”, “open”, etc. thus expressing what the words literally mean.
The illocutionary act performed by the speaker is that by making such an utterance he has expressed his intention of speaking, . asking someone to close the door, or making a complaint, depending on the context.
The perlocutionary act refers to the effect of the utterance. If the hearer gets the speaker's message and sees that the speaker means to tell him to close the door, the speaker has successfully brought about the change in the real world he has intended to; then the perlocutionary act is successfully performed. 6. What are the five types of illocutionary speech acts Searle has specified? What is the illocutionary point of each type?
答：(1) representatives: stating or describing, saying what the speaker believes to be true
(2) directives: trying to get the hearer to do something
(3) commissives: committing the speaker himself to some future course of action (4) expressives: expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing (5) declarations: bringing about immediate changes by saying something The illocutionary point of the representatives is to commit the speaker to something's being the case, to the truth of what has been said, in other words, when performing an illocutionary act of representative, the speaker is making a statement or giving a description which he himself believes to be true. Stating, believing, sweating, hypothesizing are among the most typical of the representatives.
Directives ate attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do some- thing. Inviting, suggesting, requesting, advising, wanting, threatening and ordering are all specific instances of this class. Commissives are those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action, . when speaking the speaker puts himself under a certain obligation. Promising, undertaking, vowing are the most typical ones. The illocutionary point of expressives is to express the psychological state specified in the utterance. The speaker is expressing his feelings or attitudes towards an existing state of affairs, . apologizing, thanking, congratulating. The last class “declarations” has the characteristic that the successful performance of an act of this type brings about the correspondence between what