SEMANTICS & PRAGMATICS

semantics

the study of meaning in language

pragmatics

the study of meaning in relation to context

theory of speech acts

a subfield of pragmatics that studies how words are used not only to present information but also to carry out actions

cross-cultural pragmatics

how the ways people communicate differ around cultures

situational (physical) context

speaker, hearer, place, time

background knowledge (context)

collection of facts & assumptions

co-textual context

everything that was said before a particular utterance

negation of meaning

one and the same word or sentence can mean two different things depending on context

locutionary act

literal meaning of what we say (speaker controlled)

illocutionary act

what an utterance is supposed to do (speaker controlled)

perlocutionary act

the effect that our utterance has on other people (lack of speaker’s control)

direct speech act

use of performative verbs or commands (ex. Help me, please.)

indirect speech act

use of modal verbs to make a request (ex. can you pass the salt?)

felicity conditions (1)

conditions that a speech act must fulfil to be successful

felicity conditions (2)

procedure, circumstances, attitude, abuse vs misfiring

co-operative principle

how to make a contribution in a conversation

maxim of quality (truth)

do not say what you believe is false or for which you lack evidence

maxim of quantity (content length and depth)

make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more of less than is required

maxim of relation (relevance)

be relevant, omit any irrelevant information

maxim of manner (clarity)

be clear, brief and orderly

metalinguistic hedges

to cut a long story short, correct me if i’m wrong etc

overlap of maxims

sometimes we need to choose which one of two maxims we need to obey

how to deal with CP?

obeying (accept it), flouting (a hearer realises the meaning on tehir own), violating (we don’t want a hearer to realise we violate maxims - ex. we lie), opting out (we indicate that we’ll not cooperate)

implicature

we assume that the speaker is following the maxims or at least the cooperative principle

particularised conversational implicature

we need to know the context to figure out the meaning (ex. coffee and staying awake or going to bed)

generalised conversational implicature

goes beyond what is said (ex. most of my friends believe in marriage)

conventional implicature

no connections with the maxims (ex. he’s chinese, so he knows how to use chopsticks)

inferrence

connecting literal meaning with one’s general knowledge & contextual knowledge

pragmalinguistics

the study of differences between linguistic resources that different languages provide

sociopragmatics

the study of social norms connected with performance of speech acts

sociopragmatic failure

it occurs when a speech act abuses the social norms of the hearer’s culture

pragmalinguistic failure

it occurs when learners fail to get the meaning of an utterance due to the fact that the communicative conventions behind such an utterance used are different