Pragmatics (continued)

In my blog of 30th November, I shared my first thoughts about the book my friends and I were studying (Jean Stilwell Peccei: Pragmatics). I commented that, unlike syntax and phonology and even certain approaches to discourse analysis, semantics still seems to be a hotchpotch of disconnected attempts to impose a meaningful framework on language and its relation to the real world.

Having worked and argued our way through the book, it is clear that this first impression was well-founded. Historically, language study has always been part of philosophy and philosophers have made several critical contributions to the new discipline of pragmatics.

Peccei draws on the work of the philosophers Grice, Austin and Searle in chapters 4-7 of her  workbook on Pragmatics. In addition, the first chapters of the book come from another traditional area of Philosophy, that of Logic. I shall return to the example in the earlier blog:Joan: What are you doing for Christmas?

 Pete: Where is Lapland?

Pete’s reply makes no sense unless we can make inferences from the real world which explain the connection between Joan’s question and Pete’s response.

The first chapters of Peccei’s workbook explore different kinds of inference:

  • Entailment:This kind of inference is derived from the meaning of the words without reference to the world. For example:

Jim: I always eat meat on Sundays.

The use of the word “always” infers that Jim will be eating meat next Sunday.

  • Presupposition:This kind of inference is also derived from the language system itself without reference to the world, but from meaning at the level of the clause. For example:

When did you stop beating your wife?

This presupposes that the proposition that the person designated by you is in the habit of beating his wife.

  • Implicature: This kind of inference is exemplified in Jean and Pete’s chat about Christmas. Pete’s response cannot be understand from the language alone, but needs knowledge of the world to make sense. Another example is:

Sukhvinder: Are you coming for a drink with us?

 Mohammed: It’s Ramadan.

It requires knowledge of the world to understand Mohammed’s reply as a refusal. (Ramadan is the period when Muslims fast.)

This is a difficult area of Pragmatics, in which the examples are not always straightforwardly one kind of inference or another. However, it does bring the student up against the basics of language in use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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