What Is Pragmatics ?

CHAPTER 1

What is pragmatics?

1.1 Introduction

People do not always or even usually say what they mean.

Speakers frequently mean much more than their words actually

say. For example, I might say: It's hot in here!, but what I mean is:

Please open the window! or Is it all right if I open the window? or You're

wasting electricity! People can mean something quite different from

what their words say, or even just the opposite. For instance, to

someone who has borrowed my car for the weekend and

returned it with no petrol in the tank, I might say: It was nice of you

to fill the car up! or What a shame you couldn't find the petrol tank!

Several interesting questions arise from these observations:

if speakers regularly mean something other than what they say,

how is it that people manage (as on the whole they do) to

understand one another? If a single group of words such as It's hot

in here! could mean so many different things at different times,

how do we work out what it actually does mean on one specific

occasion? And why don't people just say what they mean? These,

and many other issues, are addressed within the area o f linguistics

known as pragmatics.

In this introductory chapter I shall explain the way in which

the term pragmatics w i l l be used in this book and I shall outline

the sort of work which is carried out under the heading of

pragmatics.

1.2 Defining pragmatics

In the early 1980s, when it first became common to discuss

pragmatics in general textbooks on linguistics, the most common

definitions of pragmatics were: meaning in use or meaning in

2 Meaning in interaction

context. Although these definitions are accurate enough and

perfectly adequate as a starting point, they are too general for our

purposes — for example, there are aspects o f semantics, particularly

semantics of the type developed since the late 1980s,1 which

could well come under the headings of meaning in use or

meaning in context. More up-to-date textbooks tend to fall into

one of two camps — those who equate pragmatics with speaker

meaning2 and those who equate it with utterance interpretation3

(they do not necessarily use these terms explicitly).

Certainly each of these definitions captures something of the

work now undertaken under the heading of pragmatics, but

neither of them is entirely satisfactory. Moreover, they each

represent radically different approaches to the sub-discipline o f

pragmatics. The term speaker meaning tends to be favoured by

writers who take a broadly social4 view of the discipline; it puts

the focus of attention firmly on the producer o f the message, but

at the same time obscures the fact that the process of interpreting

what we hear involves moving between several levels o f meaning.

The final definition (utterance interpretation), which is favoured by

those who take a broadly cognitive approach, avoids this fault,

but at the cost of focusing too much on the receiver of the

message, which in practice means largely ignoring the social

constraints on utterance production. I am not going to undertake

an exhaustive discussion o f the relative advantages and disadvantages

o f the two competing approaches just now — this task will

be done at appropriate points in later chapters. But we can begin

to understand the differences between the two approaches if we

examine what is meant by levels of meaning. The first level is

that of abstract meaning; we move from abstract meaning to

contextual meaning (also called utterance meaning) by

assigning sense and/or reference to a word, phrase or sentence.

The third level of meaning is reached when we consider the

speaker's intention, known as the force of an utterance. We shall

begin by looking at each of these levels in turn.

1.3 From abstract meaning to contextual meaning

Abstract meaning5 is concerned with what a word, phrase,

sentence, etc. could mean (for example, the dictionary meanings

of words or phrases). The last four lines o f the following excerpt6

illustrate well the point I am trying to make:

What is pragmatics? 3

Example 1

'What we want is the army to take over this country. See a

bit of discipline then, we would ... The Forces, that's the

thing. We knew what discipline was when I was i n the

...