BASIC CONCEPTS,

ELEMENTS AND
PRINCIPLES OF
PRAGMATICS
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies how context contributes to meaning.
Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other
approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology.
Pragmatics has long been part of the study of both the English language teaching. As a of descriptive
linguistics, it explains how morphology, syntax, semantics, phonetics and phonology are deployed in
human language to make sense.
Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language,
pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic
knowledge (grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the utterance,
any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors.
In that respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since
meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance.
The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
SOME DEFINITIONS OF PRAGMATICS BY SCHOLARS
(i) Leech & Short (1981:290) - Pragmatics is “the investigation into that aspect of meaning which is
derived not from the formal properties of words, but from the way in which utterances are used and
how they relate to the context in which they are uttered.” Notice the word “utterances” not necessarily
sentences.
(ii) Leech (1983:6) - Pragmatics is “the study of meaning in relation to speech situations”. The speech
situation enables the speaker use language to achieve a particular effect on the mind of the hearer.”
Thus the speech is goal-oriented (i.e. the meaning which the speaker or writer intends to communicate).

(iii) Levinson (1983:9) – Pragmatics is “the study of those aspects of the relationship between language
and context that are relevant to the writing of grammars.” Notice in this definition that interest is mainly
in the inter-relation of language and principles of language use that are context dependent.
(iv) Yule (1996:127) – Pragmatics is “the study of intended speaker meaning.” It is “in many ways … the
study of invisible meaning or how we recognize what is meant even when it isn’t actually said (or
written).

PRINCIPLES OF PRAGMATICS
1. Language use i.e. language in actual speech situations (language performance rather than mere
cognitive skills). In other words, what is important is how language users communicate in oral
conversations or in writing, not necessarily how grammatically correct the sentences are.
2. Discourse/utterance rather than sentence
3. The context of the speech – location of participants in a conversation/discourse
4. Goal of utterance/discourse or speaker’s intention
5. Participants in a conversation/discourse situation, their roles, relationship and identities, since these
have some influence on how meanings are encoded and interpreted
6. Shared assumptions/knowledge, cultures, or conventions of participants in communication.
7. The fact that interactants do not rely only on their knowledge of the language system when they
interpret meaning but also their knowledge of the world, cultures, conventions or world view.

ELEMENTS OF PRAGMATICS

1. Speech acts

People use language to accomplish certain kinds of acts, broadly known as speech acts, and distinct from
physical acts like drinking a glass of water, or mental acts like thinking about drinking a glass of water.
Speech acts include asking for a glass of water, promising to drink a glass of water, threatening to drink a
glass of water, ordering someone to drink a glass of water, and so on.

Most of these ought really to be called "communicative acts", since speech and even language are not
strictly required. Thus someone can ask for a glass of water by pointing to a pitcher and miming the act
of drinking.

2. Conversational implicature

The work of H.P. Grice takes pragmatics farther than the study of speech acts. Grice's aim was to
understand how "speaker's meaning" -- what someone uses an utterance to mean -- arises from
"sentence meaning" -- the literal (form and) meaning of an utterance. Grice proposed that many aspects
of "speaker's meaning" result from the assumption that the participants in a conversation are
cooperating in an attempt to reach mutual goals -- or at least are pretending to do so!

He called this the Cooperative Principle. It has four sub-parts or maxims that cooperative
conversationalists ought in principle to respect:

(i) The maxim of quality. Speakers' contributions ought to be true.

(ii) The maxim of quantity. Speakers' contributions should be as informative as required; not saying
either too little or too much.

(iii) The maxim of relevance. Contributions should relate to the purposes of the exchange.

(iv) The maxim of manner. Contributions should be perspicuous -- in particular, they should be orderly
and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.

3. Managing the flow of reference in discourse.

In conveying a message, we have to consider more than just "who did what to whom." We also have to
keep in mind what our listeners know, and how to lay the message out for them in an orderly and
understandable way.

We have to be careful not to assume knowledge listeners don't have. If a stranger comes up to us on the
street and says, out of nowhere, "what is the frequency?" we are likely to assume that he is crazy, or
perhaps mistaking us for someone else. Young children make this sort of communicative mistake all the
time, because their ability to model other people's knowledge and belief is not well developed.
REFERENCES:
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford University Press.
Ariel, Mira (2008), Pragmatics and Grammar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ariel, Mira (2010). Defining Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-73203-1.
Bachman, L. (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press