What is pragmatics?

“We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what we
want, when we want. All normal humans can produce and understand any number of new words and
sentences. Humans use the multiple options of language often without thinking. But blindly, they
sometimes fall into its traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but themselves get caught in
the sticky strands.”

Jean Aitchison

“Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of
our choice on others.”

David Cristal

“Pragmatics is all about the meanings between the lexis and the grammar and the phonology...Meanings
are implied and the rules being followed are unspoken, unwritten ones.”

George Keith

“Pragmatics is a way of investigating how sense can be made of certain texts even when, from a semantic
viewpoint, the text seems to be either incomplete or to have a different meaning to what is really
intended. Consider a sign seen in a children's wear shop window: “Baby Sale - lots of bargains”. We
know without asking that there are no babies are for sale - that what is for sale are items used for babies.
Pragmatics allows us to investigate how this “meaning beyond the words” can be understood without
ambiguity. The extra meaning is there, not because of the semantic aspects of the words themselves, but
because we share certain contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text.

“Pragmatics is an important area of study for your course. A simplified way of thinking about pragmatics
is to recognise, for example, that language needs to be kept interesting - a speaker or writer does not want
to bore a listener or reader, for example, by being over-long or tedious. So, humans strive to find
linguistic means to make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting, more relevant, more purposeful or
more personal. Pragmatics allows this. ”

Steve Campsall

Pragmatics is a systematic way of explaining language use in context. It seeks to explain

aspects of meaning which cannot be found in the plain sense of words or structures, as
explained by semantics. As a field of language study, pragmatics is fairly new. Its origins lie in
philosophy of language and the American philosophical school of pragmatism. As a discipline
within language science, its roots lie in the work of (Herbert) Paul Grice on conversational
implicature and the cooperative principle, and on the work of Stephen Levinson, Penelope
Brown and Geoff Leech on politeness.

We can illustrate how pragmatics works by an example from association football (and other field
sports). It sometimes happens that a team-mate will shout at me: “Man on!” Semantic analysis
can only go so far with this phrase.

 For example, it can elicit different lexical meanings of the noun “man” (mankind or the
human race, an individual person, a male person specifically) and the preposition “on”
(on top of, above, or other relationships as in “on fire”, “on heat”, “on duty”, “on the
fiddle” or “on the telly”).
And it can also explain structural meaning, and account for the way this phrase works in longer
sequences such as the “first man on the moon”, “a man on the run” or “the man on top of the
Clapham omnibus”.

None of this explains the meaning in the context of the football game. This is very complex, but
perhaps includes at least the following elements:
  My team-mate has seen another player's movement, and thinks that I have either not
seen it, or have not responded to it appropriately.

 My team-mate wants me to know that I am likely to be tackled or impeded in some way.

 My team-mate wants me to respond appropriately, as by shielding the ball, passing it to

an unmarked player, laying it off for another team-mate and so on.

 My team-mate has an immediate concern for me, but this is really subordinated to a
more far-sighted desire for me, as a player on his team, to protect the ball or retain
possession, as this will make our team more likely to gain an advantage.

 My team-mate understands that my opponent will also hear the warning, but thinks that
his hearing it will not harm our team's chances as much as my not being aware of the
approaching player.

 My team-mate foresees that I may rebuke him (and the other players on our team
collectively) if no-one, from a better vantage point, alerts me to the danger.

If this is right (or even part of it), it is clear that my team-mate could not, in the time available,
(that is, before the opponent tackles me) communicate this information in the explicit manner
above. But it also relies on my knowing the methods of language interchange in football. “Man
on” is an established form of warning. For all I know, professional players may have their own
covert forms, as when they signal a routine at a free kick, corner or throw-in, by calling a
number or other code word.

Also, though my team-mate is giving me information, in the context of the game, he is chiefly
concerned about my taking the right action. If response to the alert becomes like a conditioned
reflex (I hear the warning and at once lay the ball off or pass), then my contribution to the team
effort will be improved. (Reflection on how I play the game is fine after the match, but not helpful
at moments when I have to take action.) Note also, that though I have assumed this to be in a
game played by men, the phrase “Man on” is used equally in mixed-gender and women's sports
- I have heard it frequently in games of field hockey, where the “Man” about to be “on” was a
female player. “Woman on” would be inefficient (extra syllable and a difficult intial “w” sound),
and might even lead the uncritical player to worry less about the approaching tackle - though
probably not more than once.

We use language all the time to make things happen. We ask someone to pass the salt or
marry us - not, usually at the same time. We order a pizza or make a dental appointment.
Speech acts include asking for a glass of beer, promising to drink the beer, threatening to drink
more beer, ordering someone else to drink some beer, and so on. Some special people can do
extraordinary things with words, like baptizing a baby, declaring war, awarding a penalty kick to
Arsenal FC or sentencing a convict.

Linguists have called these things “speech acts” - and developed a theory (called,
unsurprisingly, “speech act theory”) to explain how they work. Some of this is rooted in common
sense and stating the obvious - as with felicity conditions. These explain that merely saying the
words does not accomplish the act. Judges (unless they are also referees) cannot award
penalty kicks to Arsenal, and football referees (unless they are also heads of state) cannot
declare war.

Speech act theory is not the whole of pragmatics, but is perhaps currently the most important
established part of the subject. Contemporary debate in pragmatics often focuses on its
relations with semantics. Since semantics is the study of meaning in language, why add a new
field of study to look at meaning from a novel viewpoint?
This is an elementary confusion. Clearly linguists could develop a model of semantics that included
pragmatics. Or they could produce a model for each, which allows for some exploration and explanation
of the boundary between them - but distinguishes them as in some way different kinds of activity.
However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is necessary because it explains
meanings that semantics overlooks.

What does pragmatics include?

The lack of a clear consensus appears in the way that no two published accounts list the same
categories of pragmatics in quite the same order. But among the things you should know about
are:

 Speech act theory

 Felicity conditions

 Conversational implicature

 The cooperative principle

 Conversational maxims

 Relevance

 Politeness

 Phatic tokens

 Deixis

This guide contains some explanation of all of these, as well as related or peripheral subjects.
Many of them break down further into their own sub-categories, as with the different kinds of
speech acts that linguists have usefully distinguished.

Criticisms of pragmatics

Some of the criticisms directed at pragmatics include these:

 It does not have a clear-cut focus

 Its principles are vague and fuzzy

 It is redundant - semantics already covers the territory adequately

In defending pragmatics we can say that:

 The study of speech acts has illuminated social language interactions

 It covers things that semantics (hitherto) has overlooked

 It can help inform strategies for teaching language

 It has given new insights into understanding literature

 The theories of the cooperative principle and politeness principle have provided insights
into person-to-person interactions.

Speech acts

The philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) claims that many utterances (things people say) are
equivalent to actions. When someone says: “I name this ship” or “I now pronounce you man and
wife”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality. We can add many more
examples:
  Sergeant Major: Squad, by the left… left turn!

 Referee: (Pointing to the centre circle) Goal!

 Groom: With this ring, I thee wed.

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Speech act theory broadly explains these utterances as having three parts or aspects:
locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.

 Locutionary acts are simply the speech acts that have taken place.

 Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance, where
saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting one's troth, welcoming and warning.

 Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the listener, who accepts the bet
or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned.

Some linguists have attempted to classify illocutionary acts into a number of categories or types.
David Crystal, quoting J.R. Searle, gives five such categories: representatives, directives,
commissives, expressives and declarations. (Perhaps he would have preferred declaratives, but
this term was already taken as a description of a kind of sentence that expresses a statement.)
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 Representatives: here the speaker asserts a proposition to be true, using such verbs
as: affirm, believe, conclude, deny, report.

 Directives: here the speaker tries to make the hearer do something, with such words as:
ask, beg, challenge, command, dare, invite, insist, request.

 Commissives: here the speaker commits himself (or herself) to a (future) course of
action, with verbs such as: guarantee, pledge, promise, swear, vow, undertake, warrant.

 Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude to or about a state of affairs, using such
verbs as: apologize, appreciate, congratulate, deplore, detest, regret, thank, welcome.

 Declarations the speaker alters the external status or condition of an object or situation,
solely by making the utterance: I now pronounce you man and wife, I sentence you to
be hanged by the neck until you be dead, I name this ship...
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Performatives

These are speech acts of a special kind where the utterance of the right words by the right
person in the right situation effectively is (or accomplishes) the social act. In some cases, the
speech must be accompanied by a ceremonial or ritual action. Whether the speaker in fact has
the social or legal (or other kind of) standing to accomplish the act depends on some things
beyond the mere speaking of the words. These are felicity conditions, which we can also explain
by the “hereby” test. But let's look, first, at some examples.

In the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 19, verses 13-20) we read of some exorcists in Ephesus
who tried to copy St. Paul and cast out evil spirits in the name of Jesus: “I adjure you by the
Jesus whom Paul proclaims”. On one occasion the possessed man (or the evil spirit) attacked
them, and said, “Jesus I know and Paul I know; but who are you?” Evidently St. Paul not only
knew the words, but also had the means to call on divine aid for his exorcisms. In a slightly
similar vein, Claudius, in Hamlet, sees that his prayer is ineffectual because “Words without
thoughts never to Heaven go”.
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Outside of miracle or magic, there are social realities that can be enacted by speech, because
we all accept the status of the speaker in the appropriate situation. This is an idea expressed in
the American Declaration of Independence where we read, “Governments are instituted among
Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed”.

Here are some examples from different spheres of human activity, where performatives are
found at work. These are loose categories, and many performatives belong to more than one of
them:

 Universities and schools: conferring of degrees, rusticating or excluding students.

 The church: baptizing, confirming and marrying, exorcism, commination (cursing) and
excommunication.

 Governance and civic life: crowning of monarchs, dissolution of Parliament, passing

legislation, awarding honours, ennobling or decorating.

 The law: enacting or enforcing of various judgements, passing sentence, swearing

oaths and plighting one's troth.

 The armed services: signing on, giving an order to attack, retreat or open fire.

 Sport: cautioning or sending off players, giving players out, appealing for a dismissal or
declaring (closing an innings) in cricket.

 Business: hiring and firing, establishing a verbal contract, naming a ship.

 Gaming: placing a bet, raising the stakes in poker.

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The “hereby” test

One simple but crude way to decide whether a speech act is of such a kind that we can aptly
call it a performative is to insert the word “hereby” between subject and verb. If the resulting
utterance makes sense, then the speech act is probably a performative. For example,

 “I hereby confer upon you the honourable degree of Bachelor of Arts…”

 “I hereby sentence you to three months' probation, suspended for a year…”

 “I hereby appoint you Grandmaster of the Ancient, Scandalous and Disreputable Order
of Friends of the Hellfire Club …”
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It is crude, because it implies at least one felicity condition - whatever it is to which “hereby”
refers. In the first example, “hereby” may refer to a physical action (touching on the head or
shoulder with a ceremonial staff or mace, say). In the second example it may refer to the
speaker's situation - in sitting as chairman of the bench of magistrates. The third example is my
(plausible) invention - showing how all sorts of private groups (Freemasons, Rotarians, even the
school Parent Teacher Association) can have their own agreements, which give to some
speakers the power to enact performatives.
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Felicity conditions

Preparatory conditions | conditions for execution | sincerity conditions

These are conditions necessary to the success of a speech act. They take their name from a
Latin root - “felix” or “happy”. They are conditions needed for success or achievement of a
performative. Only certain people are qualified to declare war, baptize people or sentence
convicted felons. In some cases, the speaker must be sincere (as in apologizing or vowing).
And external circumstances must be suitable: “Can you give me a lift?” requires that the hearer
has a motor vehicle, is able to drive it somewhere and that the speaker has a reason for the
request. It may be that the utterance is meant as a joke or sarcasm, in which case a different
interpretation is in order. Loosely speaking, felicity conditions are of three kinds: preparatory
conditions, conditions for execution and sincerity conditions.
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Preparatory conditions

Preparatory conditions include the status or authority of the speaker to perform the speech act,
the situation of other parties and so on.

So, in order to confirm a candidate, the speaker must be a bishop; but a mere priest can baptize
people, while various ministers of religion and registrars may solemnize marriages (in England).
In the case of marrying, there are other conditions - that neither of the couple is already married,
that they make their own speech acts, and so on. We sometimes speculate about the status of
people (otherwise free to marry) who act out a wedding scene in a play or film - are they
somehow, really, married? In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has no worries, because the
words of the ceremony are not spoken on stage, and, anyway, Juliet's part is played by a boy.
(Though this may make the wedding scene seem blasphemous to some in the audience.)

In the UK only the monarch can dissolve parliament. A qualified referee can caution a player, if
he or she is officiating in a match. The referee's assistant (who, in the higher leagues, is also a
qualified referee) cannot do this.
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The situation of the utterance is important. If the US President jokingly “declares” war on
another country in a private conversation, then the USA is not really at war. This, in fact,
happened (on 11 August 1984), when Ronald Reagan made some remarks off-air, as he
thought, but which have been recorded for posterity:
“My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw
Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Click on the link below to listen to this speech as a sound file in wav format. You will need a
sound card, speakers or headphones and suitable software (such as Windows™ Media Player
or RealPlayer™) to listen to the file.

 Listen to Ronald Reagan's 1984 off-air speech.

One hopes that this utterance also failed in terms of sincerity conditions.
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Conditions for execution

Conditions for execution can assume an exaggerated importance. We are so used to a ritual or
ceremonial action accompanying the speech act that we believe the act is invalidated, if the
action is lacking - but there are few real examples of this.

Take refereeing of association football. When a referee cautions a player, he (or she) should
take the player's name, number and note the team for which he plays. The referee may also
display a yellow card, but this is not necessary to the giving of the caution:
“The mandatory use of the cards is merely a simple aid for better communication.”

The Football Association (1998); Advice on the Application of the Laws of the Game, p. 9
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In knighting their subjects, English monarchs traditionally touch the recipient of the honour on
both shoulders with the flat side of a sword blade. But this, too, is not necessary to the
performance of the speech act.

A story is told in Oxford of a young man, taking his final exams, who demanded a pint of beer
from the invigilators. He pointed out that he was wearing his sword, as required by the
mediaeval statute that made provision for the drink. The invigilator (exam supervisor), believing
the young man's version of events, brought the beer, but checked the statutes. Later the young
man received a fine - he had not, as the statute also required, been wearing his spurs. The story
may well be an urban myth (the writer heard it several times from different sources), but
illustrates neatly a condition of execution.
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Sincerity conditions

At a simple level these show that the speaker must really intend what he or she says. In the
case of apologizing or promising, it may be impossible for others to know how sincere the
speaker is. Moreover sincerity, as a genuine intention (now) is no assurance that the apologetic
attitude will last, or that the promise will be kept. There are some speech acts - such as plighting
one's troth or taking an oath - where this sincerity is determined by the presence of witnesses.
The one making the promise will not be able later to argue that he or she didn't really mean it.

A more complex example comes in the classroom where the teacher asks a question, but the
pupil supposes that the teacher knows the answer and is, therefore, not sincere in asking it. In
this case “Can you, please, tell me X?” may be more acceptable to the child than “What is X?”

We can also use our understanding of sincerity conditions humorously, where we ask others, or
promise ourselves, to do things which we think the others know to be impossible: “Please can
you make it sunny tomorrow?”
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Conversational implicature

In a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1967, the English language philosopher H.P.
(Paul) Grice outlined an approach to what he termed conversational implicature - how hearers
manage to work out the complete message when speakers mean more than they say. An
example of what Grice meant by conversational implicature is the utterance:
“Have you got any cash on you?”
where the speaker really wants the hearer to understand the meaning:
“Can you lend me some money? I don't have much on me.”
The conversational implicature is a message that is not found in the plain sense of the
sentence. The speaker implies it. The hearer is able to infer (work out, read between the lines)
this message in the utterance, by appealing to the rules governing successful conversational
interaction. Grice proposed that implicatures like the second sentence can be calculated from
the first, by understanding three things:

 The usual linguistic meaning of what is said.

 Contextual information (shared or general knowledge).

 The assumption that the speaker is obeying what Grice calls the cooperative principle.
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Conversational maxims and the cooperative principle

The success of a conversation depends upon the various speakers' approach to the interaction.
The way in which people try to make conversations work is sometimes called the cooperative
principle. We can understand it partly by noting those people who are exceptions to the rule,
and are not capable of making the conversation work. We may also, sometimes, find it useful
deliberately to infringe or disregard it - as when we receive an unwelcome call from a telephone
salesperson, or where we are being interviewed by a police officer on suspicion of some terrible
crime.

Paul Grice proposes that in ordinary conversation, speakers and hearers share a cooperative
principle. Speakers shape their utterances to be understood by hearers. The principle can be
explained by four underlying rules or maxims. (David Crystal calls them conversational maxims.
They are also sometimes named Grice's or Gricean maxims.)
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They are the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner.

 Quality: speakers should be truthful. They should not say what they think is false, or
make statements for which they have no evidence.

 Quantity: a contribution should be as informative as is required for the conversation to

proceed. It should be neither too little, nor too much. (It is not clear how one can decide
what quantity of information satisfies the maxim in a given case.)

 Relevance: speakers' contributions should relate clearly to the purpose of the

exchange.

 Manner: speakers' contributions should be perspicuous: clear, orderly and brief,

avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.

Grice does not of course prescribe the use of such maxims. Nor does he (I hope) suggest that
we use them artificially to construct conversations. But they are useful for analysing and
interpreting conversation, and may reveal purposes of which (either as speaker or listener) we
were not previously aware. Very often, we communicate particular non-literal meanings by
appearing to “violate” or “flout” these maxims. If you were to hear someone described as having
“one good eye”, you might well assume the person's other eye was defective, even though
nothing had been said about it at all.
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Relevance

Some linguists (such as Howard Jackson and Peter Stockwell, who call it a “Supermaxim”)
single out relevance as of greater importance than Grice recognised (Grice gives quality and
manner as supermaxims). Assuming that the cooperative principle is at work in most
conversations, we can see how hearers will try to find meaning in utterances that seem
meaningless or irrelevant. We assume that there must be a reason for these. Jackson and
Stockwell cite a conversation between a shopkeeper and a 16-year old customer:
Customer: Just these, please.
Shopkeeper: Are you eighteen?
Customer: Oh, I'm from Middlesbrough.
Shopkeeper: (after a brief pause) OK (serves beer to him).

Jackson H., and Stockwell, P. (1996), An Introduction to the Nature and Functions of Language,
p. 142
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Jackson and Stockwell suggest that “there is no explanation for [the customer's] bizarre reply”.
Perhaps this should be qualified: we cannot be sure what the explanation is, but we can find
some plausible answer. Possible explanations might include these:

 The young man thought his being from Middlesbrough might explain whatever it was
about him that had made the shopkeeper suspicious about his youth.

 The young man thought the shopkeeper's question was provoked by his unfamiliar
manner of speaking, so he wanted to explain this.

 The young man was genuinely flustered and said the first thing he could think of, while
trying to think of a better reason for his looking under-age.

 The young man thought that the shopkeeper might treat someone from Middlesbrough
in a more indulgent manner than people from elsewhere.
Jackson and Stockwell suggest further that the shopkeeper “derived some inference or other”
from the teenager's reply, since she served him the beer. It might of course be that she had
raised the question (how old is this customer?) once, but when he appeared to have
misunderstood it, was not ready to ask it again or clarify it - perhaps because this seemed too
much like hard work, and as a stranger, the teenager would be unlikely to attract attention (from
the police or trading standards officers) as a regular under-age purchaser of beer.
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In analysing utterances and searching for relevance we can use a hierarchy of propositions -
those that might be asserted, presupposed, entailed or inferred from any utterance.

 Assertion: what is asserted is the obvious, plain or surface meaning of the utterance
(though many utterances are not assertions of anything).

 Presupposition: what is taken for granted in the utterance. “I saw the Mona Lisa in the
Louvre” presupposes that the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre.

 Entailments: logical or necessary corollaries of an utterance, thus, the above example

entails:

o I saw something in the Louvre.

o I saw something somewhere.

o Something was seen.

o There is a Louvre.

o There is a Mona Lisa, and so on.

 Inferences: these are interpretations that other people draw from the utterance, for
which we cannot always directly account. From this example, someone might infer,
rationally, that the Mona Lisa is, or was recently, on show to the public. They might
infer, less rationally, that the speaker has been to France recently - because if the
statement were about something from years ago, he or she would have said so.
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The given/new distinction

In conveying a message, we should think about more than just “who did what to whom”. We
also have to keep in mind what our listeners know already, and how to present the message in
an intelligible and coherent manner.

We should not assume that our listeners have particular knowledge. Even if we are sure they do
have knowledge of something about which we wish to speak, we may need to introduce it, or
recall what they already know. Our listeners may do this for us, as when one's parent, irked by a
personal pronoun demands to know: “Who's she? The cat's mother?”

Similarly, we should not introduce familiar things as if they were new. This may seem
patronizing, but can also be confusing, since our listeners may try to find a new interpretation to
match our implication of novelty.

One way in which we show that information is new is by using nouns. Once it is familiar we refer
(back) to it by using deictic pronouns - like “this” or “it”.
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Names and addresses
T and V pronouns

Some languages have different forms for “you” (French “tu/vous”, German “du/Sie”, for
example). These may originally have indicated number (“vous” and “Sie”) used for plural forms,
but now show different levels of formality, with “tu” and “du” being more familiar, “vous” and
“Sie” more polite. In English this was shown historically by the contrast between “you” and
“thou/thee”. The “thou” form survives in some dialects, while other familiar pronoun forms are
“youse” (Liverpool) and “you-all” (southern USA). Where it is possible to make the distinction,
this is known as a T/V system of address.
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In this system the V form is a marker of politeness or deference. It may also be a marker of
status, with the V form used to superiors, the T form to equals or inferiors. T forms are also used
to express solidarity or intimacy. The T form is found in Shakespeare's plays, where it almost
always shows the speaker's attitude to status and situation. A king is “your majesty” or “you” but
a peasant is “thou”. It may be an insult, as when Tybalt addresses Romeo as “thou” (“Romeo,
thou art a villain”; Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3). It is also found in petrified or “frozen”
language forms, such as the stylized speech of the Society of Friends (“Quakers”) or other non-
conformist groups, like Mennonites or the Pennsylvania Amish, in orders of service and prayers.
Oddly, many modern speakers think that “thou” (being “old”) is more formal or courteous than
“you” - when the reverse is the case!
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Titles and names

In English, we also express status and attitude through titles, first names and last names. Titles
are such things as Professor, Dr, Sir, Dame, Fr. (Father), Mr, Mrs, Miss, Rabbi, Sr. (Sister) and,
in the USA, even such things as coach and chef. Note that we abbreviate some of these in
writing, but not in speaking - we write “Mr.” but say “mister”. First names may be given names
(Fred, Susan) but include epithets such as chief, guv, mate, man, pal. Last names are usually
family names. In general, use of these on their own suggests lack of deference (“Oi, Smith...”)
but in some contexts (public schools, the armed forces) they are norms. If one speaker uses title
and last name (TLN), and the other first name (FN) only, we infer difference in status. The social
superior (the FN speaker) may invite the inferior to use FN in response:
A: Professor Cringeworthy? B: Do call me Cuthbert.
A: Lord Archer? B: Please, it's Jeffrey.
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In schools teachers use FN (or FNLN when reprimanding or being sarcastic) in speaking to
pupils and receive T (“Sir”) or TLN (“Miss Brodie”) in reply. “Miss” is addressed to women
teachers, even where the speaker knows or believes them to be married.

In English avoidance of address is often acceptable - thus where French speakers say “Bonsoir,
Monsieur”, English speakers may say merely, “Good evening” (Omitting the address in France
would seem impolite.)
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The politeness principle

The politeness principle is a series of maxims, which Geoff Leech has proposed as a way of
explaining how politeness operates in conversational exchanges. Leech defines politeness as
forms of behaviour that establish and maintain comity. That is the ability of participants in a
social interaction to engage in interaction in an atmosphere of relative harmony. In stating his
maxims Leech uses his own terms for two kinds of illocutionary acts. He calls representatives
“assertives”, and calls directives “impositives”.
  Each maxim is accompanied by a sub-maxim (between square brackets), which is of
less importance. These support the idea that negative politeness (avoidance of discord)
is more important than positive politeness (seeking concord).

 Not all of the maxims are equally important. For instance, tact influences what we say
more powerfully than does generosity, while approbation is more important than
modesty.

 Note also that speakers may adhere to more than one maxim of politeness at the same
time. Often one maxim is on the forefront of the utterance, with a second maxim being
invoked by implication.

 If politeness is not communicated, we can assume that the politeness attitude is absent.
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Leech's maxims

 Tact maxim (in directives [impositives] and commissives): minimise cost to other;
[maximise benefit to other]

 Generosity maxim (in directives and commissives): minimise benefit to self; [maximise
cost to self]

 Approbation maxim (in expressives and representatives [assertives]): minimise

dispraise of other; [maximise praise of other]

 Modesty maxim (in expressives and representatives): minimise praise of self; [maximise
dispraise of self]

 Agreement maxim (in representatives): minimise disagreement between self and other;
[maximise agreement between self and other]

 Sympathy maxim (in representatives): minimise antipathy between self and other;
[maximise sympathy between self and other]
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Face and politeness strategies

“Face” (as in “lose face”) refers to a speaker's sense of linguistic and social identity. Any speech
act may impose on this sense, and is therefore face threatening. And speakers have strategies
for lessening the threat. Positive politeness means being complimentary and gracious to the
addressee (but if this is overdone, the speaker may alienate the other party). Negative
politeness is found in ways of mitigating the imposition:

 Hedging: Er, could you, er, perhaps, close the, um , window?

 Pessimism: I don't suppose you could close the window, could you?

 Indicating deference: Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I asked you to close the
window?

 Apologizing: I'm terribly sorry to put you out, but could you close the window?

 Impersonalizing: The management requires all windows to be closed.

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A good illustration of a breach of these strategies comes from Alan Bleasdale's 1982 TV drama,
The Boys from the Black Stuff, where the unemployed Yosser Hughes greets potential
employers with the curt demand: “Gizza job!”

Perhaps the most thorough treatment of the concept of politeness is that of Penelope Brown
and Stephen Levinson, which was first published in 1978 and then reissued, with a long
introduction, in 1987. In their model, politeness is defined as redressive action taken to counter-
balance the disruptive effect of face-threatening acts (FTAs).

In their theory, communication is seen as potentially dangerous and antagonistic. A strength of

their approach over that of Geoff Leech is that they explain politeness by deriving it from more
fundamental notions of what it is to be a human being. The basic notion of their model is “face”.
This is defined as “the public self-image that every member (of society) wants to claim for
himself”. In their framework, face consists of two related aspects.

 One is negative face, or the rights to territories, freedom of action and freedom from
imposition - wanting your actions not to be constrained or inhibited by others.

 The other is positive face, the positive consistent self-image that people have and their
desire to be appreciated and approved of by at least some other people.
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The rational actions people take to preserve both kinds of face, for themselves and the people
they interact with, add up to politeness. Brown and Levinson also argue that in human
communication, either spoken or written, people tend to maintain one another's face
continuously.

In everyday conversation, we adapt our conversation to different situations. Among friends we

take liberties or say things that would seem discourteous among strangers. And we avoid over-
formality with friends. In both situations we try to avoid making the hearer embarrassed or
uncomfortable. Face-threatening acts (FTAs) are acts that infringe on the hearers' need to
maintain his/her self-esteem, and be respected. Politeness strategies are developed for the
main purpose of dealing with these FTAs. Suppose I see a crate of beer in my neighbour's
house. Being thirsty, I might say:

 I want some beer.

 Is it OK for me to have a beer?

 I hope it's not too forward, but would it be possible for me to have a beer?

 It's so hot. It makes you really thirsty.

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Brown and Levinson sum up human politeness behaviour in four strategies, which correspond
to these examples: bald on record, negative politeness, positive politeness, and off-record-
indirect strategy.

 The bald on-record strategy does nothing to minimize threats to the hearer's “face”

 The positive politeness strategy shows you recognize that your hearer has a desire to
be respected. It also confirms that the relationship is friendly and expresses group
reciprocity.

 The negative politeness strategy also recognizes the hearer's face. But it also
recognizes that you are in some way imposing on them. Some other examples would
be to say, “I don't want to bother you but...” or “I was wondering if...”

 Off-record indirect strategies take some of the pressure off of you. You are trying to
avoid the direct FTA of asking for a beer. Instead you would rather it be offered to you
once your hearer sees that you want one.

These strategies are not universal - they are used more or less frequently in other cultures. For
example, in some eastern societies the off-record-indirect strategy will place on your hearer a
social obligation to give you anything you admire. So speakers learn not to express admiration
for expensive and valuable things in homes that they visit.
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Examples from Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies

Bald on-record | positive politeness | negative politeness | off-record-indirect

Bald on-record

 An emergency: Help!

 Task oriented: Give me those!

 Request: Put your jacket away.

 Alerting: Turn your lights on! (while driving)

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Positive Politeness

 Attend to the hearer: You must be hungry, it's a long time since breakfast. How about
some lunch?

 Avoid disagreement: A: What is she, small? B: Yes, yes, she's small, smallish, um, not
really small but certainly not very big.

 Assume agreement: So when are you coming to see us?

 Hedge opinion: You really should sort of try harder.

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Negative Politeness

 Be indirect: I'm looking for a pen.

 Request forgiveness: You must forgive me but....

 Minimize imposition: I just want to ask you if I could use your computer?

 Pluralize the person responsible: We forgot to tell you that you needed to by your plane
ticket by yesterday.
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Off-record (indirect)

 Give hints: It's a bit cold in here.

 Be vague: Perhaps someone should have been more responsible.

 Be sarcastic, or joking: Yeah, he's a real Einstein (rocket scientist, Stephen Hawking,
genius and so on)!
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Phatic tokens

These are ways of showing status by orienting comments to oneself, to the other, or to the
general or prevailing situation (in England this is usually the weather).

 Self-oriented phatic tokens are personal to the speaker: “I'm not up to this” or “My feet
are killing me”.

 Other-oriented tokens are related to the hearer: “Do you work here?” or “You seem to
know what you're doing”.

 A neutral token refers to the context or general state of affairs: “Cold, isn't it?” or “Lovely
flowers”.
A superior shows consideration in an other-oriented token, as when the Queen says to the
factory worker: “It must be jolly hard to make one of those”. The inferior might respond with a
self-oriented token, like “Hard work, this”. On the surface, there is an exchange of information.
In reality there is a suggestion and acceptance of a hierarchy of status. The factory worker
would be unlikely to respond with, “Yes, but it's not half as hard as travelling the world, trooping
the colour, making a speech at Christmas and dissolving Parliament.”
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Deixis

Note: this section is seriously hard. You have been warned. But first, how do you pronounce it?
The term comes from the Greek deiktikos (=“able to show”). This is related to Greek dèiknymi
(dyke-nimmy) meaning “explain” or “prove”. The standard pronunciation has two syllables (dyke-
sis) while the adjective form is deictic (dyke-tik).

According to Stephen Levinson:

“Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode...features of the context of utterance ...
and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis
of that context of utterance.”
Deixis is an important field of language study in its own right - and very important for learners of
second languages. But it has some relevance to analysis of conversation and pragmatics. It is
often and best described as “verbal pointing”, that is to say pointing by means of language. The
linguistic forms of this pointing are called deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic words;
they are also sometimes called indexicals.
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Deictic expressions include such lexemes as:

 Personal or possessive pronouns (I/you/mine/yours),

 Demonstrative pronouns (this/that),

 (Spatial/temporal) adverbs (here/there/now),

 Other pro-forms (so/do),

 Personal or possessive adjectives (my/your),

 Demonstrative adjectives (this/that),

 Articles (the).

Deixis refers to the world outside a text. Reference to the context surrounding an utterance is
often referred to as primary deixis, exophoric deixis or simply deixis alone. Primary deixis is
used to point to a situation outside a text (situational deixis) or to the speaker's and hearer's
(shared) knowledge of the world (knowledge deixis).
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Contextual use of deictic expressions is known as secondary deixis, textual deixis or endophoric
deixis. Such expressions can refer either backwards or forwards to other elements in a text:

 Anaphoric deixis is backward pointing, and is the norm in English texts. Examples
include demonstrative pronouns: such, said, similar, (the) same.

 Cataphoric deixis is forward pointing. Examples include: the following, certain, some
(“the speaker raised some objections...”), this (“Let me say this...”), these, several.
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Deictic expressions fall into three categories:

 Personal deixis (you, us),

 Spatial deixis (here, there) and

 Temporal deixis (now, then).

Deixis is clearly tied to the speaker's context, the most basic distinction being between near the
speaker (proximal) and away from the speaker (distal).

 Proximal deictic expressions include this, here and now.

 Distal deictic expressions include that, there and then.

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Proximal expressions are generally interpreted in relation to the speaker's location or deictic
centre. For example now is taken to mean some point or period in time that matches the time of
the speaker's utterance. When we read, “Now Barabbas was a thief” (John 18.40) we do not
take the statement to mean the same as “Barabbas was now a thief” (i.e. he had become a
thief, having not been so before). Rather we read it as St. John's writing, “I'm telling you now,
that Barabbas was (not now but at the time in the past when these events happened) a thief”.
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Personal deixis

English does not use personal deixis to indicate relative social status in the same way that other
languages do (such as those with TV pronoun systems). But the pronoun we has a potential for
ambiguity, i.e. between exclusive we (excludes the hearer) and the hearer-including (inclusive)
we.
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Spatial deixis

The use of proximal and distal expressions in spatial deixis is confused by deictic projection.
This is the speaker's ability to project himself or herself into a location at which he or she is not
yet present. A familiar example is the use of here on telephone answering machines (“I'm not
here at the moment...”). While writing e-mails, I often edit out the use of here, when I see that
the reader will not necessarily understand the intended meaning. (My here is this room in East
Yorkshire, England, while yours may be this school in Maryland, this flat in Moscow or this
university in Melbourne.)

It is likely that the basis of spatial deixis is psychological distance (rather than physical
distance). Usually physical and (metaphorical) psychological distance will appear the same. But
a speaker may wish to mark something physically close as psychologically distant, as when you
indicate an item of food on your plate with “I don't like that”. Perhaps a better (real example) was
Graham Taylor's famous remark on his England soccer team's conceding a goal: “Do I not like
that!” This moment, from the qualifying competition for the 1994 World Cup, was recorded for,
and broadcast on a documentary film for, Channel 4.
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Temporal deixis

Psychological distance can apply to temporal deixis as well. We can treat temporal events as
things that move towards us (into view) or away from us (out of view). For instance, we speak of
the coming year or the approaching year. This may stem from our perception of things (like
weather storms) which we see approaching both spatially and in time. We treat the near or
immediate future as being close to utterance time by using the proximal deictic expression this
alone, as in “this (that is the next) weekend” or “this evening” (said earlier in the day).
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Pragmatics of written texts

In an article for e-magazine (April 2000, page 48), George Keith notes that:
“The vast majority of pragmatics studies have been devoted to conversation, where the silent
influence of context and the undercurrents are most fascinating...”
But he goes on to show how written texts of various kinds can be illuminated by pragmatics, and
he cites particular examples from literature. Pragmatics gives us ways into any written text.
Take the following example, which is a headline from the Guardian newspaper of May 10, 2002.
This read:
Health crisis looms as life expectancy soars
If we study the semantics of the headline, we may be puzzled. The metaphor (“soars”) indicates
an increase in the average life-expectancy of the UK population. Most of us are living longer. So
why is this a crisis for health?

Pragmatics supplies the answer. The headline writer assumes that we share his or her
understanding that the crisis is not in the health or longevity of the nation, but in the financial
cost to our society of providing health care for these long-living people. The UK needs to pay
more and employ more people to provide this care. Reading the article will show this.
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Or take any item of unsolicited mail more or less at random - such as a letter sent to me by Mr.
David Moyes, the manager of Everton Football Club. Mr. Moyes opens with an invitation:
“SUPPORT YOUR TEAM”, followed by the question:
“How would you like to support Everton and receive some excellent benefits at the same time?”
After this come details of a Platinum Plus credit card and some associated offers of free gifts.
The letter closes with a copy of Mr. Moyes' signature, with his name and position (“Team
Manager”) in print below.

We can conjecture that the immediate writer of this letter is not Mr. Moyes, but someone with
knowledge of financial products, employed by the club to help raise money from fans. I can be
more confident that this is so, since it is only a few months since I received a near-identical
letter, bearing the signature of the previous manager, Mr. Walter Smith. The writer assumes that
he or she is addressing people who have at some point described themselves as supporters of
Everton FC - the mail shot will have gone only to names on a database of such potential
cardholders. Closer inspection suggests that the letter does not necessarily come from the club,
as “Everton” appears in a typeface different from the surrounding text - prompting the thought
that the card issuer (MBNA Europe bank Limited) is the real source of the letter, and has signed
up various sporting clubs to endorse its product. The card issuer understands that recipients of
such offers will rarely wish to apply for a new credit card, and therefore attempts to exploit my
affection for Everton FC as a novel or sentimental reason to do so. The second half of the
opening sentence may reflect a sense that most supporters do not receive “excellent benefits at
the same time” - though perhaps the humour here is unintended.

This kind of practical analysis is a good exercise. Sometimes a teacher will need to ask students
to write it, but this will limit how much you can do. It would be better for members of a teaching
group to spend five or ten minutes at least once a week, producing an unprepared spoken
pragmatic reading of texts chosen at random by the teacher or student.
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Pragmatics for exam students

Pragmatics as an explicit field of study is not compulsory for students taking Advanced level
courses in English Language. But it is one of the five “descriptions of language” commended by
the AQA syllabus B (the others are: lexis, grammar, phonology and semantics). In some kinds
of study it will be odd if some consideration of pragamatics does not appear in your analysis or
interpretation of data.

In commenting on texts you are seeing for the first time, you may need to make use of some
pragmatic concepts, as in this example, from Adrian Attwood:
“We know from the question that Text F is a sales script. The pragmatic consideration of this
text makes us look for features, which are designed to reassure the potential customer rather
than to inform them. Particularly, in this case, where the script is for a telephone conversation
and one of the objects from the sales-person's viewpoint is to keep the other person talking.
This means that the text will try to close off as many potential exits as possible and therefore be
similar to some of the normal co-operative principles of spoken language.”
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In language investigations or research into language, you can choose whether to undertake a
task in which pragmatic analysis is appropriate. So if you really don't like it (or fear it), then you
should avoid a task where its absence will look suspicious, and draw attention to your dislike.

One area of language study where pragmatics is more or less unavoidable is any kind of study
of spoken language in social interactions (and written forms like e-mail or computer chat that
approximate to speech). In studying language and occupation or language and power, you
cannot easily avoid the use of pragmatic frameworks for analysis.

This guide has few examples in it, because I have supposed that you will apply the analytical
methods, under your teachers' guidance, to texts that you find for yourself - including spoken
data in audio and video recordings.

LINGUISTICS

Pragmatics is the study of "how to do things with words" (the name of a well known book by the
philosopher J.L. Austin), or perhaps "how people do things with words" (to be more descriptive
about it).
We'll consider four aspects of pragmatics in this lecture: speech acts; rhetorical structure;
conversational implicature; and the management of reference in discourse.

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.

It's common to divide speech acts into two categories: direct and indirect.

Direct Speech Acts

There are three basic types of direct speech acts, and they correspond to three special
syntactic types that seem to occur in most of the world's languages. Examples are given in
English, French and Buang (a Malayo-Polynesian language of Papua New Guinea

Sentence
Speech Act Function Examples
Type
Assertion Declarative. conveys information; is "Jenny got an A on the test"
 "Les filles ont pris des photos."('The
true or false girls took photos')
"Biak eko nos." ('Biak took the food')
" Did Jenny get an A on the test?"
"Les filles ont-elles pris des
Question Interrogative elicits information photos?"('Did the girls take photos')
"Biak eko nos me? "('Did Biak take the
food')
"Get an A on the test!"
Orders and causes others to behave "Prenez des photos!"('Take some
Imperative
Requests in certain ways photos!')
"Goko nos! "('Take the food!')

Although assertions, questions and orders are fairly universal, and most of the world's
languages have separate syntactic constructions that distinguish them, other speech acts do not
have a syntactic construction that is specific to them. Consider the English sentence,

(a) If you cross that line, I'll shoot you!

Most English speakers would have no trouble identifying such an utterance as a threat.
However, English has no special sentence form for threats. The if-construction used in (a) is not
specific to the speech act of threatening. Such a construction might also express a promise, as
in:

(b) If you get all A's, I'll buy you a car!

or simply a cause and effect relationship between physical events:

(c) If you heat water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it will boil.

A consideration of the syntactic means available for expressing the various speech acts leads
us to see that even for the three basic speech acts laid out in the table above, speakers may
choose means of expression other than the basic syntactic type associated with the speech act
in question.

To some extent, this just reflects the existence of a diversity of means of expression, but a more
pervasive reason is that speakers may use indirect rather than direct speech acts.

Indirect Speech Acts

Returning to the speech act of questioning, we can easily come up with a number of alternate
ways to ask the same question by using sentence types other than interrogative. Let's look
again at the interrogative sentence:
(d1) Did Jenny get an A on the test?

A positive answer ("yes") to that question would give the questioner the actual answer she
wanted, but now consider (d2)

(d2) Do you know if Jenny got an A on the test?

This is still in the form of a question, but it probably is not an inquiry about what you know. Most
of the time, the answer "yes, I do" would be ostentatiously uncooperative. The normal answer
we would expect in real life would be "Yes, she did", or "No, she only got a B", or something of
the sort. Here the reply is directed to the speech act meaning, not the literal meaning. A
simple "yes" answer that responds to the literal meaning would usually be taken for an
uncooperative answer in actual social life (for example "Yes, I do") would be heard as "Yes, I
do, but I'm not necessarily going to tell you".
Other indirect ways of asking the same question, using the declarative form, are listed in (d3)
and (d4).

(d3) I'd like to know if Jenny got an A on the test.

(d4) I wonder whether Jenny got an A on the test.

In the case of the speech act of requesting or ordering, speakers can be even more indirect. As
in the case of questions, conventional indirect requests may, taken literally, be questions about
the addressee's knowledge or ability. Here is a direct request:

(e1)( Please) close the window.

Conventional indirect requests may be expressed as questions as in (e2) and (e3), or as

assertions (e4). In context, (e5) and (e6) may also be immediately understood as a complaints,
meant as an indirect request for action.

(e2) Could you close the window?

(e3) Would you mind closing the window?
(e4) I would like you to close the window.
(e5) The window is still open!
(e6) I must have asked you a hundred times to keep that window closed!

Performatives
One subtype of direct speech acts exists in English and in many other languages, and allows us
to expand the kinds of direct speech acts we can make beyond the three basic types that have
their own special syntax. These are the direct speech acts that use performative verbs to
accomplish their ends. Performative verbs can also be used with the three basic speech act
types as exemplified in (f) - (h), associated with making statements, requests and commands
respectively:

(f) I assert that Jenny got an A on the test.

(g) I ask you who took the photos.
(h) I order you to close the window.

To these can be added performative verbs that allow us to directly convey promises, threats,
warnings, etc.

(i) I advise you to keep up the payments on your car.

(j) I warn you not to step across this line.
(k) I promise you that I will pay the money back by the end of the month.
(l) I bet you a dollar that it'll rain on the parade.

In the last sentence, the utterance of the sentence actually accomplishes the act of betting
(possibly along with setting aside the money for the bet), and as such, it belongs to the class of
ceremonial utterances that accomplish other kinds of changes in the world:

(m) I now pronounce you husband and wife.

(n) I name this ship Sojourner.
(o) I dub thee Sir Galahad.

It is clear that not all uses of verbs that can be performative are actually performative in
particular utterances. For example, if we change the person or the tense in any of the last seven
sentences, they are no longer performative:

(i2) He advises you to keep up the payments on your car.

(n2) I named this ship Sojourner.

In both these cases, the utterance simply reports, and does not accomplish the act of advising
or of naming.
 The hereby test.

A test of whether or not a particular sentence is a performative utterance is whether or not you
can insert hereby before the verb. If the resulting sentence doesn't make sense, it is not a
performative:

(m3) I hereby name this ship Sojourner; but

(m4) *I hereby named this ship Sojourner.

How many kinds of speech acts are there?

Some researchers have extended the classical lists of "speech acts" to include many actions
that are felt to be helpful in analyzing task-oriented dialogs, things like "answer", "accept",
"reject" and so forth. One influential set of ideas about this is expressed in the so-called DAMSL
("Dialog Act Mark-up in Several Layers") proposal.

For another, funnier take on an extended set of speech acts, listen to this scene from Chicago's
Neo-Futurist group.

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:

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

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

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

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

Grice was not acting as a prescriptivist when he enunciated these maxims, even though they
sound like prescriptions for how to communicate. Rather, he was using observations of the
difference between "what is said" and "what is meant" to show that people actually do follow
these maxims in conversation. We can see how this works in considering the maxim of quantity
at work in the following made-up exchange between parent and child:
Parent: Did you finish your homework?
Child: I finished my algebra.
Parent: Well, get busy and finish your English, too!

Pragmatics is the study of "how to do things with words" (the name of a well known book by the philosopher J.L.
Austin), or perhaps "how people do things with words" (to be more descriptive about it).

We'll consider four aspects of pragmatics in this lecture: speech acts; rhetorical structure; conversational
implicature; and the management of reference in discourse.

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.

It's common to divide speech acts into two categories: direct and indirect.

Direct Speech Acts

There are three basic types of direct speech acts, and they correspond to three special syntactic types that seem to
occur in most of the world's languages. Examples are given in English, French and Buang (a Malayo-Polynesian
language of Papua New Guinea

Sentence
Speech Act Function Examples
Type
"Jenny got an A on the test"
conveys information; is true or "Les filles ont pris des photos."('The girls took
Assertion Declarative.
false photos')
"Biak eko nos." ('Biak took the food')
" Did Jenny get an A on the test?"
"Les filles ont-elles pris des photos?"('Did the girls
Question Interrogative elicits information
take photos')
"Biak eko nos me? "('Did Biak take the food')
"Get an A on the test!"
Orders and causes others to behave in
Imperative "Prenez des photos!"('Take some photos!')
Requests certain ways
"Goko nos! "('Take the food!')

Although assertions, questions and orders are fairly universal, and most of the world's languages have separate
syntactic constructions that distinguish them, other speech acts do not have a syntactic construction that is specific to
them. Consider the English sentence,

(a) If you cross that line, I'll shoot you!

Most English speakers would have no trouble identifying such an utterance as a threat. However, English has no
special sentence form for threats. The if-construction used in (a) is not specific to the speech act of threatening. Such a
construction might also express a promise, as in:

(b) If you get all A's, I'll buy you a car!

or simply a cause and effect relationship between physical events:

(c) If you heat water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it will boil.

A consideration of the syntactic means available for expressing the various speech acts leads us to see that even for
the three basic speech acts laid out in the table above, speakers may choose means of expression other than the
basic syntactic type associated with the speech act in question.

To some extent, this just reflects the existence of a diversity of means of expression, but a more pervasive reason is
that speakers may use indirect rather than direct speech acts.

Indirect Speech Acts

Returning to the speech act of questioning, we can easily come up with a number of alternate ways to ask the same
question by using sentence types other than interrogative. Let's look again at the interrogative sentence:
(d1) Did Jenny get an A on the test?

A positive answer ("yes") to that question would give the questioner the actual answer she wanted, but now consider
(d2)
(d2) Do you know if Jenny got an A on the test?

This is still in the form of a question, but it probably is not an inquiry about what you know. Most of the time, the answer
"yes, I do" would be ostentatiously uncooperative. The normal answer we would expect in real life would be "Yes, she
did", or "No, she only got a B", or something of the sort. Here the reply is directed to the speech act meaning, not the
literal meaning. A simple "yes" answer that responds to the literal meaning would usually be taken for an
uncooperative answer in actual social life (for example "Yes, I do") would be heard as "Yes, I do, but I'm not
necessarily going to tell you".

Other indirect ways of asking the same question, using the declarative form, are listed in (d3) and (d4).

(d3) I'd like to know if Jenny got an A on the test.

(d4) I wonder whether Jenny got an A on the test.

In the case of the speech act of requesting or ordering, speakers can be even more indirect. As in the case of
questions, conventional indirect requests may, taken literally, be questions about the addressee's knowledge or ability.
Here is a direct request:

(e1)( Please) close the window.

Conventional indirect requests may be expressed as questions as in (e2) and (e3), or as assertions (e4). In context,
(e5) and (e6) may also be immediately understood as a complaints, meant as an indirect request for action.

(e2) Could you close the window?

(e3) Would you mind closing the window?
(e4) I would like you to close the window.
(e5) The window is still open!
(e6) I must have asked you a hundred times to keep that window closed!

Performatives
One subtype of direct speech acts exists in English and in many other languages, and allows us to expand the kinds of
direct speech acts we can make beyond the three basic types that have their own special syntax. These are the direct
speech acts that use performative verbs to accomplish their ends. Performative verbs can also be used with the
three basic speech act types as exemplified in (f) - (h), associated with making statements, requests and commands
respectively:

(f) I assert that Jenny got an A on the test.

(g) I ask you who took the photos.
(h) I order you to close the window.

To these can be added performative verbs that allow us to directly convey promises, threats, warnings, etc.

(i) I advise you to keep up the payments on your car.

(j) I warn you not to step across this line.
(k) I promise you that I will pay the money back by the end of the month.
(l) I bet you a dollar that it'll rain on the parade.

In the last sentence, the utterance of the sentence actually accomplishes the act of betting (possibly along with setting
aside the money for the bet), and as such, it belongs to the class of ceremonial utterances that accomplish other kinds
of changes in the world:

(m) I now pronounce you husband and wife.

(n) I name this ship Sojourner.
(o) I dub thee Sir Galahad.

It is clear that not all uses of verbs that can be performative are actually performative in particular utterances. For
example, if we change the person or the tense in any of the last seven sentences, they are no longer performative:

(i2) He advises you to keep up the payments on your car.

(n2) I named this ship Sojourner.

In both these cases, the utterance simply reports, and does not accomplish the act of advising or of naming.

The hereby test.

A test of whether or not a particular sentence is a performative utterance is whether or not you can insert hereby
before the verb. If the resulting sentence doesn't make sense, it is not a performative:

(m3) I hereby name this ship Sojourner; but

(m4) *I hereby named this ship Sojourner.

How many kinds of speech acts are there?

Some researchers have extended the classical lists of "speech acts" to include many actions that are felt to be helpful
in analyzing task-oriented dialogs, things like "answer", "accept", "reject" and so forth. One influential set of ideas
about this is expressed in the so-called DAMSL ("Dialog Act Mark-up in Several Layers") proposal.

For another, funnier take on an extended set of speech acts, listen to this scene from Chicago's Neo-Futurist group.

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:

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

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

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

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

Grice was not acting as a prescriptivist when he enunciated these maxims, even though they sound like prescriptions
for how to communicate. Rather, he was using observations of the difference between "what is said" and "what is
meant" to show that people actually do follow these maxims in conversation. We can see how this works in considering
the maxim of quantity at work in the following made-up exchange between parent and child:
Parent: Did you finish your homework?
Child: I finished my algebra.
Parent: Well, get busy and finish your English, too!
The child did not say that her English homework is not done, nor did she imply it in a legalistic sense. Nevertheless the
parent is likely to draw this conclusion. The implicit line of argument is something like this: the child would have simply
said 'yes', without mentioning any particular subjects, if that answer were true; the fact that she referred to algebra,
and did not mention other subjects, suggests ("implicates") that the unmentioned subjects are not done.

Very often, particular non-literal meanings are conveyed by appearing to "violate" or "flout" these maxims. If you were
to hear someone described as having "one good leg", you would be justified in assuming the person's other leg was
bad, even though nothing had been said about it at all.

A more elaborate taxonomy of types of conversational implicature, with illustrative examples, can be found here.

[Exercise for the reader: the last sentence implicates that you should go read the referenced site. What kind of
implicature is that?]

3. Rhetorical Structure
Consider the following paragraph from the introduction to a recent magazine article:

Here is the problem with the college-admissions system. It is a vast and intricate bureaucracy designed to do one
thing, and it does that very well; but it is under intense social and economic pressure to do something different—
something more or less directly at odds with its supposed goal. The resulting tensions affect everyone involved: The
high school guidance counselors who try to steer students toward the right school. The college admissions officers
who sort through ever mounting piles of applications to choose an entering class. The college administrators who
wonder how many of those accepted will enroll—and how many of them will need financial aid. The parents who
contemplate what will be (after housing) the second largest financial outlay of their lives. And, of course, the students
themselves.

        -The Atlantic Monthly. 11/2003

Just as a phrase is a structured combination of words, this paragraph is a structured combination of phrases. Let's
review how this passage uses the kinds of syntactic and morphological structure that we've previously studied to
express semantic relations like modification and predicate-argument structure ("who did what to whom").

In the paragraph above, "vast and intricate" modifies "bureaucracy", and "intense" modifies "social and economic
pressure." This modification relation is expressed by a structure that we might write down something like this:

(NounPhrase
  (Adjective (Adjective vast) (Conjunction and) (Adjective intricate)))
     (Noun bureaucracy)))

[Exercise for the reader: how would you draw this structure as a tree?]

STEER is a predicate whose arguments may include an agent (the person or thing steering), a theme (the person or
thing that gets steered), and a goal (the path or endpoint of the steering). In the passage above, there is a verb "steer"
whose agent is "high school guidance counselors", whose theme is "students", and whose goal is "toward the right
school". This predicate-argument relation is expressed by the fact that "steer" is a active verb whose subject is the
agent, whose object is the theme, etc. In this case, the subject turns out to be "high school guidance counselors", after
we untangle and interpret the syntactic structure (... counselors who try to steer ... ). The same semantic relation might
have been expressed by syntactic patterns such as "students being steered by guidance counselors", "the steering of
students by guidance counselors", and so on.

When you read and understand this passage, you're parsing the structure of its phrases, and using the results to help
you interpret local aspects of the meaning, such as modification and predicate-argument structure.

However, it should be clear to you that there is also a larger-scale structure relating the 11 clauses of this paragraph.
We could indicate this structure as follows (I've used line breaks, indentation and square brackets for the structural
relations, simplified the language to make it fit more easily on the page, and numbered the clauses for future
reference):

[A
(1) Here is the problem with the college-admissions system.
  [A1
    [A1.1 (2) It is a bureaucracy designed to do one thing; A1.1]
    [A1.2
    [A.1.2.1 (3) but it is under pressure to do something different— A.1.2.1]
    [A.1.2.2 (4) something at odds with its supposed goal. A.1.2.2]
    A1.2]
  A1]
A]
[B
  [B.1 (5) The resulting tensions affect everyone involved: B.1]  
  [B.2 (6) Counselors who steer students toward the right school. B.2]  
  [B.3 (7) Admissions officers who sort through piles of applications. B.3]
  [B.4
    [B.4.1 (8) Administrators who wonder how many will enroll— B.4.1]
    [B.4.2 (9) and how many of them will need financial aid. B.4.2]
  B.4]
  [B.5 (10) Parents who contemplate their second largest outlay. B.5]
  [B.6 (11) And, of course, the students themselves. B6]
B]

At the highest level, there are two units: A, there is a problem with college admissions; B, the results affect everyone
involved. The first unit explains something about what the problem is; the second units lists the kinds of people
affected and something about their roles in the process.

Some of this rhetorical structure involves the relationships of phrases inside sentences, and some of it involves
relationships among sentences or groups of sentences. Like syntactic structures, these rhetorical structures usually
seem to be "trees" -- that is, successive subdivisions of larger units into smaller ones.

One difference between syntax and rhetoric is scale -- syntax typically operates on a smaller scale, among words or
small groups of words inside sentences, while rhetoric works on a larger scale, typically relating clauses, sentences
and whole sections of a discourse.

Another difference is function. Syntactic structure mainly expresses semantic relations like modification, predication,
quantification and so on. These are key parts of a basic account of "sentence meaning". Rhetorical structure typically
expresses pragmatic relations like exemplification, concession, justification, summary and so on, things that are part of
"speaker meaning", the way that people use language to inform or entertain or persuade.

For the past century or two, linguists have been much more interested in syntactic structure than in rhetorical structure.
As a result, theories of syntax are much better developed and more widely known. However, there are some
interesting accounts of rhetorical structure, including a body of work known as RST (for "rhetorical structure theory").

Some linguists are skeptical that rhetorical structure is even a well-defined kind of mental representation that is
intrinsic to language, of the kind that syntax seems to be. Thus rhetorical structures might simply be useful patterns
that speakers and writers sometimes choose to create or borrow, just as architects and painters may choose certain
stereotypical ways of arranging their materials. On this view, it might not turn out to be possible to list all the possible
rhetorical structures, or to uniquely and accurately classify every passage in terms of such structures, any more than
we can list all possible hand tools, or necessarily classify all the tools that we find into a fixed taxonomy. After all,
someone can always invent a new tool, or a tool that combines aspects of several old ones.

4. 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.

Similarly, we have to be careful not to introduce familiar things as if they were new. Aside from being insulting, this can
be confusing, since our listeners may try to find a new interpretation to match our implication of novelty. If your
roommate says "there's a letter for you on the table", and it's the same old letter that both of you know well has been
there for several days, you may waste some time looking for another one.

There are many aspects of language that help to indicate whether a particular piece of information is "old" or "new",
and to manage the amount of detail that we use in talking about it, and to make it more or less salient for our listeners
or readers. For example, "old information" (part of the earlier content of a discourse, for instance) is referred to using a
pronoun, and occurs early in a sentence. What is "new" typically occurs as a noun, and occurs later in the sentence:

"When John appeared at the party, he was introduced to Pearl.

She had arrived with her friend Julie."

In this text fragment, John turns into 'he' when John is "known", and this pronoun occurs at the beginning of the clause
that introduces Pearl as new. When Pearl becomes known, she also gets converted to the pronoun 'she' in the next
sentence, occupying a slot at the beginning of the next sentence, which in turn introduces the new character, Julie, in
the typical sentence-final position.

Here's a more realistic example, taken from a transcript of conversation about fashions that took place in 1991
(sw4746):
B.72 : [Sniffing] One thing I've noticed is come back here are clogs.
A.73 : Really?
B.74 : Yeah. They're starting to make a comeback.
You see them in the stores more and more and I said I didn't think I'd ever see those again. [laughter]
The new information "clogs" is put at the end of the phrase that introduces it, and then referred to with a pronoun at the
start of the next full sentence that discusses it. Consider how odd it would be to do the opposite, switching the
structures of the first and second of B's sentences::
B.72 : [Sniffing] Clogs're starting to make a comeback..
A.73: Really?
B.74: Yeah. One thing I've noticed is come back here are them.
You see them in the stores more and more and I said I didn't think I'd ever see those again. [laughter]
Something similar often happens with indefinite and definite noun phrases ("a man" or "some people" vs. "the man" or
"those people"). Here's a real example from another transcribed conversation (sw4787) , this one about family
reunions (overlapping speech is marking with #...#):
B.52: And well they elect officers every year and #they have a#
A.53: #You're kidding.# I have never heard of this. [laughter]
B.54: Yeah, they have a,- they have a- a president. Usually they try to elect a family and inside that family, there'll be
the president and- or the chairman or whatever and then each person has an assignment to- to you know,
carry out one part of the thing.
Here speaker B starts out by saying "they have a president", and then, in adding more information, switches to "the
president". The same sort of switch from indefinite to definite occurs in saying "usually they try to elect a family and
inside that family, there'll be..." As this switch occurs, nothing is changed about the nature of the concepts that the
phrases are naming -- the only thing that changes is the listener's familiarity with them.

Another way to study how we organize and package information according to the communicative context is to look at
the usage of different sentence forms with very similar meaning.
(o) I need a nickel.
(p) It's me that needs a nickel.
(q) What I need is a nickel.
(r) A nickel is what I need.
Now, imagine yourself standing next to a phone booth fishing for change. Someone trying to be helpful might say:
(s) What are you looking for?
(t) Here's a dime.
Which of (o)-(r) are appropriate responses to each of these?

Studying such potention question and answer pairs shows us that sentences can express the same semantic content
and still have different pragmatic circumstances of appropriate usage. This is because language has many devices for
indicating what is given and what is new, and questions (explicit or implicit) set up expectations that are respected in
the answers.