Linguistics I

• Eje temático 1: Lingüística. Niveles de análisis. Introducción a teorías lingüísticas.

What is Linguistics?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
Linguists (experts in linguistics) work on specific languages, but their primary goal is to understand the
nature of language in general.
The main goal of linguistics, like all other intellectual disciplines, is to increase our knowledge and
understanding of the world. Since language is universal and fundamental to all human interactions, the
knowledge attained in linguistics has many practical applications.
Linguistics focuses on:
● differences between human language and animal communication system
● features that are common to all human languages
● relationship among modes of linguistic communication (speech, writing, sign language.)
● relationship of language to other types of human behavior

The central branches of Linguistics

Language is a phenomenon with many layers, from the sounds that speakers produce to the meanings
that those sounds express. The field of Linguistics comprises several sub-fields. Most professional
linguists become specialists in one or more of these sub-fields.

Sound

Phonetics: the study of speech sounds. Phoneticians study both the production of speech sounds by the
human speech organs (articulatory phonetics) and the properties of the sounds themselves (acoustic
phonetics). Phoneticians are concerned with such questions as:

➔ What specifically defines different “accents”?

➔ Can speakers be identified by “voiceprints”?

Phonology: the study of language sound systems. Phonologists are concerned with questions such as:

➔ What sounds of a language can or cannot occur one after the other (for example, why can words
begin in st– in English but not in Spanish)?

Structure

Morphology: the study of word structure. Seeks to define how words are built. Morphologists examine
such questions as:
 ➔ To what extent are ways of forming words “productive” or not (e.g. why do English speakers say
arrival and amusement but not *arrivement and *amusal)?

Syntax: the study of how linguistic units larger than the word are constructed. Concerned with sentence
structure. Syntacticians address such questions as:

➔ How can the number of sentences that speakers can create be infinite in number even though
the number of words in any language is finite?
➔ Why would English speakers judge a sentence like colorless green ideas sleep furiously to be
“grammatical” even though it is nonsensical?

Meaning

Semantics: the study of meaning. Semantics deals with the literal meaning conveyed by the use of words,
phrases and sentences of a language. Semanticists answer such questions as:

➔ How do speakers know what words mean (e.g. How does one know where red stops and
orange starts)?
➔ What is the basis of metaphors (e.g. Why is my car a lemon a “good” metaphor but my car is a
cabbage is not)?

Pragmatics: pragmatics is the study of how words are used, or the study of signs and symbols. Studies
the words in context.

- An example of pragmatics is how the same word can have different meanings in different
settings.
- An example of pragmatics is the study of how people react to different symbols.

Other sub-fields

In addition to these sub-fields, there are a number of other sub-fields that cross-cut them:

Historical linguistics: the study of how languages change over time, addressing such questions as why
modern English is different from Old English and Middle English or what it means to say that English
and German are “more closely related” to each other than English and French.

Sociolinguistics: The study of how language is used in society, addressing such questions as what makes
some dialects more “prestigious” than others, where slang comes from and why it arises, or what
happens when two languages come together in “bilingual” communities.

Psycholinguistics: The study of how language is processed in the mind, addressing such questions as
how we can hear a string of language noises and make sense of them, how children can learn to speak
and understand the language of their environment as quickly and effortlessly as they do, or how people
with pathological language problems differ from people who have “normal” language.- Psycholinguistics
is concerned with the nature of the processes that the brain undergoes in order to comprehend and
produce language. An example of psycholinguistics is a study of how certain words represent traumatic
events for some people.

Neurolinguistics: the study of how language is represented in the brain: that is, how and where our
brains store our knowledge of the language (or languages) that we speak, understand, read, and write,
what happens in our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and what happens as we use it in our
everyday lives.

Computational linguistics: Learning and understanding a language involves computing the properties of
that language that are described in its phonology, syntax, and semantics. The challenge of describing
this process connects linguistics with computational issues at a very fundamental level. How could
syntactic structures be computed from spoken language, how are semantic relations recognized, and
how could these computational skills be acquired?
(This is the application of computer science to the analysis, synthesis and comprehension of written and
spoken language)

Chapter 1: Principles of Language Learning and Teaching.

Language is:

● Systematic: explicit and formal accounts of the system of language (phonological, syntactic, and
semantics)
● Has a set of arbitrary symbols. The symbols are primarily vocal, but may also be visual:
phonetics, phonology, writing systems, kinesics, proxemics (study of personal space and the
degree of separation that individuals maintain between each other in social situations), and
other “paralinguistic” features of language.
● These symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they refer: semantics, language and
acquisition, psycholinguistics.
● Language is used for communication: communication systems, speaker-hearer interaction,
sentence processing.
● Language operates in a speech community or culture: dialectology, sociolinguistics, language and
culture, bilingualism, and second language acquisition.
● Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited to humans.
● Language is acquired by all people in much the same way. Language and language learning both
have universal characteristics.

Definition of language by Pinker’s the language instinct (1994): language is a complex, specialized
skill, which develops in the child spontaneously without conscious effort or formal instruction, is
deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is
distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. Pinker explains that a
universal grammar represents specific structures in the human brain that recognize the general rules of
other humans' speech, such as whether the local language places adjectives before or after nouns, and
begin a specialized and very rapid learning process not explainable as reasoning from first principles or
pure logic. This learning machinery exists only during a specific critical period of childhood and is then
disassembled for thrift, freeing resources in an energy-hungry brain.

Definition of language by Chomsky: Noam Chomsky says the language is the inherent capability of the
native speakers to understand and form grammatical sentences. A language is a set of (finite or infinite)
sentences, each finite length and constructed out of a finite set of elements. This definition of language
considers sentences as the basis of a language. Sentences may be limited or unlimited in number, and are
made up of only limited components.

Definition of language by Saussure: Language is an arbitrary system of signs constituted of the signifier
and signified. In other words, language is first a system based on no logic or reason. Secondly, the system
covers both objects and expressions used for objects. Thirdly objects and expressions are arbitrarily
linked. And finally, expressions include sounds and graphemes used by humans for generating speech
and writing respectively for communication.
Learning is acquiring or getting knowledge of a subject or skill by study, experience, or instruction.
Learning is a permanent change in a behavioral tendency and is the result of reinforced practice. It can
also be subject to forgetting.

Teaching cannot be defined apart from learning. Teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, it is
enabling the learner to learn, setting the conditions for learning. Teachers’ understanding of how the
learner learns will determine their philosophy of education, teaching style, approach, methods, and
classroom techniques. “A teacher’s theory of teaching is his/her theory of learning”.

School of Thought in Second Language Acquisition

There are different viewpoints emerge from equally knowledgeable scholars (linguists) who are
embedded on how language works :

1. Structuralism/Behaviourism: involves conditioning, reinforcement, observation, scientific

method, empiricism, language drills. They prove this way of learning by experimenting on
animals, hence Pavlov’s theory. (Theorists: Pavlov, Watson, Skinner)
2. Rationalism and Cognitive Psychology: involves universal grammar, interlanguage,
competence, deep structure of the brain. These linguists state that humans are born with a wired
brain because language cannot be observed, language happens in our brains.
3. Constructivism: involves interactive discourse, group learning, sociocultural variables,
interlanguage variability. These agree with the fact we are born with wirings but state that we
have to construct knowledge by means of social interaction.

Chapter 2 : First Language Acquisition

Not until the twentieth century did researchers begin to analyze child language systematically and to
try to discover the nature of the psycholinguistic process that enables every human being to gain
fluent control of an exceedingly complex system of communication. In a matter of a few decades,
some giant strides were taken, especially in the generative and cognitive models of language in
describing the acquisition of particular languages, and in probing universal aspects of acquisition.
This wave of research in child language acquisition led language teachers and teachers trainers to
study some of the general findings of such research with a view to drawing analogies between first
and second language acquisition, and even to justifying certain teaching methods and techniques on
the basis of the first language learning principles. On the surface, it is entirely reasonable to make
the analogy. After all, all children, given a normal developmental environment, acquire their native
languages fluently and efficiently. They acquire them “naturally”, without special instruction.
There are dozens of salient differences between first and second language learning; the most
obvious difference, in the case of adult second language learning, is the tremendous cognitive and
effective contrast between adults and children.
 Theories of first language acquisition.
As a child grows up, he goes through a “fantastic” journey from the first anguished cry at birth,
from the first word of tens of thousands. It is amazing how people get the language by imitating
words and speech sounds they hear around them.
In principle, one could adopt one of two polarized positions in the study of the first language
acquisition. Using the schools of thought, a extreme behavioristic position would claim that
children come into the world with tabula rasa, a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about
the world or about the language, and that these children are then shaped by their environment and
slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement,
At the other constructivist extreme is the position that makes not only the rationalist/cognitivist
claim that children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge, predispositions, and
biological timetables, but that children learn to function in a language, chiefly through interaction
and discourse.
These positions represent opposites on a continuum, with many possible positions in between.

Behavioristic Approaches
The behaviourist approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behaviour-
the publicly observable responses- and the relationships or associations between those responses
and events in the world surrounding them. A behaviorist might consider effective language
behaviour to be the production of the correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is
reinforced, it then becomes habitual, or conditioned. Thus children produce linguistic responses that
are reinforced. The behaviorist theory believes that “infants learn oral language from other
human role models through a process involving imitation, rewards, and practice. Human role
models in an infant's environment provide the stimuli and rewards,”
One of the best-known attempts to construct a behaviourist model of linguist behaviour was
embodied in B.F. Skinner’s classic, Verbal Behaviour. Skinner’s theory of verbal behavior was an
extension of his general theory of learning by operant conditioning. It refers to conditioning in
which the organism (human being) emits a response, or operant (a sentence or utterance) without
necessarily observable stimuli, that operant is maintained (learned)by reinforcement.
→ e.g. If a child says “WANT MILK” and a parent gives the child some milk, the operant is
reinforced, and over repeated instances, is conditioned.
According to Skinner, verbal behaviour is controlled by its consequences. When consequences are
rewarding, behavior is maintained and can increase in strength and perhaps frequency. When
consequences are pushing, the behaviour is weakened and eventually extinguished.

In the attempt to broaden the base of behavioristic theory, some psychologists proposed modified
theoretical positions. One of these positions was mediation theory, in which meaning was
accounted for by the claim that linguistic stimulus (a word or sentence) elicits a “mediating”
response that is self-stimulating. Charles Osgood called this self-stimulation a “representational
mediation process”, a process that is really covert and invisible, acting within the learner.
However, mediation theories still left many questions about language unanswered.
Yet another attempt to account for first language acquisition within a behaviouristic framework was
made by Jenkins and Palermo. They claimed that the child may acquire frames of a linear pattern
of sentence elements and learn the stimulus-response equivalences that can be substituted within
each frame; imitation was an important, if not essential, aspect of establishing stimulus-response
association. but this theory, too, failed to account for the abstract nature of language, for the child's
creativity and for the interactive nature of language acquisition.

The Nativist Approach

The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately
determined, that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic
perception of language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of
language. Suggests that we're born with a specific language-learning area in our brain. Nativists believe
that children are wired to learn language, regardless of their environment. Behaviorists believe that
children learn language directly from experiences with their environment.
→ Eric Lenneberg proposed that language is a “species-specific” behaviour and that certain modes
of perception, categorizing abilities, and other language-related mechanisms are biologically
determined.
→ Chomsky similarly claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain the child’s
mastery of a native language in such a short time. This innate knowledge , according to him, is
embodied in a “little black box” of sorts, a language acquisition device (LAD).
→ McNeill described LAD as consisting of four innate linguist properties:
1. the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment,
2. the ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined,
3. LAD is the knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that
other kinds are not, and
4. the ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to
construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.

McNeill and other Chomskyan disciples composed arguments for the appropriateness of the LAD
proposition, especially in contrast to behaviouristic, stimulus-response (S-R) theory, which was so
limited in accounting for the generativity of child language.

● Aspects of meaning, abstractness, and creativity were accounted for more adequately.

Even though it was readily recognized that the LAD was not literally a cluster of brain cells that
could be isolated and neurologically located, such inquiry on the rationalistic side of the
linguistic-psychological continuum stimulated a great deal of research.

More recently, researchers in the nativist tradition have continued this line of inquiry through a
genre of child language acquisition research that focuses on what has come to be known as
Universal Grammar. Positing that all human beings are genetically equipped with abilities that
enable them to acquire language, researchers expanded the LAD notion into a system of universal
linguistic rules that went well beyond what was originally proposed for the LAD. Universal
Grammar (UG) research is attempting to discover what it is that all children, regardless of their
environmental stimuli (language they hear around them) bring to the language acquisition process.
(humans will always develop language with certain properties (e.g., distinguishing nouns from
verbs, or distinguishing function words from content words).)

One of the more practical contributions of nativist theories is evident if you look at the kinds of
discoveries that have been made about how the system of child language works. Research has
shown that the child’s language, at any given point, is a legitimate system in its own right. The
child’s linguistic development is not a process of developing fewer and fewer ‘incorrect’ structures,
not a language in which earlier stages have more ‘mistakes’ than larger stages. Rather, the child’s
language at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly forming hypotheses on the basis
of the input received and then testing those hypotheses in speech (and comprehension). As the
child’s language develops, those hypotheses are continually revised, reshaped, or sometimes
abandoned.

Before generative linguistics came into vogue, Jean Berko (1858) demonstrated that children learn
language as an integrated system. Using a simple nonsense-word test, Berko discovered that
English-speaking children as young as four years of age applied rules for the formation of plural,
present progressive, past tense, third singular, and possessives. For example, if a child sees one
‘dag’ he can easily talk about two ‘dags’, or if he were presented with a person who knows how to
‘tilk’, the child could talk about a person who ‘tilked’.

Nativist studies of child language acquisition were free to construct hypothetical grammars
(descriptions of linguistic systems) of child language, although such grammars were still based on
empirical data. These grammars were formal representations of the deep structure- the abstract rules
underlying surface output, the structure not overtly manifest in speech.

The early grammars of child language were referred to as ‘pivot grammars’. It was commonly
observed that the child’s first two-word utterances seemed to manifest two separate word classes,
and not simply two words thrown together at random. Examples: ‘mommy sock’, ‘my shoe’, ‘all
gone water’, ‘that kitty’. Linguists noted that the first words seemed to belong to a class that words
that came second in the utterance generally did not belong to. For example, ‘my’ can co-occur with
‘shoe, milk, sock’ but not with ‘that, all gone’. Mommy is, in this case, a word that belongs to both
classes. The first class of words is called ‘pivot’ since they could pivot around a number of word in
the second, ‘open class’. Sentence--> pivot word + open word

Parallel distributed processing model (PDP) (or connectionism): is based on the idea that the
brain does not function in a series of activities but rather performs a range of activities at the same
time, parallel to each other. Its foundation is consistent with neurological functioning of the brain.
The PDP model holds that the cognitive processes can be explained by activation flowing through
networks that link together nodes. Every new event changes the strength of connections among
relevant units by altering the connection weights. Consequently, you are likely to respond
differently the next time you experience a similar event. For example, while you have been reading
about the PDP approach, the strength of connections between PDP and its features will become
greater. All related terms are likely to be activated when you next encounter the term PDP approach.

Basically, the symphony of the human brain enables us to process many segments and levels of
language, cognition, affect and perception all at one – in a parallel configuration. According to the
PDP model, a sentence is not ‘generated’ by a series of rules. Rather, sentences are the result of the
simultaneous interconnection of a multitude of brain cells.

All of these approaches within the nativist framework have made 3 important contributions to our
understanding of the first language acquisition process:
1- Freedom from the restrictions of the so-called ‘scientific method’ to explore the unseen,
unobservable, underlying, abstract linguistic structures being developed in the child.

2- Systematic description of the child’s linguistic repertoire as either rule-governed or operating out
of parallel distributed processing capacities

3- The construction of a number of potential properties of Universal Grammar.

Functional approaches
Functionalism is an approach to language development that focuses on the relationship between
language form and social meaning. That is, language is not so much a system of rules as posed by
Chomsky, but a means of performing particular socially communicative functions. This is an approach
concerned with functions performed by language. A functional approach asserts that we need to
learn how to choose our language to meet the particular needs of a situation.

- Form (how sth is formed in a way) but function is connected in how we use the
language(suggestions, invitation, declination, etc).
- Highly social, needs interaction.
- We need context in order to communicate
- Communication is the key
In most accounts (any dialogue), the primary purpose of language is to facilitate communication, in
the sense of transmission of information from one person to the other.

Cognition and language development

Bloom (1971) illustrated her criticism of pivot grammar when pointing out that the relationship in
which words occur in telegraphic utterances (two-word and three-word sentences, children acquire
them when learning the language) are only superficially similar. For example, in the utterance
‘daddy phone’, nativists would describe it as a sentence consisting of a ‘pivot word+open word’. In
contrast, Bloom found at least 3 possible underlying relations:
1. Agent-action: daddy is using his phone.
2. Agent-object: daddy sees the phone.
3. Possessor-possessed: daddy’s phone.
Bloom concluded that children learn underlying structures, and not superficial word order. Thus,
depending on the social context, ‘daddy phone’ could mean a number of different things to a child.
Those varied meanings were inadequately captured in a pivot grammar approach.

Nativist vs Functional Approach

Nativists:
❖ Propose generative rules (abstract, formal, explicit and quite logical)
❖ Deal with the forms of language (morphemes, words, rules,etc)
❖ Pivot word (very essential words) (mommy water: two separate word classes)

Functional:
Cognition and language development:
 ❖ Bloom and Slobin (1970’s - 1980s)
❖ Deal with the deeper functional levels of meaning constructed from social interaction
(suggestion, criticism, disagreement, etc) this is why we use the language
❖ Context: children learn structures, not a superficial word order.
❖ Cognitive development (how children think, explore and figure things out)
❖ Interaction with their environment, developing cognitive capacities and their linguistic
experiences.
❖ Gleitman and Wanner: Children appear to approach language learning equipped with
conceptual interpretative abilities for categorizing the world.
❖ Semantic learning (meanings of words (a branch of linguistics)) depends on cognitive
development, information-processing capacities.
Social interaction and language development:
❖ Holzman 1980’s
❖ “A reciprocal behaviour behavioural system operates between the language-developing
infant-child and the competent language user in a socializing-teaching-nurturing role”
(parent-child-social interaction).

.
 Eje temático 2:

Discurso y Pragmática. Análisis del discurso. Discurso y texto. Contexto, registro, género.
Tematización. Organización de la información. Deixis. Actos del habla, cooperación e implicancias.
Cortesía. Análisis de la conversación.

Discourse: the conversations and the meaning behind them by a group of people who hold certain
ideas in common. Linguistic Conventions.
Conversational cues. (Eye contact, facial expressions,pitch, behaviour)

Pragmatics
What 's pragmatics? branch of linguistics, this is how people use context and understand the
language
What’s the cooperative principle? People work together to have a conversation.
Who can’t understand pragmatics? Robots, computers, they cannot read between the lines.
What’s required to understand language? Our knowledge is required to understand human
behaviour and relations to analyze the context around us.

Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis: they are approaches to studying language’s relation to the
contextual background features. They have much in common, both study context, text and function.

Context and its importance: both pragmatics and discourse analysis study the meaning of words
in context, analyzing the parts of meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical and
social world, and the socio-psychological factors influencing communication, as well as the
knowledge of the time and place in which the words are uttered or written.

Discourse and its importance: discourse (or the use of language and text, or pieces of spoken or
written language) is important because when analyzing Pragmatics and Discourse, the second one
must be taken into account because it concentrates on how stretches of language become
meaningful and unified for their users.

Relevance Theory: is the study of how the assumption of relevance holds text together
meaningfully.

Speech acts examples: promise, apologize and threaten.

Critical discourse analysis: an ideological approach that examines the purpose of language in the
social context, and reveals how discourse reflects and determines power structures.
The Difference between Discourse Analysis (the use of structures like he, she, etc) and
Pragmatics (context): emphasis on the structure of text.

NOTAS DE LA CLASE 15.09.21

Context & Co-text (the part that accompanies the text)

Halliday describes context as “the events that are going on around when people speak and write”.
It entails the situation within which the communicative interaction takes place.

● Discourse analysis: it focuses on linguistics and cognitive choices made relevant to the
interaction at hand.
● Pragmatics: participants taking part in the interaction, the sociocultural background and
physical situation….
● Observable context: SITUATIONAL CONTEXT (what speakers know about what they can
see around them), BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE CONTEXT (what they know about each
other and the world), CO-TEXTUAL CONTEXT (what they know about what they have been
saying)
● Situational Context: it’s the immediate physical copresence, the situation where the
interaction is taking place at the moment of speaking.
● Background knowledge context: it’s the assumed background knowledge that speakers
have.
→ Cultural general knowledge
→ Interpersonal Knowledge
● Co-text: it’s the context of the text itself. Referring expressions should link together with
each other. Only then can we say the text is COHESIVE. COHESION is obtained by
grammatical and lexical cohesion.

CONTEXT
The term context in discourse analysis refers to all the factors and elements that are not
linguistic and nontextual but which affect spoken or written communicative interaction.
Halliday describes context as “the events that are going on around when people speak and
write”.
Discourse may depend primarily on contextual features found in the immediate environment
and be referred to as context-embedded, or it may be relatively independent of context
(context-reduced or decon-textualized) and depend more on the features of the linguistic code
and the forms of the discourse itself.
Context entails the situation within which the communicative interaction takes place.

Shared Knowledge
In a communicative exchange both interactans rely on their prior knowledge, which may or
may not be shared. Shared knowledge is perhaps most important for everyday communicative
exchanges. When such exchanges take place between participants who are familiar with each
other, they rely on their shared knowledge.
For discourse where context is not readily available (written text or formal speeches), those
interpreting the discourse have to rely more heavily on the text itself and on their prior
knowledge. Relevant prior knowledge can create the appropriate context within which is
possible to understand and properly interpret the discourse.

TYPES OF CONTEXT
Duranti and Goodwin propose 4 types of context:
● Setting (physical and interactional)
● Behavioral environment (nonverbal and kinetic)
● Language (co-text and reflexive use of language)
● Extrasituational (social, political, cultural and the like)

Two of these types of context are important.

1- The situtuational context - i.e. the purpose, the participants and the physical and temporal
setting where communication is taking place (analized as pragmatics) and..
2- the discourse context or co-text, the stream of prior and subsequent language in which a
language segment or an exchange occurs (analyzed as discourse)

CO-TEXT

COHESION
The use of various cohesive ties to explicitly link together all the propositions in a text results in
cohesion of that text. It’s expressed via language resources. It’s the key to understanding a text or
conversation.

Grammatical Cohesion

Reference
Referencing is the act of using language
to refer to entities in the context.
(Reference Words: personal pronouns,
possesive adj/pronouns)
Types of reference
EXOPHORIC. There is no previous
mention of referents in the text. It is
dependent on the context outside.
ENDOPHORIC. The items exist and
interconnect within the text. It avoids
repetition.
There are 2 types of endophora:
❖ The pronouns “them” and “this” link back to something that went before in the
preceding text. This is called Anaphora.
❖ Cataphora is the opposite, pronouns link forward to a referent in the text that follows.
❖ Whereas anaphora refers back, cataphora refers forward.

Substitution
Endophoric reference, with personal and demonstrative pronouns and possessives, is only one
form of grammatical cohesion. Substitution holds the text together and avoids repetition.

Ellipsis
Just like substitution, ellipsis avoids repetition and depends on the hearer or reader’s being able
to retrieve the missing words from the surrounding con-text. This is typical in spoken and
written text, although it occurs more often in conversation.

Both substitution and ellipsis can only be used when there is no ambiguity as to what is being
substituted or ellipted. If there is more than one possibility, the result can be confusion.

Lexical Cohesion
Cohesion is also maintained by lexical cohesion.
Repetition
Repeated words or word-phrases, threading through the text.
Synonyms
Instead of repeating the exact same word, a speaker or writer can use another word that means
the same or almost the same.
Superordinates
Is a general term or name of the category of something.
General Words
These can be general nouns as “thing” “stuff” “place” “person” “woman” and “man”, or general
verbs as in “do” and “happen”. It is an umbrella term that can cover almost everything.
 Deixis
Deixis is a technical term for one of the most basic things we do with utterances. It is connected to the
speaker’s context, with the most basic distinction between deictic expressions being “near speaker”
(proximal terms related to the speaker’s location or deictic center: this, here, now) versus “away from
speaker” (distal terms: that, there, then)

It means “pointing” via language. Any linguistic form used to accomplish this said pointing is referred to
as deictic expression/indexical. Example: “What’s that?” in this case “that” is the deictic expression, you
are indicating something in the immediate context. These are among the first forms spoken by very
young children and can be used to indicate people via person deixis “me, you” or location via spatial
deixis “here, there” or time via temporal deixis “now, then”. All these depend on the speaker and hearer
sharing the same context, they are usually more common in face-to-face spoken interaction.

Person deixis

Operates on a basic three-part division: the 1st person (I), the 2nd person (you), and 3rd person (he, she,
it). In other languages can also be elaborated with makers of relative social status (low status or higher
described as honorifics). The choice of one of these forms is described as social deixis.

We can also make notice of T/V distinction: this is the distinction between forms used for a familiar
versus a non-familiar addressee in some languages “tú”/”Usted”. The choice of one form will
communicate something indirectly about the speaker’s view of his/her relationship with the addressee.
These are called ‘Honorifics’. In those social contexts where individuals typically mark distinctions
between social status of the speaker and addressee:

- the higher, older, and more powerful speaker will tend to use “tú”
- the lower, younger, and less powerful addressee will tend to use “Usted”

The third person is not a direct participant in basic interaction. These pronouns are distal forms in terms
of person deixis. Using a 3rd person form where a 2nd could have been used is one way of communicating
distance and non-familiarity. In English it can be used for:

★ an ironic/humorous purpose: “Would her highness like some water?” if that person is not helping
the other to make dinner and just being lazy, for example.
★ to make potential accusations directly or indirectly (to make it impersonal): “you didn’t clean
up”/ “somebody didn’t clean up after herself”
★ General rules: “we clean up after ourselves around here”
○ “we” can be exclusive (speaker+others) or inclusive (speaker and addressee). However,
this ambiguity allows the hearer to decide what was communicated.
○ Another difference can be: “let’s go” as in to some friends (inclusive) and “let us go”
(exclusive) as in someone who has captured the speaker and friends.

Spatial deixis

The concept of distance already mentioned is clearly relevant to spatial deixis, where the relative
location of people and things is being indicated.
 - Contemporary English uses only two adverbs ‘here’ and ‘there’
- Older texts/dialects: ‘yonder’ (more distant to speaker), ‘hither’(to this place) and ‘thence’ (from
that place).
- Some verbs of motion such as ‘come’ and ‘go’ retain a deictic sense when they are used to mark
movement toward the speaker “go to bed!” “Come to bed!
- The concept of motion toward the speaker (becoming visible), learned first by children and they
use words like ‘this’ and ‘here’.
- Location from the speaker’s perspective can be fixed mentally as well as physically. In the case of
speakers temporarily away from their home location will often continue to use ‘here’ to refer to
their home location as if they were still there.
Speakers can also project locations as when saying ‘I’ll come later’ (movement to addressee’s
location), this is referred to as deictic projection. Its use increases as more technology allows it to
manipulate location. Another example, “I am not here now” can be used into the recorder of a
telephone answering machine and it would be a dramatic performance for a future audience in
which I project my presence to be in the required location.
The pragmatic basis of spatial deixis is actually psychological distance. Physically close objects will tend
to be treated by the speaker as psychologically close “that man over there”. Whereas, something that is
physically distant will generally be treated as psychologically distant.
However, something that is physically close CAN be treated as psychological distant “I don’t like that”
while sniffing a perfume.

Temporal deixis

The use of the proximal form ‘now’ as indicating both the time coinciding with the speaker’s utterance
and the time of the speaker’s voice being heard by the hearer. In contrast, the distal expression ‘then’
applies to both past and future time relative to the speaker’s time:

- June 13rd, 1981? I was in Boston then.

- Dinner at 9pm on Friday? Okay, I’ll see you then.

We also elaborate systems of non-deictic temporal reference such as: calendar time and clock times.
However, deictic expressions such as ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’,’tonight’, ‘next week’, ‘last week’,
‘this week’. All these expressions depend on their interpretation on knowing the relevant utterance of
time. If we don’t know the utterance time as in “back in an hour”, we won’t know if we have a short or a
long wait ahead.
The psychological basis of temporal deixis seems to be similar to that of spatial deixis. We can treat
temporal events as objects that move toward us or away from us. In English, events coming toward the
speaker from the future take the phrase ‘the coming week’, ‘the approaching year’. Events going away
from the speaker to the past ‘in days gone by’, ‘the past week’.
We also seem to treat the near/immediate future as being close to utterance time by using the proximal
deictic ‘this’ as in “this (coming) weekend”.

In English, one basic type of temporal deixis is in the choice of verb tense:

- Present “I live here now”: proximal form

- Past “I lived there then”: distal form
 Distant vs Distal

★ Distal is remote from the point of attachment or origin, this is something that is treated as
extremely unlikely or impossible from the speaker’s current situation. It can either communicate
distant from current time as well as distance from current reality or facts. Example, “I could be in
Hawaii” (if I had a lot of money). “If I had a yacht,…” “If I was rich,…”: so distant from the
speaker’s current situation that they actually communicate the negative, the speaker does not
have a yacht nor is rich.
★ Distant is far off whether physically, logically or mentally. This is something having taken place
in the past, it is typically treated as distant from the speaker’s current situation. Example, “I
could swim” (when I was a child).

Reference
Reference is an act in which a speaker, or writer uses linguistic forms or co-text to enable a listener
or reader to identify something. Reference is tied to the speaker’s goals and the speaker’s beliefs
in the use of language. Those linguistics forms are referring expressions which can be:

- Proper nouns: ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Massachusetts’, etc.

- Definite noun phrases: the author, the singer, the island
- Indefinite noun phrases: a man, a woman, a beautiful place.
- Pronouns: he, her, it, them

The choice of one type of referring expression seems to be based on what the speaker assumes
the listener already knows. For example, in a shared visual context some pronouns that can
function as successful deictic expressions are ‘take this!’, ‘look at him!’. However, where
identification seems more difficult, we need to use more elaborate noun phrases such as
‘remember the old foreign guy with the funny hat?’

Inference
For successful reference to occur, we must recognize the role of inference. Because there is no
direct relationship between entities and words, the listener’s task is to infer correctly which entity
the speaker intends to identify by using a particular referring expression. So reference is using
observation and background to reach a logical conclusion. You probably practice inference
every day. For example, if you see someone eating a new food and he or she makes a face, then
you infer he does not like it. Or if someone slams a door, you can infer that she is upset about
something.

● Some inferences are vague expressions (the blue thing, that icky stuff, etc.) therefore
relying on the listener’s ability to infer what we have in mind. Speakers even invent names
to refer to something or someone. Successful reference is necessarily collaborative, with
both the speaker and the listener having a role in thinking about what the other has in mind.

Referential and attributive uses

Not all referring expressions have identifiable physical referents. Indefinite noun phrases can be
used to:
 - Identify a physically present entity as in ‘there’s a man waiting for you’
- Describe entities that are assumed to exist but are unknown as in ‘he wants to marry a
woman with lots of money’. This expression can designate an entity that is known to the
speaker only in terms of its descriptive properties. The word ‘a’ could be replaced by ‘any’,
this is an attributive use.
- Describe entities that, as far as we know, do not exist as in ‘we’d love to find a nine-foot-tall
basketball player’

Attributive use refers to the use that a speaker makes of a definite noun phrase to say something
about whatever fits the description of the noun phrase. For example, as in ‘he wants to marry a
woman with lots of money’, the word ‘a’ being replaced by ‘any’ because it refers to
‘whoever-whatever’ fits the description.
Whereas, referential use means that the speaker actually has a person in mind and instead of
using his/her name or some other description, he/she chooses the expression.

A similar distinction can be found with definite noun phrases:

- Attributive use: during a news report on a mysterious death, the reporter says without
knowing for sure if there is a person who could be the referent of the definite expression
‘the killer’, this is an assumption made by the speaker on a referent that must exist.
Some speakers can often invite us to assume, via attributive use, that we can identify what
they are talking about even when the entity/individual described may not exist as in tooth
fairy or Santa Claus.
- Referential use: if a particular individual is identified as having done the killing and had
escaped, then the uttering in the sentence ‘there was no sign of the killer’ would be
referential use, based on the speaker’s knowledge that a referent does exist.

Names and Referents

The version of reference being presented here is one in which there is a basic
‘intention-to-identify’ and a ‘recognition-of-intention’ collaboration at work. This process needs
work between the speaker and listener, it is said to work in terms of convention between all
members of a community that share a common language and culture.

Names, proper nouns like ‘Shakespeare’ and common nouns like ‘the cheese sandwich’ can not
only be used to identify one specific person or thing. Via these expressions, a speaker can use ‘the
cheese sandwich’ phrase to identify a person and ‘Shakespeare’ can be used to identify a thing.
Examples:

- ‘Can I borrow your Shakespeare?’ ‘yeah, it’s over there on the table.’ Referring to a book.
This is a conventional and potentially culture-specific set of entities that can be identified by
the use of a writer’s name. (not only writer but also artists, composers, musicians and many
other producers of objects)
- ‘where’s the cheese sandwich sitting?’ ‘He's over there by the window’ a waiter brings an
order of food for another waiter and asks who ordered it.

There appears to be a pragmatic connection between proper names and objects that will be
conventionally associated, within a socio-culturally defined community with those names. Using a
proper name referentially to identify any such object invites the listener to make the expected
inference (for example, from name of the writer to book by writer) and thereby show himself/herself
to be a member of the same community as the speaker.
The nature of reference interpretation is also what allows readers to make sense of newspaper
headlines using names of countries as in ‘Argentina wins World Cup’, where the referent is to be
understood as a soccer team, not as a government.

The role of co-text

Co-text refers to the words surrounding a particular word or passage within a text that provide
context and help to determine meaning. Co-text is a linguistic part of the environment in which
a referring expression is used. The physical environment (context) is perhaps easier to
recognize as it has a powerful impact on how referring expressions are to be interpreted
(restaurant and speech conventions of those who work there may be crucial to the interpretation,
for example). It limits the range of possible interpretations we might have because the referring
expression provides a range of reference (a number of possible referents)

There can also be local context and local knowledge of the participants (a person being in a
hospital with an illness, then it can be identified via the name of the illness by the nurses). These
conventions differ from one social group to another. This is because reference is not a simple
relationship between the meaning of a word/phrase and an object/person. It is also a social act, in
which the speaker assumes that the word/phrase they choose to identify an object/person will be
interpreted as intended.

Anaphoric reference
Anaphoric reference/anaphora means that a word in a text refers back to other ideas in the text
for its meaning. After the initial introduction of some entity, speakers will use various expressions to
maintain reference. These can be:

- Indefinite: ‘a man’, ‘a woman’, ‘a cat’

- Definite noun phrases: ‘the man’, ‘the woman’, ‘the cat’
- Pronouns: ‘it’, ‘he’, ‘her’, ‘they’

In technical terms, the initial expression is referred to as antecedent and the second or
subsequent expression is called the anaphor.

Cataphora
This refers to something that will be mentioned later as in “I turned the corner and almost stepped
on it. There was a large snake in the middle of the path.” The word ‘it’ refers to ‘snake’ that is
mentioned in the second utterance. This is much less common than anaphora.

Zero anaphora or ellipsis

There is no linguistic expression. The use of ellipsis as a means of maintaining reference
creates an expectation that the listener will be able to infer who or what the speaker intends to
identify. It is also another obvious case of more being communicated than said. Also, the listener is
expected to make more specific types of inferences when the anaphoric expressions don’t seem to
be linguistically connected to their antecedents. Example, ‘peel an onion and slice it. Drop the
slices into hot oil. Cook for three minutes’ the last sentence requires us to identify an entity that it
is expressed before in the text but now, it is omitted (it refers to the peeled and sliced onions)

Speech Acts
Actions are performed via utterances. Speaker’s communicative intention.

Speech events: circumstances surrounding the utterance.

SPEECH ACT THEORY

Levels: ILLOCUTIONARY FORCE, PERLOCUTIONARY EFFECT. Everything is connected

with what we say.

LOCUTIONARY ACT. it’s the act of saying something, the form of the words uttered, producing a
meaningful linguistic expression.

I.F. → it’s the function of the words, the specific purpose the speaker has in mind.

P.E. → it’s the result of the effect on the hearers, the hearer’s reaction.

SPEECH ACTS CLASSIFICATION

1. DECLARATION change the state of the immediate world

2. REPRESENTATIVES tell what the speaker thinks or believes
3. COMMISSIVES commit the speaker to do sth in the future
4. DIRECTIVES make the hearer perform an action
5. EXPRESSIVES show how the speaker feels about a situation

FELICITY CONDITIONS - Speech act success

Austin

→ The content and roles must be recognised by all parties.

→ The action must be carried out completely.

→ The participants must have the right intentions.

John Searle

→ The hearer must hear and understand the language used by the speaker.

→ The speaker must not be pretending/acting.

 Indirect speech acts
Much of the time, what we mean is actually not in the words themselves but in the meaning implied. For many
reasons, for example we don’t wish to impose – we may ask for something to be done indirectly. ‘Can you pass
the salt’ is not really a question, but a directive; an answer of ‘yes’, without an attempt to pass it would be
totally inappropriate. He is expressing a directive, ‘requesting’ indirectly, with the force of the imperative ‘Get
me the salt ’; this is what we call an indirect speech act.
Searle explained that someone using an indirect speech act wants to communicate a different meaning
from the apparent surface meaning; the form and function are not directly related. There is an underlying
pragmatic meaning, and one speech act is performed through another speech act. If the relationship between
structure and function is indirect. Indirect speech acts are part of everyday life. The classification of utterances
in categories of in direct and direct speech acts is not an easy task, because much of what we say operates on
both levels, and utterances often have more than one of the macro functions (‘representative’, ‘commissive’,
‘directive’, ‘expressive’ and so on). Indirect speech acts are commonly used to reject proposals and to make
requests.

Direct Speech act

Searle said that a speaker using a direct speech act wants to communicate the literal meaning that the
words conventionally express; there is a direct relationship between the form and the function. Thus, a
declarative form (not to be confused with declaration speech acts) such as ‘I was going to get another one’ has
the function of a statement or assertion; an interrogative form such as ‘Do you like the tuna and sweetcorn
ones?’ has the function of a question; and an imperative form such as ‘Get me one’ has the function of a
request or order.

Speech acts and society

- Social dimension: Indirectness is so much associated with politeness that directives are more often
expressed as interrogatives than imperatives. This is especially the case with people with whom one
is not familiar. An interesting case here is the sign to the general public in many British restaurants,
bookshops and petrol stations, which says, ‘Thank you for not smoking.’ The expressive ‘thanking’
speech act is presumably used because it sounds more polite and friendly to all the strangers who
read the sign, than the impersonal directive prohibiting ‘No Smoking.’ Other factors that can make
speakers use indirect directives, in addition to lack of familiarity, are the reasonableness of the task,
the formality of the context and social distance (differences of status, roles, age, gender, education,
class, occupation and ethnicity). Social distance can give speakers power and authority, and it is
generally those of the less dominant role and so on who tend to use indirectness.
- Cultural dimensión: Speech acts and their linguistic realizations are culturally bound. The ways of expressing
speech acts vary from country to country, from culture to culture. In India, for example, the
expressive speech act of ‘praising’ and ‘congratulating’ a person on their appearance can be
realized by the words ‘How fat you are!’, because weight is an indicator of prosperity and health, in a
country where there is malnutrition. In Britain, these words express a speech act of ‘deploring’ or
‘criticizing’, since the fashion and diet foods industries, and possibly health education, have
conditioned many into thinking that ‘slim is beautiful’.
Differences in speech act conventions can cause difficulties cross-culturally.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Complete utterances are linked to other complete utterances through their function, and indeed
that whole chunks of conversation are related to the surrounding chunks by the structure of
conversation. Conversations tend to occur in strings of related and combined utterances.

Exchange structure
 The combination of moves in the IRF (initiation, response and follow up) is known as the
EXCHANGE.

When one person asks and the other only answers , this is not a real conversation, in the sense of
people having a casual chat. The act is the lowest rank.

Sinclair and Coulthard said that these acts tend to be carried out in a fixed order of moves, as
they call the next rank up. They found that there are basic moves→ IRF: the initiation from a
person (e.g. a teacher), the response from other person( e.g. a student) and the follow-up ( which is
the first person’s comment on the other other’s answers ( teacher’s comment on the student’s
answer).

the exchange structure approach looked at discourse as a predetermined sequence

Each part of the IRF has characteristic acts that occur in it. Example:

Limitation of IRF

The IRF model has certain limitations as a model of classroom transactions. It does not
accommodate easily to the real-life pressures and unruliness of the classroom, such as a
pupil not responding to a teacher or asking a friend to respond. Another limitation of the
model is that it reflects the traditional teacher-centered classroom, in which the teacher is
permitted long turns and the students can have short turns in response.

The IRF approach is rarely used today. It was explicitly restricted to classroom discourse
and there have been adaptations of this framework. Although the structure of classroom
transactions is not typical of everyday talk, it is typical of transactions of a formal and
ritualistic nature with one person in a position of power over the other(s), controlling the
discourse and planning it to a certain extent.

Conversation analysis

Conversation analysis (CA) takes a “bottom-up”starting with the conversation itself, it lets the
data dictate its own structure. CA looks at conversation as a linear ongoing event that unfolds little
by little and implies the negotiation of cooperation between speakers along the way, thus viewing
conversation as a process. CA differs in its methodology from discourse analysis: for example it
takes real data and then examines the language and demonstrates that conversation is systematically
structured. Unlike exchange structure, both CA and discourse analysis are approaches that have
evolved over the last decades and are very much alive today.

Conversation is discourse mutually constructed and negotiated in time between speakers; it is

usually informal and unplanned. Cook says that talk may be classed as conversation when :

Many linguists would contend Cook’s property of “not primarily necessitated by a practical
task”, and say that most of what we say is outcome oriented. Even the most casual of conversations
have an interactional function. Otros linguists would contend the property “ any unequal power of
participants is partially suspended”, pointing out that in all exchanges, there is unequal power in
varying degrees, and that conversation can occur when there are significant power differentials
between participants.

Turn-taking

Cooperation in conversation is managed by all the participants through turn-taking. In most

cultures, only one person speaks at a time. All cultures have their own preference as to how long a
speaker should hold the floor, how they indicate that they have finished, etc.

A point in a conversation where a change of turn is possible is called a transition relevance

place or TRP. Next speakers cannot be sure that the current speaker's turn is complete, but they
will usually take the end of a sentence to indicate that the current speaker’s turn is possibly
complete. When speakers do not want to wait until the TRP, this is called interruption (indicated
with a //)

When hearers predict that the turn is about to be completed and they come in before it is.This is
an overlap ( indicated with a =). The lack of overlaps and interruptions in the serials and shows can
also be explained by the fact that they ares scripted or semi-scripted: the language is more “tidy”
than real-life discourse, and the turns are pre-planned.

Each culture seems to have an unwritten agreement about the acceptable length of a pause
between turns. In any culture, if the pause is intended to carry meaning, analysts call it an
“attributable silence”.

Adjacency pairs

CA analysts say that there is a relation between acts, and that conversation contains frequently
occuring patterns, in pairs of utterances known as ‘adjacency pairs’. They say that the utterance of
one speaker makes a certain response of the next speaker very likely. The acts are ordered with a
first part and a second part and categorised as question-answer, offer-accept, blame-deny and so on.
This is known as preference structure: each first part has a preferred and a dispreferred response.

The dispreferred responses tend to be the refusal and disagreements. An absence of response can
be taken as the hearer not having heard, not paying attention or simply refusing to cooperate.

Sequences

Conversation analysts claim that as speakers are mutually constructing and negotiating their
conversation in time, certain sequences emerge. These can be *pre-sequences, insertion sequence
and opening and closing sequences.

→ Pre-sequences prepare the ground for a further sequence and signal the type of utterance to
follow. There are pre-invitations( e.g I’ve got 2 tickets for the concert), pre-requests (e.g Are u busy
right now?) and pre-announcements (e.g You’ll never guess!)

→ Insertion . The pairs occur embedded within other adjacency pairs which act as macro-
sequences. The dispreferred response turns into an insertion sequence.

→ Openings tend to contain a greeting, an inquiry after health and a ást reference. The Br. and
North Americans tend to have a pre-closing sequence rather than just ending with a farewell. This
sequence can be long and drawn out on occasions.

Limitation of CA

One problem with CA is that there is a lack of systematicity in the sense that there is not an
exhaustive list of all adjacency pairs, or a precise description of how adjacency pairs or TROs might
be recognized.

Another criticism levelled at CA is that it does not take into account pragmatic or sociolinguistic
aspects of interaction, the background context of why and how people say, components of situation
and the features of the social world and social identity such as occupation and gender of
participants.

NOTAS DE LA CLASE 13.10.21

COOPERATION
HUMAN COMMUNICATION

-Successful communication

-Social conventions, associated with the situation they are.

-Eageness

-Willingness

-Collaboration / Cooperation / Negotiation / Common Purpose

Paul Grice 1975

He developed the Cooperative Principle.

1. MAXIM OF QUANTITY → Your utterances should be as informative as required (≠ You

shouldn’t give too much or too little info)
2. MAXIM OF QUALITY → As truth as required (≠ False and unreal info)
3. MAXIM OF RELATION → As relevant as required (≠ Change of topic)
4. MAXIM OF MANNER → As clear as required (≠ Obscure and ambiguous)

GRICE’S MAXIM:

-Unwritten Conventions

-Basic and unstated assumptions

HEDGES: Not to take full responsibility for the quality of an utterance.

1. Hedges of QUALITY (We soften our information, we are not sure)

2. Hedges of QUANTITY (Connected with the amount of information that we provide)
3. Hedges of MANNER (Connected with being clear)
4. Hedges of RELEVANCE (It is like “Let me tell you sth before I forget…”)

MAXIMS VIOLATION

● Not adhering to maxims

● Make corrections
● Ostentatiously
● Adjust speech (Deceive, White lie)

FLOUTING THE MAXIMS

● Disregarding maxims
● Intentional
● Face saving
● Hearer’s inference
● Not literal meaning
● Sound polite
OTHER WAYS OF FLOUTING QUALITY

● Hyperbole → Language that describes sth as better or worse than it really is, to
exaggerate or emphasize.
● Metaphor → Language that describes sth as sth else, to suggest they’re similar.
● Euphemism → Language to sound less offensive, to lessen the harshness of its meaning.
● Irony → The speaker expresses a positive meaning and implies a negative one.
● Banter → Negative language to indicate a positive thing, usually to tease sb or flirt.

As regards Maxims, it results in a successful communication.

CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURES

● No special context
● Not based on maxims
● Associated with specific words
● Contrast
● Addition
● Possibility
● Condition
 Implicature

Conversational implicature

The speaker must intend that the speaker infer that what is mentioned was not brought.
There is no special context, it is not based on maxims. It is associated with specific words.
It is speakers who communicate meaning via implicatures and it is listeners who recognize those
communicated meaning via inference.

Generalized conversational implicatures

When no special knowledge is required in the context to calculate the conveyed meaning it is called a
generalized conversational implicature.
One common example in English involves any phrase with an indefinite article such as “a garden” and “a
child.” These phrases are typically interpreted according to the generalized conversational implicature ,
it is known that it is not the speaker’s; if the speaker was capable of being more specific, then he or she
would have said “my garden” and “my child.”

Scalar implicatures
These are a number of generalized conversational implicatures that are commonly communicated on the
basis of a scale of values.
Certain info is always communicated by choosing a word which expresses one value from a scale of
values.
This is particularly obvious in terms of expressing quantity like “all, most, many, some, few, always,
often, sometimes.”
When producing an utterance, a speaker selects a word from the scale which is the most informative and
truthful (quantity and quality) in the circumstances.
The basis of scalar implicature is that when any form in a scale is asserted, the negative of all forms
higher on the scale is implicated.
Example:
when we use “some” we imply “not most, not many”.
when we use “sometimes”, we imply “not always, not often.”
One noticeable feature of this implicature, is that when speakers correct themselves on some detail, they
typically cancel one of the scalar implicatures. Like in “I got some stones, um actually, most of them.”

Particularized conversational implicatures

Most of the time, our conversations take place in very specific contexts in which locally recognized
inferences are assumed. Such inferences are required to work out the conveyed meaning which result
from particularized conversational implicatures.
The speaker asks sth, and in order to make the hearer’s answer relevant, the speaker has to draw on
some assumed knowledge.
A: Hey, are you coming to the wild party tonight?
B: My parents are visiting.

An additional conveyed meaning can be an answer that is so obvious that the question did not need to
be asked.
A: Do vegetarians eat hamburgers?
B: Do chicken have lips?

Properties of conversational implicatures

Because these implicatures are part of what is communicated and not said, speakers can always deny
that they intended to communicate such meaning.
CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES ARE DENIABLE. They can be explicitly denied in different
ways.
It is quite easy for a speaker to suspend the implicature “only” using the expression “at least”, or to cancel
the implicature by adding further info, often following the expression “in fact” or to reinforce the
implicature with additional info. “You’ve won five dollars, in fact, ten!”
Conversational implicatures can be calculated, suspended, cancelled and reinforced.

Conventional implicatures

Conventional implicatures are not based on the cooperative principle or the maxims. They don’t have to
occur in conversations, and they don’t depend on special contexts for their interpretation.
Conventional implicatures are associated with specific words and result in additional conveyed meaning
when those words are used. The English conjunction “but” is one of these words.
Other English words such as “even” and “yet” also have conventional implicatures. When “even” is
included in any sentence describing an event, there is an implicature of “contrary to expectation”.
The conventional implicature of “yet” is that the present situation is expected to be different, or perhaps
the opposite, at a later time.
It may be possible to treat the so-called different meanings of “and” in English as instances of
conventional implicature in different structures.
● When two statements containing static infor are joined by “and” the implicature is simply “in
addition” or plus. Example: Mary was happy and ready to work.
● When the two statements contain dynamic, action-related info, the implicature of “and” is “and
then”, indicating sequence. Example: She put on her clothes and left the house.
For many linguists, the notion of “implicature” is one of the central concepts in pragmatics. An
implicature is certainly a prime example of more being communicated than is said.

Politeness
We refer to the choices that are made in language use, the linguistic expressions that give people space
and show a friendly attitude to them.
It is possible to specify a number of different general principles for being polite in social interaction
within a particular culture.
With an interaction there is a more narrowly specified type of politeness at work. In order to describe it,
we need the concept of face.

Face

Face means the public self-image of a person. It refers to that emotional and social sense of self that
everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize.
Politeness can be defined as the means employed to show awareness of another person’s face.
Politeness can be accomplished in situations of social distance or closeness.
● Showing awareness for another person’s face when that other seems socially distant is often
described in terms of respect or deference.
● Showing the equivalent of awareness when the other is close is often described in terms of
friendliness, camaraderie, or solidarity.

Within their everyday social interactions, people generally behave as if their expectations concerning
their public self-image, or their face wants, will be respected.
If a speaker says sth that represents a threat to another individual’s expectation regarding self-image, it is
described as a face threatening act (FTA)
Given the possibility that some action may be interpreted as a threat to another’s face, the speaker can
say sth to lessen the possible threat. This is called a face saving act (FSA).
It is generally expected that each person will attempt to respect the face wants of others.

Negative face
A person’s negative face is the need to be independent, to have freedom of action, and not to be imposed
on by others. Negative politeness is a face saving act which is oriented to the person’s negative face will
tend to show deference, emphasize the importance of the other’s time or concerns, and even include an
apology for the imposition or interruption.

Positive face
A person’s positive face is the need to be accepted, even liked, by others, to be treated as a member of
the same group, and to know that his or her wants are shared by others. Positive politeness is a face
saving act which is concerned with the person’s positive face will tend to show solidarity, emphasize that
both speakers want the same thing, and that they have a common goal.

Pre-sequences:

Fce is typically at risk when the self needs to accomplish sth involving other. Rather than simply
making a request, speakers will often first produce a pre-request. The advantage of the
pre-request elements is that it can be answered either with a ‘go ahead’ response or a ‘stop’
response. A general pattern of pre-request actually being treated as request and being responded
to with the action being performed.
Example:
a: “are you busy?” (pre-request)
b: no, why?
A: Let’s go to the cinema.

·SAY STH-OFF AND ON RECORD

even if you decide to say sth, you don’t actually have to say something.
· SAY NOTHING APPROACH: your first choice is whether to say something or not. Example:
You’re leaving the supermarket carrying lots of bags. You accidentally drop one and sigh loudly,
shaking your head, while looking around you. At that moment, the shop assistant sees you,
comes to pick it up and helps you carry your bags. You didn’t explicitly ask for help. This “say
nothing” approach may or may not work, but if it does, it’s because the other offers and not
because the self asks.

· SAY STH OFF RECORD APPROACH: when you say sth off record, you ask for help
indirectly. This particular off-record communicative act is an indirect speech-acts, they may be
referred as “hints”. Indirectness in the form of indirect speech acts and maxim flouting allows a
speaker to make suggestions, requests, offers or invitations quite casually without addressing
them to anyone in particular. The illocutory force will most likely be understood by the hearer,
but they can choose to ignore it. Hearers usually know what is implied, but they have the
freedom to respond or to ignore it without losing face. The speaker is showing great awareness
of face and not imposing much at all.

· SAY STH BALD ON RECORD APPROACH: you can directly address the other as a means
of expressing needs. The most direct approach, using imperative forms is known as bald on
record. If a speaker makes a suggestion, request, offer or invitation in an open and direct way,
we say that they are doing a face threatening act bald on record. These are direct speech acts,
such utterances tend to contain the imperative with no mitigating devices (like please). These
sentences leave the hearer little to no option but to do as they are told or be seen as
uncooperative. Example: “Fix this.” Sometimes bald-on record events can actually be oriented
to saving the hearer´s face, like in “Marry me”. The directness also makes the hearer less
reluctant to threaten the speaker’s face by accepting. The firmer the invitation, the more polite
it is. Directness often indicates a wish to be seen as socially close.

· SAY STH ON RECORD WITH NEGATIVE POLITENESS APPROACH: negative politeness

strategies pay attention to negative face, by demonstrating the distance between interlocutors,
and avoiding intruding on each other’s territory. Speakers use them to avoid imposing or
presuming and to give the hearer options. Speakers can avoid imposing by emphasizing the
importance of the other’s time and concerns, using apology and hesitation or a question giving
them the opportunity to say no. The extent of the option giving influences the degree of
politeness. In many cases, the grater chance that the speaker offers the hearer to say “no”, the
more polite it is. Example: “I couldn’t borrow 30 dollars, could I, If you don’t need it right now?

· SAY STH ON RECORD WITH POSITIVE POLITENESS APPROACH: positive politeness

strategies aim to save politeness face, by demonstrating closeness and solidarity, appealing to
friendship, making other people feel good, and emphasizing that both speakers have a common
goal. Brown and Levinson say that one of the main types of positive politeness strategy is
claiming common ground. Speakers do this by attending to the hearer’s interests, wants and
needs. Example: “I’ll always do what you ask, I’ll never stop loving you.”

· Politeness and cooperative principle: speakers can violate cooperative maxims if they want to
show positive politeness. Example: a: How do I look? B: Good” (thinks: awful)

Politeness maxims

according to Leech (1983), there is politeness principles with conversational maxims. He lists six
maxims

Maxim of Tact and generosity (pair)

Tact: perhaps the most important kind of politeness in English speaking society. It focuses on
the hearer and says “minimize cost to other” and “maximize benefit to other”. The first part of
the maxim fits in with the negative politeness strategy and the second part reflects the positive
politeness strategy.

Generosity: it focuses on “minimize benefit to self” and “maximize cost to self”.

Maxim of approbation and modesty (pair)

Approbation: it says “minimize dispraise of other” and “maximize praise of other” The first part
of the maxim is similar to the politeness strategy of avoiding disagreement. The second part fits
in with the positive politeness strategy of making other people feel good by showing solidarity.
Example: “You are a very fast writer, you must have what the teacher just said.”
Modesty: it says “minimize praise of self” and “maximize dispraise of self”. Modesty is possibly a
more complex maxim than other, since the maxim of quality can sometimes be violated in
observing it. Example: “I’m so stupid! I didn’t make a note of what she said, did you?

Maxim of Agreement

“Minimize disagreement between self and other” and “maximize agreement between self and
other.” It is in line with positive politeness.

Maxim of Sympathy

“Minimize antipathy between self and other” and “maximize sympathy between self and other”.
It includes such polite speech acts as congratulate, and express condolences. Positive politeness
strategy.

Maxim of Consideration

This wasn’t part of the original maxims. Cruse proposed this. “Minimize discomfort/displeasure
of other” and “maximize comfort/pleasure of other.”

· OVERLAPS AND GAPS: one utterance can contain both positive and negative politeness:
“Could you take me home? Don’t bother if you can’t.” One utterance can obey two or more
maxims. Tact and generosity: “Have as many cake as you want.”

POLITENESS AND CONTEXT:

Form and function: Politeness is a pragmatic phenomenon. Politeness lies not in the form and
the words themselves, but in their function and intended social meaning. If speakers use more
polite forms than the context requires, hearer might suspect that there is an intention other
than that of redressing and FTA. Politeness is NOT the same as deference, which is a polite
form expressing distance from and respect for people of a higher status, and does not usually
include an element of context.

Situation Context: Since politeness is a pragmatic phenomenon, it is influenced by elements of

the context. There are two situational context factors that influence the way we make a request:
1. Size of imposition, the routines and reasonableness of task, “the
grater the imposition, the more indirect the language is.”
 2. The formality of the context, “the grater the formality, the more
indirect the language.”
Social Context: the choice of the politeness formulation depends on the social distance
and the power relation between speakers. When there is social distance, politeness is
encoded and there is more indirectness; where there is less social distance, there is less
negative politeness and indirectness. The variables that determine social distance are:
1. The degree of familiarity between speakers is one of the most
obvious variables. Speakers who know each other well don’t need to
use formulas encoding politeness strategies, and when they do use
them, it can imply quite the opposite of politeness.
2. Differences of status, roles, age, gender, education, class,
occupation and ethnicity can give speakers power and authority. It is
those of the lower status who use more indirectness and negative
politeness devices. Expressions that are bald on record are used by
people who assume that they have got power.
Cultural Context: the relationship between indirectness and social variables is not so
simple: the whole issue of politeness and language is exceedingly culture-bound. Tannen
says that the use of indirectness “can hardly be understood without the cross-cultural
perspective.” Example: the British reject praise in the form of a personal compliment,
whereas the Janapese accept a compliment graciously.

Politeness Strategies

1. Solidarity Strategy: the tendency to use positive politeness forms, emphasizing

closeness between speaker and hearer. A solidarity strategy will be marked via
inclusive terms such as “we”, such strategy will include personal info, nicknames,
sometimes even abusive terms, and shared dialect or slang expressions.
2. Deference Strategy: the tendency to use negative politeness forms, emphasizing
the hearer’s right to freedom. A deference strategy is involved in “formal politeness”.
It is impersonal, as if nothing is shared and can include expressions that refer to
neither the speaker not the hearer. The language associated with a deference strategy
 emphasizes the speaker’s and the hearer’s independence, marked via an absence of
personal claims. Example: “Customers may not smoke here.”

10.11.21
THEME by Halliday