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CHAPTER 1

Using and understanding language

We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.
(Sam Johnson, in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 11 April 1776)

Keywords: context, deictic, face, index, indexicality, infer, inference,

intention, metapragmatic, non-​deictic, optimality, politeness, ­procedural,
proposition, sentence meaning, speaker meaning, speech act,
talk-​in-​interaction,  turn

A definition: Pragmatics is the study of the use of language.

1.1  STUDYING LANGUAGE IN USE

One Saturday afternoon not long ago, I was with a group of friends enjoying
an ice-​cream outside a village shop after a long walk. For some weeks I’d
been thinking about the opening paragraph of this book and how it would be
good to find a simple example of real talk to illustrate the difference between
pragmatics and other areas of language study. As we were eating our ice-​
creams, a bus passed, at which point this apparently inane exchange occurred
between two of the people in our group:

(1) ANNE: That’s the bus

CLARE: It is the bus

I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s easy enough to describe the grammatical form
of each utterance using terms such as subject, (copular) verb and comple-
ment. And it’s easy enough to describe the phonetic forms the speakers
use in terms of the place and manner of their articulation. And it’s easy
enough to explain the meanings associated with each of the forms. But
pragmatics isn’t about forms, it’s about the use of forms: although we know
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what the speakers’ words mean formally (their semantics), knowing what
the speakers mean by using them (their pragmatics) isn’t so obvious. To help
us to get on terms with pragmatics, I’m going to ask you to think about this
example and the few more that follow. Towards the end of the chapter, we’ll
come back to each of them and consider what they tell us about pragmatics
and the use of language. So, before you read on, please try to answer this
question:

Why do Anne and Clare say what they say?

Example 2

I’m washing my car in the street. A car draws up on the other side of the road,
and this is what occurs:

(2) CAR DRIVER: Excuse me, is this Buston Terrace

<I walk across the road with the sponge in my hand and see that
the driver and his wife are looking at their satnav with a puzzled
expression>
ME: Yes, it is. You need to get yourself a better car with a satnav that
works

This is the question for you to think about:

What do you think about what I say and what do you think happens next?

Example 3

Most buses in Britain have an upper deck, typically with a staircase that comes
down to the lower deck just behind the driver’s seat on the right-​hand side of
the bus. (In the UK, the driver sits on the right of a vehicle as people drive on
the left.) I’m on just such a double-​decker, and when it reaches the stop where
I want to get off, a passenger from the upper deck arrives at the bottom of
the staircase at the same time as I get there from the lower deck, and this
exchange occurs:

(3) HIM: After you

ME: After you
HIM: No, after you

What do we each do next? Does either of us speak, and, if so, what do you
think we say?
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Example 4

It’s breakfast time in a small hotel when this exchange takes place between a
female guest sitting at the table next to me and the landlady:

(4) GUEST: Is the bar open

LANDLADY: No, it doesn’t open till later

The guest then speaks again and I add a comment.

What do you think we each say?

Example 5

I’m listening to a chatty radio programme hosted by two presenters, one male
and one female, who are talking about what clothes tell you about the person
who wears them. At one point, the male presenter says:

(5) MALE PRESENTER: That’s one of the advantages of working on radio –​

you can wear anything you like or absolutely nothing at all and no one
would ever know

He pauses briefly and then adds three more words which suggest that either
he or the female presenter, or perhaps both, are wearing no clothes.

What words do you think he adds?

Example 6

At the supermarket checkout, the till operator gives me my change and hands
me a coupon. This is what happens next:

(6) ME <reading the coupon>: Oh, 25p off milk products

TILL OPERATOR: You never know when you might want something

What do you think about her utterance and what do you think I say or
do next?

Example 7

I’m second in a queue in the bus station waiting for the bus to come. When it
comes, it’s obvious that the person in front of me doesn’t know that passengers
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have to push a knob to open the glass door to get to the bus. He’s standing
slightly in front of the knob and so he can’t see it without looking over his
shoulder.

What happens next? Who speaks first and what do they say?

Now you’ve done some work, I’ll do a little myself before we return to the
examples and to your ideas about them.
Let’s begin with a scenario. Walking at a brisk pace along the footpath,
I pass a mother with a small boy in a pushchair and a small girl trotting along
beside them. As I pass, this exchange occurs:

(7) SMALL BOY: Man

ME: Is that your brother
SMALL GIRL: Yes
ME: It takes all sorts
MOTHER: It certainly does

Unexceptional, you might think, but from a pragmaticist’s point of view, this
exchange, like any other, is far from uninteresting. Let’s look at it, utterance by
utterance.
SMALL BOY: Man
Although this utterance consists only of a single noun, the speaker uses it
for a purpose –​to demonstrate to himself or to his mother or to his sister or
perhaps to all three of them his ability to recognize objects. Perhaps even to
show off this ability. As pragmaticists, we see that the form of his utterance
(its grammar) and its literal semantic meaning fail to determine its pragmatic
function, which we have to work out for ourselves.
ME: Is that your brother
Although I’m not addressed by the small boy and have never met him before,
it feels inappropriate to continue walking past without a response, and I find
myself opting for a relatively neutral question to his sister. I suppose my use of
‘that’ rather than ‘he’ might encode my wish to get my own back on the small
boy who’s drawn attention to me and caused us all just a little embarrassment.
And because I choose the formula, ‘your brother’, rather than, say, ‘her brother’,
I select the small girl as the person who must respond.
SMALL GIRL: Yes
The small girl’s minimal answer perhaps suggests that she doesn’t think the
mild criticism implicit in ‘that’ is appropriate. Or perhaps that she thinks it’s
unfair that I’ve picked her out to respond in a slightly awkward situation.
ME: It takes all sorts
Although I don’t identify the person referred to, my idiomatic suggestion that
we’ve a character in our midst is readily taken to refer to the small boy. The
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utterance also functions as a kind of compliment because it implies that a

small infant whose contribution to the exchange has been only a single word
has a distinct character and that his small sister is clever enough to understand
this pragmatic meaning.
MOTHER: It certainly does
Like ‘it takes all sorts’, the children’s mother’s utterance is also indirect, that’s
to say, she confirms that her small son is a character although she doesn’t say
this explicitly. Although her comment might in theory be taken to refer to me,
in which case, it would certainly be an insult, it never occurs to us to take it
this way. Thus, an exchange that had begun badly for all of us with a small boy
making an audible comment about a stranger ends with everyone feeling good.

Here’s another scenario which also had an awkward element to it, but which
ended happily. I’m standing at the bar of our local pub having a quiet drink. Two
large men have just come in and are standing next to me. The barman’s serving
them when the barmaid appears and says

(8) BARMAID: Are you two both together –​well you know what I mean
ME: I was wondering too
ONE OF THE MEN: That’s how rumours get started

Again, if we look at this exchange, utterance by utterance, we see that our

ability as pragmatically skilled conversationalists to recognize meanings that
are implicit rather than explicit is crucial to our understanding.
BARMAID: Are you two both together –​well you know what I mean
It’s clear from the barmaid’s ‘you know what I mean’ that the optimal meaning
of ‘are you two both together’ isn’t the meaning she intends. Those familiar with
the British pub context know that Are you together functions as an offer made
by someone working behind a bar to serve a person standing beside someone
who’s already being served. On this occasion, the barmaid fails to produce this
optimal form, so her untypical utterance prompts us to search for another pos-
sible meaning. Perhaps it’s a combination of the slightly dismissive ‘you two’
and the redundant ‘both’ which causes the barmaid to realize that she might be
thought to be asking the men if they are a gay couple. Her use of ‘well’ is also
crucial –​imagine the quite different force the utterance would be likely to have
without it. It seems that ‘well’ mitigates the force of ‘you know what I mean’
and goes some way to apologizing for the unintended meaning that arises as
a result of the speaker’s unfortunate choice of words.
ME: I was wondering too
Although what’s just happened has nothing to do with me, I can hardly pretend
I haven’t heard what was said. Even keeping quiet might be taken to imply
that I’m at least considering whether the men standing next to me could be a
couple, so it seems safer to speak. Fortunately, my utterance is regarded as a
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joke. Perhaps the use of ‘too’ aligns me with the barmaid and her mistake –​
somehow her pragmatically inappropriate choice of words seems less prob-
lematic when someone else states, but does not mean, that they could have
made the same mistake.
ONE OF THE MEN: That’s how rumours get started
Just as the barmaid commented on the unintended pragmatic meaning of her
own utterance, so the customer also refers to her utterance, from which he
distances himself with the use of ‘that’. And in his use of ‘rumours’, he implies
that he isn’t gay. It’s also noticeable that it’s important to clear up the possible
misunderstanding before attending to the matter of whether or not the two
men are together and whether one of them is waiting to be served.

Interestingly, I was in another pub on a different occasion when a similar scen-

ario occurred. As before, I’m standing at the bar having a drink and the barman’s
serving a customer with someone else standing next to him. A second barman
appears and this exchange follows:

(9) SECOND BARMAN: Are you together

CUSTOMER: We’re not together together if you know what we mean

As the customer stressed the first use of ‘together’, I took him to mean that
they were together (so the first barman should serve both of them) but that,
contrary to the British custom where whoever orders the drinks buys the round,
they would each pay for their own drinks –​i.e. they weren’t ‘together’ in the
usual sense in which the word is used in this situation. So the use of the first
‘together’ is metalinguistic in that it glosses or explains the second ‘together’.
And indeed they did each pay for their own drinks –​they must have been poor
students. Notice also how we understand the customer’s first use of ‘we’ to
include the other customer but to exclude the barman, whereas sometimes
we use we, as I’m intending to do now, to include the person or people we
(i.e. you and I) address. I can’t make my mind up about the customer’s second
use of ‘we’ in ‘if you know what we mean’ –​does he refer only to himself, as
he comments on his obscure use of ‘together together’ or does he intend to
include himself and his friend in the reference? What do you think?
One more scenario, this one involving my friend, Phil, and the exchange
that followed when asked to give his name at the counter in Starbucks:

(10) BARISTA: Your name

PHIL: Bill
BARISTA: Bill
PHIL: Bill
BARISTA: Your name is Bill
PHIL: Yes, Bill
BARISTA: OK
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The exchange will probably appear rather strange to you, just as it did to Phil,
until he took his coffee and went to sit down, at which point he realized why the
exchange had taken such an unusual course.
BARISTA: Your name
As we see, this is an economical or elliptical way of asking someone for their
name. Moreover, we know that in Starbucks, unlike in a police station, it’s our
given name and not our family name that we’re expected to provide.
PHIL: Bill
I don’t know if it’s the same where you live, but in Britain quite a lot of people don’t
like being asked to give their name in Starbucks and so give a false name. Phil
always says he’s ‘Bill’, so he isn’t one of those naughty boys who give their name
as ‘Willy’ for the pleasure of hearing the barista sing it out when their food’s ready.
BARISTA: Bill
When the barista repeats ‘Bill’, it’s with a rising, interrogative intonation which
conveys perhaps that he isn’t sure that he’s heard correctly or perhaps that
he finds Phil’s answer surprising. The prosody is also quite different from the
prosody in Phil’s previous use of the same single-​word utterance, as we might
expect, since the function of this utterance is different from the function of
Phil’s semantically identical utterance. As skilled users of language, we know
that this kind of prosodic marking is an important way of conveying pragmatic
meaning.
PHIL: Bill
The same single-​word utterance now occurs for a third time and with a third
intonation contour which marks it as a confirmation that the speaker’s name
is indeed Bill.
BARISTA: Your name is Bill
Once again, this is said with a strongly rising interrogative intonation and
accompanied by a frown so that what’s said, how it’s said and the facial expres-
sion that accompanies saying it all tell us that the barista doesn’t believe what
he’s heard: although he says ‘your name is Bill’, the way he says it tells us that
he’s asserting its opposite, that’s to say I don’t think your name is Bill.
PHIL: Yes, Bill
Although Phil must surely realize that the barista doesn’t think his name is Bill, in
saying ‘Yes, Bill’, he responds to the literal meaning of ‘Your name is Bill’ and not to
the pragmatic meaning conveyed by the barista’s intonation, presumably because
both speakers would lose a lot of face and some awkward explanation would
have been called for if he’d said something like ‘OK, it’s not Bill, actually it’s Phil’.
BARISTA: OK
As with every other turn in this exchange, the issue isn’t what the words mean
but what is meant by using them. ‘OK’ can be used to mean many different
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things. Here it seems to mean something like ‘Be silly if you want –​we’ll
do it your way’ and indicates that the barista won’t pursue this unproductive
exchange any further.

So Phil takes the coffee which he’s earned after a long morning working with
children in the primary school he’s been visiting up the road. He’s a writer and
from time to time goes into schools to work with students. He’s been to a
good school this morning where the teacher distributes star-​shaped pieces
of card for everyone to write their name on and pin to their chest so that Phil
can address each child by name. Unfortunately, he’s forgotten to remove his
before leaving the school and walking down the road to Starbucks, and it’s
only now as he sits down with his coffee reflecting on the very odd barista in
this branch of Starbucks that he remembers that his real name is pinned to
his chest on a star-​shaped piece of yellow card. This reminds us that when
we use language, we take the context in which we use it into account and
explains why the barista had conveyed in the way he said ‘Your name is Bill’
that he meant I don’t think your name is Bill.

A useful way of explaining the uses of language in the scenarios we’ve been
studying is to make a distinction between sentence meaning (in this case,
what ‘Your name is Bill’ means literally) and speaker meaning (in this case,
I don’t think your name is Bill). I began this chapter by defining pragmatics
as ‘the study of the use of language’; while semantics is the study of sen-
tence meaning, pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning, that’s to say the
meanings that emerge from our use of language. This point is well made by
Atkinson, Kilby and Roca, who define pragmatics as being to do with ‘The dis-
tinction between what a speaker’s words (literally) mean and what the speaker
might mean by his words’ (1988: 217). If you return to the scenarios we’ve just
been discussing, you’ll see that we can easily distinguish what is said (sen-
tence meaning) from what is meant by saying (speaker meaning) not only in
every turn in the Starbucks scenario but in every turn in each of the preceding
exchanges too.

1.2  FROM DESCRIPTION TO EXPLANATION

The observations we’ve been making about some of the pragmatic properties
of these brief, everyday exchanges show how subtle even the most apparently
straightforward uses of language are. We study pragmatics in order to describe
and ultimately to explain how we produce and understand such everyday (and
sometimes apparently rather peculiar) uses of language. With these thoughts
in mind, let’s return to the examples that you thought about before.
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Example 1

As we were eating our ice-​creams, a bus passed, at which point this apparently
inane exchange occurred between two of the people in our group:

(1) ANNE: That’s the bus

CLARE: It is the bus

Why do Anne and Clare say what they say?

One possible answer to this question is that Anne is 3 years old and, like the
small child who sees me and says ‘Man’, Anne points to a particular bus that
passes and says ‘That’s the bus’ to draw her mother Clare’s attention to her
skill in identifying the object she sees. Clare’s emphatic ‘It is the bus’ (rather
than ‘It’s the bus’) seems to support this explanation. Conversation analysts
call Clare’s response next turn proof procedure because it’s only when the
next turn occurs in a conversation that we can be sure of how the person who
speaks understood the previous turn. But Anne and Clare aren’t mother and
child, they’re fully grown adults, as perhaps Anne’s use of the definite noun
phrase ‘the bus’, rather than the indefinite ‘a bus’, suggests. When we use the
definite determiner the together with a countable noun such as child(ren) or
bus(es), we assume the person we address can determine which particular
children we’re referring to. So on this occasion, Anne doesn’t need to say any
more than ‘the bus’ to convey the speaker meaning she has in mind. This is
because she knows that Clare will infer that it’s the bus that Joan, a member
of our group who left five minutes earlier, was intending to catch. Put another
way, although the noun phrase ‘the bus’ is underdetermined, Clare’s able
to find a context (Joan has gone to catch a bus) that makes what she says
relevant. The confirmatory force of Clare’s emphatic ‘It is the bus’ is clearly
different from the force of the unmarked or more usual utterance ‘It’s the
bus’, which we might utter as the first speaker in an exchange to alert a friend
to the approach of a bus for which we are both waiting. We might want to
argue that it would be more usual for Clare to say something like ‘Yes, it is’,
and that ‘It is the bus’ indexes a distinct context, perhaps her surprise, that
the bus has come so soon. Taken together, the two utterances also show the
speakers’ preference for agreement. Had this scenario taken place in Japan,
Anne and Clare might both have used the sentence final particle ne, which
speakers of Japanese use when they want to invite or confirm a common
opinion, so that a Japanese version of this exchange might be:

(1’) ANNE:  Ano     basu da ne

    That   bus is ne
    ‘That’s the bus’
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CLARE:  So     da   ne
     One is ne
      ‘It is the bus’

Clare’s use of the Japanese pronoun ‘so’, referring to ‘ano basu’ in Anne’s
utterance, is intended to represent her emphatic use of ‘is’ in English. In the
normal way, she might well say just ‘Da ne’. (With thanks to Kanako Nishizumi.)
Of course you couldn’t provide exactly this explanation because you didn’t
know about Joan wanting to curtail her walk and go home early on the bus,
but I hope you more or less sussed out that there’s something special about
the use of the definite noun phrase ‘the bus’, which can only be explained
by appealing to the idea of speaker meaning. And although I suggested that
this exchange appeared inane, you probably decided that it’s only inane at the
level of sentence meaning and that it’s not inane at all at the level of speaker
meaning, even though you weren’t familiar with these particular terms at the
time you were thinking about the example.
In discussing this example, I’ve used a number of semi-​technical terms,
which I’ve italicized. These will be important in your continuing study of
pragmatics. I’ll continue to italicize semi-​technical terms in discussing the
other examples you thought about to draw attention to their importance in
pragmatics, which I’ll say more about later in the chapter. You’ll also find brief
definitions in the Glossary on pp. 274–278.

Example 2

I’m washing my car in the street. A car draws up on the other side of the road,
and this is what occurs:

(2) CAR DRIVER: Excuse me, is this Buston Terrace

<I walk across the road with the sponge in my hand and see that the
driver and his wife are looking at their satnav with a puzzled expression>
ME: Yes it is. You need to get yourself a better car with a satnav that
works

What do you think about what I say and what do you think happens next?

I’m guessing that you think I was impolite and perhaps you are hoping that the
driver or his wife jump out of their car, seize the sponge and wring it out over
my head. If so, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. The driver smiles
knowingly and raises his hand slightly to acknowledge the compliment. If you
didn’t predict this outcome, it’s because I provided you with only a very min-
imal context. The car I’m cleaning is far from new and not a premium brand
either. But the car that pulls up across the road is a gleaming new Jaguar,
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in fact very new indeed, as shown by the number plate which includes the
registration code that came into effect at the beginning of the month, this per-
haps explaining the driver’s problems understanding an unfamiliar satnav. So
what appears to be an insult is in fact a compliment and what appears to be
impolite, being spoken ironically, is only ritually impolite. An important thing to
notice about what I say is that it isn’t the sentence meaning that matters, but
what I do as a speaker when I use the sentence. We call the use of language
for an intentional purpose –​such as to insult someone or, as in this case, to
pass a compliment –​a speech act. The term ‘act’ reflects the fact that we do
something by using language, just as the driver does something by smiling and
raising his hand to acknowledge the compliment. Indeed, perhaps remaining
silent and indicating his understanding with a gesture is the most appropriate
way of dealing with my unexpected utterance.
It’s also worth noting the driver’s use of ‘Excuse me’. What he says
consists of two parts ‘Excuse me’ and the open proposition (‘open’ because
it’s a question rather than an assertion) ‘Is this Buston Terrace’. As an apology
for causing inconvenience, ‘excuse me’ has a politeness function so that the
two parts of his utterance are two speech acts, an apology and a request
for help. I doubt he could ever have imagined my response, which reminds
us that unforeseen or emergent contributions are a very common feature of
talk. Unlike in syntax, in pragmatics there is no such thing as a rule –​we have
expectations about how interaction will go and, as we’ll see later, can iden-
tify principles which seem to guide what we choose to say in order to convey
speaker meaning. In a similar way, pragmatic meanings are probabilistic in the
sense that the addressee must infer from my use of ‘you need to get yourself
a better car’ that I’m passing a compliment, but as his inference is only the best
guess he can make as to what I mean by what I say, it’s probabilistic.

Example 3

Most buses in Britain have an upper deck, typically with a staircase that comes
down to the lower deck just behind the driver’s seat on the right-​hand side of the
bus. (In the UK, the driver sits on the right of a vehicle as people drive on the left.)
I’m on just such a double-​decker, and when it reaches the stop where I want to
get off, a passenger from the upper deck arrives at the bottom of the staircase
at the same time as I get there from the lower deck, and this exchange occurs:

(3) HIM: After you

ME: After you
HIM: No, after you

What do we each do next? Does either of us speak, and, if so, what do you
think we say?
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I suppose first you tried to work out who has the right of way. In some cultures,
I’d have the right of way because I was progressing in a straight line which he
was interrupting; in others he’d have the right of way because he was on my
right. In Britain, passengers from the upper deck tend to wait until all the lower
deck passengers have passed them unless either they see a gap they can fill
without impeding the lower deck passenger or unless a lower deck passenger
stops and invites them to go first. Taking this into account, strictly speaking, it
shouldn’t be necessary for the passenger from the upper deck to say ‘after you’
as I already have the right of way. Indeed, if anyone were to say ‘after you’, you’d
expect it to be me. I suppose there must have been something in the proxemics
(the amount of private space we both felt we had in relation to each other) that
prompted the utterance ‘after you’, by means of which he indexes the default
right of way. And I suppose it was also the proxemics that prompted me to
respond by offering him the right of way –​had he perhaps seen a possible
gap which disappeared all of a sudden after he’d begun to move into the space
of the passenger on the lower deck? This makes his use of ‘no’ interesting
too –​does he mean that my reading of the proxemics isn’t his? And if it means
this, is he being sincere or merely polite? As with the driver of the Jaguar in
Example 2, we see a subtle relationship between language and action.
If you decided that I had the right of way, I guess you concluded that
I proceeded and perhaps said ‘thank you’. If this was your conclusion, you were
right about my proceeding but my emergent utterance is harder to predict. This
was what happened:

(3’) HIM: After you

ME: After you
HIM: No, after you
ME: <proceeding> You’re too much of a gentleman
HIM: <pats me on the right shoulder as I pass him>

My use of the formula you’re too much of an x might be regarded as an impolite

criticism, but this default interpretation is far outweighed by the inference that
I consider him to be gentlemanly to an exceptional degree. He acknowledges
my compliment by patting me on the shoulder, an action which I find surprising
in a culture where deliberately touching strangers is taboo. Now comes the
difficult part: I find myself noticing that our skins are of different colours and
wonder whether this has something to do with his action. Perhaps I shouldn’t
have such a thought, which may reflect negatively on me. But at the same
time, neither should he, and if he does, this perhaps reflects negatively on him
too. But what if, in a culture that has yet to fully rid itself of racist behaviour,
acknowledging courteous behaviour in the way I do is less common between
people of different skin colours than between people of the same skin colour?
Of course, all this is supposition and probably as embarrassing for you to read
as it is for me to write, but I write it not only because I want to represent what
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occurred honestly, but also to make another very important point about con-
text: if he and I are unaware of skin colour until a certain point in our exchange,
it suggests that we choose to construct a context in which skin colour is rele-
vant. Context therefore does not determine our behaviour (we don’t act as we
do because our skins are of different colours), rather our behaviour creates
context (what we do creates the difference in our skin colours which didn’t until
that moment exist between us). So there’s no such thing as colour or gender
or age unless we choose to affiliate to it, which we may do by something
as apparently insignificant as patting someone on the back or by reacting to
someone patting us on the back.
One more thing to notice before we pass on to the next example. When
he uses the word ‘you’, the person he wishes to refer to is me, and when I use
the same word, the person I wish to refer to is him. In fact, a speaker can use
the word you to refer to any single individual in the world or to any group of
two or more individuals. I’ll say a little more about such deictic expressions in a
moment before the more detailed discussion that follows in Chapter 5.

Example 4

It’s breakfast time in a small hotel when this exchange takes place between a
female guest sitting at the table next to me and the landlady:

(4) GUEST: Is the bar open

LANDLADY: No, it doesn’t open till later

The guest then speaks again and I add a comment.

What do you think we each say?

I guess you’ve concluded that by saying ‘Is the bar open’, the guest is indirectly
indicating that she’d like a drink, and that by replying baldly ‘no it doesn’t open
till later’, the landlady is indirectly indicating that she isn’t sympathetic to her
guest’s request for alcohol at breakfast. I say ‘baldly’ because she didn’t use
any redressive politeness formula, such as I’m afraid before ‘it doesn’t open’.
Perhaps you concluded that the landlady’s use of ‘later’ licenses the guest
asking when it does open, and you’ll probably have been wondering whether
my comment takes the side of the guest or the landlady, and perhaps con-
cluding that I should have minded my own business and kept quiet.
This is what we each say next:

(4’) GUEST: Is the bar open

LANDLADY: No, it doesn’t open till later
GUEST: Only I think I left my bag in there last night
ME: Good try
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14 Using and understanding language

The guest’s second utterance makes it clear that she hadn’t intended ‘Is the bar
open’ to be understood as a formulaic way of implying that she wanted a drink. This
draws our attention to the fact that speech acts aren’t only a way of using language
to do something –​like all actions, they have consequences, and in this case a con-
sequence not intended by the guest. In fact, the guest’s first utterance is rather
unusual in that the intended speaker meaning is more or less identical to the literal
sentence meaning of ‘is the bar open’. However, as you already know, addressees
expect to look beyond what the speaker’s words mean, and so it’s unusual for
the speaker to mean by their words just what those words say. Accordingly, the
landlady looks beyond the guest’s sentence meaning and, as her next utterance
shows (next turn proof procedure), draws the unintended inference (inferred
meaning being probabilistic) that the guest wants an alcoholic drink, which the
guest corrects (indirectly) by saying ‘Only I think I left my bag in there last night’.
Notice that the guest’s first three words are not part of the proposition
whose content she seeks to convey: ‘only’ suggests that she has a reason for
her question and that that reason (she’s mislaid her bag) is of much less social
consequence than asking for a drink at breakfast. In order to avoid being too
direct, she’s also careful to hedge the proposition that she left her bag in the
bar with ‘I think’, thereby opening up the possibility that she may not be right.
So whereas the landlady’s utterance was notable for its lack of accompanying
politeness phenomena, the guest’s utterance is notable for the presence of
such phenomena –​she gives a reason for her previous question, she minimizes
its significance (‘only’) and she hedges the proposition (‘I think’). Politeness is
very obviously pragmatic in that its use constructs a context, as we’ll see when
we study it in more in more detail in Chapter 7.
And as for ‘good try’, well, I hope to save the landlady’s face by pretending that
the inference she drew isn’t in fact wrong at all, and by making a joke in a slightly
awkward situation I hope to restore the equilibrium that had prevailed before.

Example 5

I’m listening to a chatty radio programme hosted by two presenters, one male
and one female, who are talking about what clothes tell you about the person
who wears them. At one point, the male presenter says

(5) MALE PRESENTER: That’s one of the advantages of working on

radio –​you can wear anything you like or absolutely nothing at all and
no one would ever know

He pauses briefly and then adds three more words which suggest that either
he or the female presenter, or perhaps both, are wearing no clothes.

What words do you think he adds?

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Using and understanding language 15

I wonder how you got on with this example. In fact, he adds a two-​word tag and
the presenter’s name, using rising intonation rather than the falling intonation
more commonly associated with the use of two-​word tags. The effect of this is
to turn what he has just said into a question. So congratulate yourself if this is
what you decided.

(5’) MALE PRESENTER: That’s one of the advantages of working on

radio –​you can wear anything you like or absolutely nothing at all and
no one would ever know <pause> would they Michelle

By means of the pause and by adding the tag and his co-​presenter’s name
with a marked intonation contour, the male presenter implies, with the intention
that the overhearing radio audience should infer, well, that she is naked (my
preferred interpretation) or that he is naked (perhaps your preferred interpret-
ation) or that they both are. I hope you agree that it’s not easy to decide whether
only some or all of the features identified in the previous sentence –​the tag,
the name, the intonation –​give rise to the inferences we might draw. If the
presenter had used only a rising intonation without adding his co-​presenter’s
name, I think I’d have inferred that they were both naked, and inferred also that
the overhearing audience might just possibly have known this already. But the
addition of ‘Michelle’ suggests to me that it’s she who is naked, which is why
for me it’s the preferred, or optimal, interpretation.
Whereas the judgements we make about the syntax of sentences is to do
with their grammaticalness, the judgements we make about pragmatics are
governed by optimality, so that a speaker tries to achieve an optimal form for
the meaning she seeks to convey and a hearer tries to determine an optimal
meaning for the form of the utterance he hears. This is why, while we can
usefully talk about rules in syntax, in pragmatics there are only extents to
which we achieve an optimal meaning-​to-​form and form-​to-​meaning corres-
pondence. And as each of us is likely to identify slightly different contexts as
we go about the process of determining the speaker meaning invited by the
utterances addressed to us, what is optimal for me may not be optimal for you
and vice versa.
Notice also the crucial role the pause and the marked intonation play in
helping us to interpret the presenter’s utterance successfully and to recover
the pragmatic meaning he intends to convey. Their function is metapragmatic,
like Clare’s marked or emphatic use of ‘is’ in Example 1 which also helps
us to reach a pragmatic understanding that we wouldn’t otherwise reach.
Similarly, the guest’s use of the discourse marker ‘only’ in Example 4’ helps
us to recover the pragmatic meaning she intends to convey. Metapragmatic
features, such as prosody and discourse markers, lessen the task of reaching
an optimal understanding, especially when an unusually large processing effort
is required or when without this marking we wouldn’t be able to recover such
speaker meanings at all. We might therefore think of them as constraints on
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16 Using and understanding language

interpretation because, by reducing the wide range of possible interpretations,

they help us to recover the speaker’s intended meaning in an economical way
and within the limited time that online processing of talk allows.
This example also raises another interesting question about pragmatic
meaning. If by adding the name of the addressee, a speaker can imply that the
addressee is naked, is it perhaps possible that anything can mean anything? Or
put another way, no matter what’s actually said, can an addressee get any inter-
pretation you like to think of by identifying a context, or as here, a combination
of context and co-​text, in which that interpretation makes sense, or appears
optimally relevant? Even if you think this suggestion’s going a bit far, at the
same time it’s worth thinking for a moment about the rather extraordinary phe-
nomenon of pragmatic meaning: if you were designing human beings, would
it occur to you to design them so that what they say is not what they mean,
and what they mean is not what they say? Surprisingly, the answer might well
be yes, and for this reason: if the same sentence can have a large number of
different speaker meanings, language can be much smaller than it would have
to be if every concept in our heads had a unique linguistic counterpart. In much
the same way, we saw how useful it is to have the single word you which we
can use to pick out and to refer to every individual or group of individuals we
address –​think how large our heads would need to be if we had first to dis-
cover and store the name of a person before we could address them, and how
difficult it would be to address a large audience!
Finally, to return to the example, whether this sort of humour’s to your
taste or not is of course another question. But as we also saw in Example (4’)
humour is clearly achieved by pragmatic means. Sadly, we won’t be examining
humour in this book, but it’s certainly a rich field to investigate from a pragmatic
perspective.

Example 6

At the supermarket checkout, the till operator gives me my change and hands
me a coupon. This is what happens next:

(6) ME <reading the coupon>: Oh, 25p off milk products

TILL OPERATOR: You never know when you might want something

What do you think about her utterance and what do you think I do or
say next?

What you think about the till operator’s utterance depends on what speech act
you take it to be. Is it an apology in response to a customer’s apparent disap-
pointment? Is it a reprimand in response to a customer’s implicit complaint that
the coupon isn’t worth much? Is it an expression of loyalty to her employer in
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Using and understanding language 17

response an apparently critical comment? Or is it simply an assertion of the

usefulness or value of the coupon?

And what do I say or do next?

I’m guessing you decided that I respond to whatever speech act I take the till
operator’s utterance to be. Perhaps you decided that I reject it by remaining
silent. Perhaps that I indicate by my body language that I accept it. Or perhaps
you thought that I might strike out in a new direction.
I don’t suppose the till operator could predict my response any more than
I expect you could, which confirms the emergent nature of talk-​in-​interaction.
This is the exchange in full:

(6’) ME <reading the coupon>: Oh, 25p off milk products

TILL OPERATOR: You never know when you might want something
ME: Something off alcohol products would also be welcome
TILL OPERATOR: <laughs>

My metapragmatic use of ‘oh’ signals that I wasn’t expecting what I read on

the coupon. But as well as determining whether my surprise at ‘25p off milk
products’ is an expression of disappointment at or a complaint about or a criti-
cism of the offer on the coupon, there’s also the possibility that I address the
way the offer is worded. Is there something slightly obscure, or even pom-
pous, about ‘milk products’? Whilst dairy products is a standard formula, milk
products isn’t, and just what a milk product might be is unclear. Is a customer, or
any addressee, come to that, entitled to a maximally clear and straightforward
communication?
Whatever speech act the till operator’s response is intended to be,
it contains what is usually called a non-​deictic use of ‘you’ –​non-​deictic
because it doesn’t identify me as the referent but instead is taken to refer
more generally. This is a way of impersonalizing her response and therefore
more polite or less threatening to my face than the stressed deictic use that
picks me out would be. That this is a service encounter is, therefore, indexed
by the till operator, not only in avoiding threatening her customer’s face but
also in both affiliating to her status as a loyal employee in defending the
coupon and at the same time acknowledging the customer’s doubts by means
of ‘you never know’. And the use of the non-​specific ‘something’ rather than a
named dairy product perhaps also indexes her recognition of the customer’s
metalinguistic, even perhaps satirical, comment on the choice of the term
‘milk products’.
In saying ‘something off alcohol products would also be welcome’,
I express solidarity by echoing the till operator’s use of ‘something’ and by
confirming my satirical take on ‘milk products’ in my use of the still more
absurd ‘alcohol products’. At the same time, in the use of ‘also be welcome’
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18 Using and understanding language

I cancel any previous assumption about my not being suitably grateful for
the coupon. Just as a customer might take ‘you never know when you might
want something’ as an apology, so I intend the till operator to take my ‘also be
welcome’ as an indirect apology –​this draws attention to the fact that speech
acts such as apologizing are very often indirect and not marked by explicit
formulas such as I apologize or I’m sorry.
Before moving on, it’s also interesting to note that when I read the coupon
aloud I give ‘milk products’ a different footing from the one it has when I read
it silently. The oral version is mine and the silent version is the original author’s.
This raises the interesting possibility that, when quoting, we have a choice, which
on this occasion we exercise by means of metapragmatic marking, of more or
less faithfully representing the footing of the original. We’ll pick this up again in
Chapter 5 when we consider how ‘reported’ reported speech actually is.
Finally, we again see how laughter restores the status quo –​what has just
happened is both emergent and unpredictable and to some extent confronta-
tional, but by responding to the customer’s satire with laughter, the till operator
enables us to part on good terms. All this goes to show how important prag-
matic meaning is even in fleeting everyday encounters in ordinary situations
like checking out at the supermarket.

Example 7

I’m second in a queue in the bus station waiting for the bus to come. When it
comes, it’s obvious that the person in front of me doesn’t know that passengers
have to push a knob to open the glass door to get to the bus. He’s standing
slightly in front of the knob and so he can’t see it without looking over his
shoulder.

What happens next? Who speaks first and what do they say?

Perhaps you thought the other passenger turns to me as the person behind
him in the queue, either for help or to express frustration about a door that
doesn’t open. Although he might ask for help or express frustration by ges-
ture alone, I guess you probably thought about what he might say. Or perhaps
you thought that to spare him the embarrassment of having to ask for help,
it’s me who acts first, either by pushing the button for him or by telling him
that he has to push it. Either way, my action will probably cause him some
loss of face. If I tell him he has to push the button, he’ll lose face not only
because he has to be told what to do but also because he has to locate the
button, which he may find difficult as it’s awkwardly placed in relation to
where he stands. But if I push the button for him, will he feel humiliated since
someone else does for him what he should be able to do for himself? Or will
he feel that a stranger has acted kindly by helping him in a situation where
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Using and understanding language 19

he didn’t know what to do? Perhaps you also thought about whether, at the
same time as pushing the button, I might say something which might lessen
his loss of face?
This is what happens:

(8) ME: <presses knob to open the door; the passenger sees my action out of
the corner of his eye>
PASSENGER: It’s not automatic
ME: No, far from it
PASSENGER: <smiles>

I decide that pressing the knob is the least face-​threatening course of action
for both of us. While the form of the passenger’s response is declarative, his
rising intonation marks ‘It’s not automatic’ as an indirect question, although
having seen my action, he knows that the door isn’t automatic. Logically, he
ought not to be asking a question to which he already knows the answer –​
we might say it’s infelicitous, but by asking such a question he justifies not
having acted in the required way in the first place. We might say that one
of the felicity conditions on turning ‘it’s not automatic’ into a question is the
speaker’s legitimate expectation that the door should open of its own accord,
as indeed in some bus stations the doors do. Although, strictly speaking, his
question lacks logic, its pragmatic function justifies its being asked. And it
justifies my treating it as a genuine question although I know that it isn’t one.
Indeed my answer, ‘No, far from it’, suggests that there is in fact something
at fault in the system in this particular bus station and so helps to reduce the
threat to his face of not understanding the required procedure. My response
isn’t so incongruous as to merit laughter to restore the status quo –​this time
the passenger’s smile is sufficient for our lives to continue with an awkward
moment safely behind us.
I’m guessing that the way you predicted what happens next in these
exchanges differed from the way they actually developed, even when your
judgements about the appropriate speech acts coincided with those of the
participants. This isn’t surprising since we are all different people who index our
identities through our own distinctive use of language. For that reason, it makes
sense to think of the use of language as emergent rather than prescribed. At
the same time, as speakers, we each strive for an optimal realization of the
meaning we have in mind and, as hearers, for an optimal interpretation of the
utterances addressed to us. In order to facilitate the optimal interpretation of
our utterances, we need to take into account the addressee’s ability to iden-
tify a context which makes this possible, whilst at the same time taking into
account the need for what we say to be appropriate and to satisfy the face
wants of the addressee. And, as speakers, we may also seek to guide the
addressee’s interpretation by metapragmatic means (such as the use of dis-
course markers and prosody).
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20 Using and understanding language

1.3  SPEAKER MEANING

All academic disciplines make use of a metalanguage to describe and explain

the phenomena they seek to understand. Pragmatics is no different. In the pre-
vious section I italicized a set of what I called the ‘semi-​technical terms’ used by
pragmaticists to describe and explain the phenomena we study. In this section
I’m going to group this pragmatic metalanguage in what I hope will be relatively
tidy sub-​sets. Towards the end of the section I’ll look forward to the chapters
that follow and briefly indicate how the phenomena we’ll be studying make use
of the metalanguage you encountered in the previous section.

Sentence meaning and speaker meaning

As we’ve seen, sentence meaning is the term we use to describe the literal
meaning of sentences (for the moment I’m regarding ‘literal’ meaning as unprob-
lematic, although as we’ll see in Chapter 3, things aren’t quite as simple as this),
while speaker meaning is the term we use to describe the meanings we infer that
go beyond literal meaning. Sometimes the propositional form of the sentence
meaning will look similar to the propositional form of the speaker meaning, as in

(1) that’s the bus <sentence meaning>

that’s the bus that Joan will be on <putative speaker meaning>

Sometimes they look very different, as in

(2) you need to get yourself a better car <sentence meaning>

I’m full of admiration for your lovely new car <putative speaker
meaning>

You may also have noticed that when I used the terms sentence and utterance
in the previous sections, I intended sentence to be understood as a description
of a syntactic structure with a certain semantic content, and utterance to be
understood as a sentence put to use and so inviting a pragmatic interpretation.
Syntacticians study sentences and pragmaticists study utterances.

Optimality

Many pragmaticists think it’s useful to regard pragmatic meanings as satisfying

optimality considerations, which, from a speaker’s perspective, match input (a
meaning) to output (an utterance) in an optimally effective way. In Optimality
Theory, such matching is not subject to rules which generate utterances but to
constraints which limit the possibilities available for conveying the meaning the
speaker has in mind. As we saw in discussing
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Using and understanding language 21

(5) <pause> would they Michelle

identifying these constraints is problematized by my daring to ask whether we

might find a context that would license our inferring any meaning from any
form. Nevertheless, optimality does seem to be a fruitful way of thinking about
form/​meaning and meaning/​form correspondence in pragmatics. As we’ll see
in Chapter 3, the correspondence between an expectable meaning and an
unmarked form, on the one hand, and between an unusual meaning and a
marked form, on the other, suggests that hypothesizing constraints such as
this might be legitimate.

Metapragmatic marking

When a speaker wants to facilitate the interpretation of an utterance that might

otherwise be open to an unintended interpretation or might simply be too chal-
lenging to interpret in the time available in the ongoing interaction, she’s likely
to guide the addressee towards the intended interpretation or to limit the pro-
cessing effort required by means of metapragmatic marking. So by prefacing
what I say with ‘oh’

(6) Oh, 25p off milk products

and in the prosody I choose to indicate that my oral reading of ‘25p off milk
products’ differs from my silent reading, I guide the till operator towards the
interpretation that I intend her to arrive at. And if we compare what I say later

(6’) Something off alcohol products would also be welcome

with

(6”) Something off alcohol products would be welcome

we see that my use of ‘also’ presupposes that something else –​evidently the

25p off milk products –​was already welcome, and turns what would have been
an extended criticism, as in (6”), into an apology, or at least an acknowledgement
that I was insufficiently grateful when I first spoke. Who would have thought
that ‘also’ would turn a criticism into an apology! The use of exclamations such
as ‘oh’ and adjunctives such as ‘also’, as well as a wide range of discourse
markers and related phenomena, is sometimes described as procedural. This
is because they don’t alter the truth-​conditions of the sentences in which they
occur: that’s to say, both ‘oh, 25p off milk products’ and ‘25p off milk products’
are true or false under exactly the same conditions, just as ‘something off
alcohol products would also be welcome’ describes exactly the same state
of affairs in the world as ‘something off alcohol products would be welcome’.
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22 Using and understanding language

We call the procedural use of language metapragmatic because it shows that

speakers are aware (perhaps at some level below everyday consciousness) of
the pragmatic effect of what they say.

Utterances and intentions

Speech act theory distinguishes between what we say and what we do by

saying, or between the propositions carried by our utterances and the force
they have. So when the car driver who pulls up opposite me says

(2) Excuse me, is this Buston Terrace

he uses the imperative form (verb with no overt subject) ‘excuse me’ to request
that I forgive him for interrupting my car-​washing task, and the interroga-
tive form (verb followed by subject) ‘is this Buston Terrace’ to ask a yes/​no
question. We distinguish therefore between the form –​imperative –​and the
function or force associated with the use of the form –​making a request, or, in
the case of the interrogative, asking a question. The relationship between form
and function is sometimes a good deal less direct than this though, as when
the hotel guest uses the interrogative form, but is taken by the landlady to be
requesting a drink rather than to be asking a yes/​no question:

(4) Is the bar open

We might say that the landlady understands what is in effect intended by the
guest as a direct question to be an indirect request.
Notice that there some conditions or constraints on saying ‘is the bar
open’, typically that you want a drink or, more unusually, that you left something
there the evening before that you now need to recover. A condition such as
one of these circumstances needs to be met for the utterance to be, in the ter-
minology of speech act theory, felicitous. Because the guest doesn’t succeed
at the first attempt in doing what she intends to do, we might want to say that
she hasn’t found an optimal form for her meaning, perhaps because she hasn’t
sufficiently taken into account the felicity condition most commonly associated
with her utterance. Although her utterance is intended as a yes/​no question, by
stating a felicity condition on requesting a drink, namely, that the bar should be
open, she is, incorrectly on this occasion, understood to be requesting a drink
indirectly. The intentional use of language will be the subject of Chapter 2.

Inference

I began the chapter by defining pragmatics as the study of the use of lan-
guage. When we understand any particular use of language, we reach our
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Using and understanding language 23

understanding by drawing a set of inferences that bridge the gap between

sentence meaning and speaker meaning. So Clare infers that the bus to which
Anne draws attention is the one that Joan will be on, and the driver who pulls
up across the road while I’m washing my car infers that my apparent insult is in
fact a compliment, and the overhearing radio audience infers that the speaker’s
co-​presenter has no clothes on. Sentence meaning, in an inference-​based
account of pragmatics, is one piece of evidence that we use alongside any
procedural cues, our knowledge of the world, and accessible contexts in the
process of determining speaker meaning. The significance of inference has
been progressively recognized in the study of language use, as we shall see in
the third and longest chapter of this book in which we look at the role of infer-
ence in determining pragmatic meaning. In that chapter, we’ll also distinguish
between an inference as the conclusion we draw as a result of a cognitive
process and inference as the name we give to the process of inferring itself.

Indexicality

I’ve frequently used the slightly puzzling term index in this chapter, typically as
a verb. What then do I mean by saying that a linguistic form is an index? Or
that by using this or that form, a speaker indexes some concept? At the end
of this book, you’ll find an index. If you look up a term in that index, you’ll find
a direction to a particular page or series of pages which hopefully will provide
the information you seek. So when we use the term index of a linguistic form,
we mean that it’s a shorthand for a more elaborate concept associated with
it. A deictic term like you is a prototypical example of indexicality because it
points to or identifies a person or set of people who, in the context in which
they are identified, constitute an index or shorthand for a uniquely definable
person or set of people, such as the passenger on the lower deck of the bus
or the passenger at the bottom of the stairs that lead down from the upper
deck of the bus. Obviously enough, in a different context, the ‘you’ pointed to in
an utterance such as ‘after you’ is liable to be an index for a different uniquely
definable person or set of people.
When we return to this area of pragmatic meaning in Chapter 5, we’ll
explore the extent to which this concept extends beyond obvious deictic words
such as you. For example, when I say

(2) You need to get yourself a better car with a satnav that works

we might want to argue that it’s not only ‘you’ which functions indexically.
What about ‘a better car’? I don’t say a better car than the car you’re driving,
but the driver of the car infers this elaborated proposition (or something very
similar). Does this elaborated proposition function as an index for that ‘better
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24 Using and understanding language

car’? A similar argument might apply to ‘a satnav that works’. Is every linguistic
choice we make an index for some social meaning? For example, when the
presenter says

(5) That’s one of the advantages of working on radio

are his words an index for the same concept as is indexed by apparently syn-
onymous or truth-​preserving utterances such as that’s one of the advantages
of working on the radio and that’s one of the advantages of working on air and
that’s one of the good things about working on the radio?

Context and language

You’ll have noticed how frequently we appealed to context in getting from sen-
tence meaning to speaker meaning in the examples we studied. In fact, I can
well imagine a book like this having the title Language and Context because of
the important role that context typically plays in enabling us to determine what
is meant by what is said. Just what constitutes ‘context’ is the topic we’ll explore
in Chapter 6. We had a taste of the complexity of this question in Example 3
when I suggested that the skin colour of the interlocutors only became a con-
text at a certain point in their interaction. And I argued that context is not
presumptive, that’s to say not a determinant of our behaviour, but rather that
we create context by our behaviour. Take the occasion when I had a doctor’s
appointment at 16.30 one afternoon. This is how the consultation began:

(9) DOCTOR: Good morn-​sorry good afternoon

ME: When did you first notice this happening

As you can see, I reversed our roles and created a context in which the doctor
was the patient and the patient was the doctor. I can’t say she was very happy!
Perhaps I touched a raw nerve. But what this exchange shows is that even when a
doctor-​patient consultation proceeds in an expectable way, it’s actually because
this is the context they create and not because they are obliged to act as they
do by a presumptive context. You might say, therefore, that context is inherent in
our actions, including in the use of language –​or even that language is context.
This is quite a difficult idea to get your head round when you first encounter it,
and it’s not uncontroversial, so you’ll need to make your mind up about context
as you continue to study pragmatics and particularly as you read Chapter 6. All
I’ll say for the moment is that in considerations of identity, it’s quite common for
the presumptive context position to be rejected. For example, according to my
birth certificate, my sex is male. Since I don’t think my sex as described on my
birth certificate ought to be relevant in my professional life, when I use language
in a professional context, I hope that, in as far as I can, I avoid constructing my
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Using and understanding language 25

gender, although of course I’m not always successful in this and may well index
it more often that I might wish to. The word gender is interesting then because
it’s the term we use when we want to refer to the construction of a sex iden-
tity as a result of making such a context salient. Is it possible that we have no
biologically determined sex, only a constructed gender, because our biologically
determined sex doesn’t signify except as a construction?

Politeness phenomena

Since Brown and Levinson first wrote about it from a pragmatic point of view
in 1978, politeness has been an enduring area of investigation in pragmatics.
Brown and Levinson began by observing that very typically politeness phe-
nomena mark a departure from maximally efficient communication. When the
guest wants the landlady to open the bar, she doesn’t use the maximally eco-
nomical imperative form open the bar but instead asks the question

(4) Is the bar open

and when her question’s answered, provides a reason for requesting that the
landlady open it

(4’) Only I think I left my bag in there last night

For the reason that it departs from maximally efficient communication, polite-
ness is an important phenomenon since we need to explain why anyone
would go to unnecessary trouble when communicating a meaning. Brown and
Levinson argue that we use language in the way we calculate most likely to
bring about our desires. This means that we have to take into account the
susceptibilities, or as they term it face, of the person we address. Some of
the strategies speakers use which address the face wants of addresses have
already been discussed: these include being indirect, minimizing what’s desired
and providing a reason for one’s action, as in the example above. It’s clearly
not enough to know the syntactic, phonological and semantic properties of a
language to use it successfully, and arguably no area of linguistic behaviour
exemplifies this in a more obvious way than politeness phenomena, which will
be the topic of our study in Chapter 7.

This chapter began with Sam Johnson’s acute observation that while we all
know what light is, it isn’t easy to tell what it is. We take light for granted and
rarely try to describe it, and, unless we have a specialist interest, probably never
try to explain it. So it is with pragmatics. It’s one thing to describe the pragmatic
properties of utterances as we’ve been trying to do in this chapter, but quite
another to explain how we understand underdetermined utterances more or
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26 Using and understanding language

less in the way the speaker intends. We can all recognize the degree to which
an utterance is appropriate, but how do we explain what makes it appropriate?
We take for granted our ability to convey speaker meaning and to recognize
the speaker meanings of other language users, but, as this chapter shows,
describing the use of language is far from easy. And explaining it is a consid-
erable challenge, one that you and I, as people with a special interest, have
undertaken. So how is it undertaken?
If you were studying light, I suppose you’d begin with various different
instances of the phenomenon, which is why this chapter has been example-​or
data-​driven rather than theory-​driven. We’ve shared some examples of actu-
ally occurring talk whose properties we’ve tried to describe; and perhaps just
occasionally we’ve begun to feel that we can also explain what’s going on. As
you’ll see in the chapters that follow, one of the strange things about prag-
matic theory is that all too often the theory is postulated and then illustrated
by examples that are invented to support it. As in the study of syntax from a
generative perspective, a theory is postulated, and, provided it can account for
all and only the grammatical sentences of a language, it’s considered to be
explanatorily adequate, or in plain English ‘good enough’. This may be a sound
method for a rule-​bound phenomenon such as syntax where we may be on
safe ground in thinking we can determine the grammatical status of every sen-
tence, but it’s much more problematic in pragmatics, as we shall see.

Raising pragmatic awareness

1 This exercise works well if you do Step 1 individually and Steps 2
and 3 in your tutorial or with a group of friends.
(a) Write a very short dialogue between two imaginary characters.
(b) Dictate each utterance to your colleagues. As you dictate, they
write down, not what you say but the contexts in which they
imagine each utterance being spoken.
(c) Ask each person to read out what they have written down and
discuss the pragmatics of the utterances in relation to the
contexts which have been imagined for them.
2 This exercise works best in a tutorial or with a group of friends.
Choose an item from the following list and brainstorm all the contexts
in which you could utter it: I’m tired, I’m sorry, Is it me?, I thought so,
Don’t. Why do you think a single proposition can function as so many
different speech acts?
3 Get together with a few friends. Each person should recall something
surprising which someone once said to them. The other members of
the group try to guess the context by asking Yes/​No questions.
4 This exercise works best in pairs. You and your partner each find
three or four sentences from different newspaper stories or captions
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Using and understanding language 27

for newspaper photographs which invite the reader to draw an infer-

ence. (For example, ‘The husband of the doctor who disappeared
last week refused to comment. Meanwhile, the police continued
digging in their garden.’) When you have each found your sentences
or captions, see whether your partner draws the same inferences as
you and try to work out what triggers them. (Acknowledgement: this
is Andrew Caink’s idea.)
5 This exercise works well in a tutorial group. Before the tutorial, cut
out three or four magazine pictures and pin instructions to them
which test pragmatic skills. For example, if you cut out a picture of
a romantic couple looking out over the sea at night, your instruction
might be ‘Ask these two for a cigarette/​if they’ve lost a pen you’ve
just found/​where they get their hair done’; or if you cut out a picture
of someone with a gun, the instruction might be ‘Ask her/​him for the
gun’; or a picture of a toddler, ‘Get this person to admire your shoes/​
to call you Mummy’. Take the pictures and instructions to your tutorial
and ask the other members of your group how they would carry out
the instructions.

Discussions and essays
Based on what you already know about pragmatics, discuss the relative
merits of each of the following views:

■■ Pragmatics is the study of the use of language.

■■ Whilst semanticists study the basic meanings of words, pragmaticists
study what speakers mean on the particular occasions when they
use words.
■■ Pragmatic uses of language require addressees to take context into
account in order to understand what speakers mean.
■■ All non-​literal meanings are by definition pragmatic.
■■ We tend to be much better at describing literal meaning than prag-
matic meaning because, unlike literal meaning, pragmatic meaning
does not depend only on form and is therefore largely invisible.
■■ Artificial intelligence will never cope with pragmatics.

FURTHER READING

• Textbook: Cummings (2005: 1–​5).