GRIFFITHS  An introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics

1. STUDYING MEANING: difference between Semantics and

Pragmatics Introduction

- This article is about how English enable people to convey meaning.

 Semantics and Pragmatics are the two main approaches of the
linguistic study of meaning.

- Semantics: is the knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the

language and in its patterns (patrones) for building more elaborate
meanings, up to the level of sentence meanings.

- You deal with meaning and there is no context to consider.

- Pragmatics: is concerned with the USE of these tools (knowledge

encoded in vocabulary and in patterns so as to build meaning) in
meaningful communication.

Pragmatics is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with

our knowledge of the world, taking into account context of use.

- If there is context brought into consideration, then you are engaged

with pragmatics.

 An expression is any meaningful language unit or sequence of

meaningful units, from a sentence down: a clause, a phrase, a
word or a meaningful part of a word.

 Pragmatics is concerned with choices among semantic

possibilities, and how language users, taking into account the
context and using their general knowledge, build interpretations
on the semantic foundation.
Example: “Hold out your arm. That’s it.”
- Hold out your arm denotes an activity and a situation that the
speaker wants; hold out denotes an action; arm denotes a part of the
body of a person; your arm denotes the arm of the person being
spoken to.
- That’s it is an expression which can mean OK or “there is no more
to say”.
- That is a demonstrative adverb and denotes something obvious to
whomever it is addressed (the act of holding the arm, perhaps).
Another connotation of “that” can be that it refers to the arm itself.

- It denotes something that has been spoken about: it could refer to the
arm or the act of holding the arm.

 This is the explanation which can be given WITHOUT knowing the

context. So, it is a SEMANTIC analysis.

 Now, taking context into account, we would know that this

expression comes from the first Harry Potter books. The
participants are Mr. Ollivander, a supplier of wands, who speaks
to Harry. Harry was trying out the right wand for him.

- The contextual information gives us the information and now we

know that the arm refers to Harry’s arm. And “That’s it” was said
to acknowledge that Harry had done what Mr. O had wanted.

- So That denotes Harry’s act done in response to the request, an

obvious visible movement of his arm; it denotes the previous
specification of what Harry was asked to do, the act of holding out
his arm; and the ‘s indicates a match: what he had just done was
what he had been asked to do.

 This is an analysis taking the context into account: a pragmatic

analysis
COMMUNICATION: concepts  addressee, sender

 Human communication with language requires active

collaboration on the part of any person the message is directed to:
the addressee (a reader and a listener).

- The addressee has the task of trying to guess what the sender
(writer or speaker) intends to convey (communicate)

- The sender’s task is to judge what need to be written or said to

enable the audience (addressee) to recognise what the sender wants
to communicate.

 As soon as the sender’s intention has been recognised, the message

has been communicated.

 There are different ways of communicating the same message and

the same string of words (expression used) can convey different
meaning,  because it depends on the context in which such
communicative event is taking place and on what will enable the
addressee to recognise the sender’s intention.

 The active participation of the audience (addressee) allows to be

communicated with a few words.

 Mistakes are possible. In face- to- face interactions the speaker

can monitor the listener’s reactions (grins, scowls, responses) to
judge whether the information has been correctly guessed.
 - This will help to cancel misunderstandings and give a further
guidance to the addressee to show what was intended to say.

1.1 PRAGMATICS DISTINGUISED FROM SEMANTICS

 SENTENCE

It is the abstract linguistic object on which an utterance is based

Literal meaning

 UTTERANCES

 raw data of linguistics

are the things that have meaning
each utterance is unique; it has been produced by a particular
sender in a specific situation.
utterances refer to spoken and written stretches of language and
goes from a sentence down.
They can never be repeated
Utterances are interpreted in context

For example: “People who buy these tickets often don’t have
loads of money”

- Often modifies what follows it instead of what goes before.

- If this utterance is heard, the speaker would deliberately signal
which of the two meanings was intended
 - We need to use context to check that we have heard the intonation
correctly we have to treat intonation as a clue regarding the
contextual information to use.

THREE STAGES OF INTERPRETATION

- The essential difference between sentences and utterances  is that

sentences are abstract, not tied to contexts, whereas utterances are
identified by their contexts.

Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning

Semantics is the studying of sentence meaning and word

meaning.

- The three stages are: literal meaning (semantic), explicature

(pragmatic) and implicature (pragmatic)

“That was the last bus”

 THE LITERAL MEANING of a sentence is based on the

semantic information that you have from your knowledge of
English.

- So, regarding the example: that is a demonstrative pronoun which

indicates the bus; was is in the past tense form; last refers to the final
or the most recent bus.  this is the meaning available, without
considering who might say it to whom, when or where. There is no
consideration of the context.

 AN EXPLICATURE is a basic interpretation of an utterance

using contextual information and world knowledge to work out
what is being referred to and which way to understand ambiguous
expressions, such as the word “last”
- There are two possible contexts, that is, they lead to different
explicatures:

 It may mean that that was the last bust on tonight’s schedule”
 A passenger asks the bus driver if some of the buses go via
Portobello, to what the bus driver replies that “that was the last one”
(meaning that, that bust was the last one which travels to the place in
question)

- So, these explicatures go beyond the literal meaning of the sentence;

there are interpretations based on the linguistic context and the non-
linguistic context (it is late at night, the situational context) and
background knowledge (buses generally stop running at some late
hour)
- Context facilitates disambiguation

 AN IMPLICATURE is a further information: it is the hint that

is brought by an utterance in a particular context

- We would have to know more about the kind of relationship between

the integrants of the communicative event (if they were close or not),
the look on the driver’s face (whether he conveyed annoyance or
apology in his response), and if we had been participants in these
exchanges before.
- In that case, we would be able to judge confidently whether the reply
of one of the participants conveyed (showed) sympathy or
annoyance.

 These are inferences by trying to understand following the

contextual and background information.
Literal meaning is the foundation for explicature, in which
implicatures are based.
 - Each stage is built on the previous one and we need to develop
theories of all three:
 Literal meaning: the semantic of sentences in abstract
 Explicature: the pragmatics of references and disambiguation
 Implicature: the pragmatic of hints

A FIRST OUTLINE OF PRAGMATICS (primer resumen de pragmatica

?)

Example:
1.5 A: What was the accommodation like on the work camp?
B: It was OK.
A: Not all that good, hey?

- Speaker A draws an implicature from B’s response because, if the

accommodation was better than just OK, B could have said “good”,
or if it was very good B could have said “excellent”. As B didn’t say
good or excellent, A infers that the accommodation wasn’t very
satisfactory.
- Also, A might have heard and seen indications to confirm this
implicature: perhaps B’s tone of voice was NOT enthusiastic.
 Such things are also contextual evidence for working out
implicatures.

- The stage of explicature: the work camp is one that B had knowledge
of.

TYPES OF MEANING
Sender’s meaning
 the meaning the speaker or writer intends to convey by means of an
utterance.
The audience (addressee) make informed guesses about what the sender
wants to say.
The sender (speaker or writer) offers confirmation, corrections or
elaborations, such as: “Yes, that’s what I meant, but also I’m trying to tell
you..”

 Sender’s meaning are the communicative goals of senders and the

interpretational targets for the audience (addressee)

 They are rather private: sometimes senders don’t admit that they
intended to convey selfish or hurtful implicatures and, at times, they
may be unable to put across the intention behind an utterance.

 We cannot be sure that the sender meaning always coincides with the
addressee interpretation so there is a dilemma over what to
consider as the meaning of an utterance: is it the sender’s meaning
or the interpretation which is made from the utterance by the
addressee (audience)?

- We wouldn’t know but, as language users, we gain experience as

both senders and addressees and develop intuitions about the
meaning an utterance is likely to carry in a given context.

Utterance meaning therefore, is a necessary fiction that linguists doing

semantics and pragmatics must work with.
- It is the meaning – explicature and implicatures – that an utterance
would likely be understood when interpreted by people who know
the language, are aware of context, and have whatever background
knowledge the sender could presume to be available to the audience
(addressee)
- Utterances are the data for linguistics  Sentences in use

 The meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to the

meaning of sentences in which it appears.
- Non-linguists wouldn’t be able to know whether “strong” means the
same as “powerful”. To have a proper feeling of what words means,
it is best to consider sentences containing them.
DENOTATION, SENSE, REFERENCE, AND DEIXIS

- Sentences and words denote aspects of the world. The denotation of

an expression is whatever it denotes (refers to).

- If expressions did not have denotations, language wouldn’t be of

much use  the fact that they allow us to communicate about the
world is what makes them indispensable.

- Ostension  process of live demonstration and pointing. For

example, you want to show what “arm” means so you point the
person’s arms, or you wave one of your arms.

- After childhood we usually use language, not ostension, to explain

the meanings of the words. People may use ostention for explaining
meanings, example: “beige is this colour” while pointing at a piece
of toffee.

Formal semantics  use systems of formal logic to set out descriptions of

meaning and theories of how the meanings of different sorts of expressions
are constructed from the meanings of smaller expressions.

- Different varieties of denotations:

A tree (noun) denotes a set of things
Singular names denote individuals

Another approach: sense  refers to those aspects of meaning of an

expression that give it the denotation that it has.

Difference between denotation ?

Sense relations  semantic relationships between the senses of
expressions
A person who knows the denotations of some words, as a start in the
network of relationships, can develop an understanding of the meanings
(senses) in the rest of the system.

REFERENCE
It is a pragmatic act performed by senders and interpreted at the explicature
stage.
It is interpreted with regard to the context.
It is what speakers/writers refer to for their audience. They refer to
people, things, times, places, ideas  referring expressions
Referants  are the actual entities outside the language; what the
referring expressions refer to

DEIXIS
- Deictic expressions are words, phrases that have to be interpreted in
relation to the situation in which there are uttered (expressed).
Example: “me” (the sender of this utterance) or “here” (the place
where the sender is).

- Deixis is pervasive (tending to spread)  because it coordinates

with the situation of the utterance and indicates place, time,
participants, and so on, according to the situation.

- Kinds of deixis:

Time: now, soon, ago, tomorrow

Place: here, there, that way, come
Participants: she, her, hers, him, they
Discourse itself: this sentence, the next paragraph

- Our semantic knowledge of the meanings of deictic expressions

guides us on how to interpret them in context. Example: yesterday
(The day before the day of the utterance)
 - In pragmatics, the interpretations will be guesses rather than
certainties.

PROPOSITION
- It is the core sentence meaning (the central meaning)

- The abstract idea which is not tied to particular words or sentences

 you can express the same idea in different words, even in fewer
words or may be with just a gesture.

- Propositions are not known until an explicature has been worked out
for it: reference and ambiguities clear up using contextual
information.

- They can be true or false statements

COMPOSITIONALITY
- The manner in which the parts are put together  The meaningful
parts of a sentence are causes, phrases and words. And the
meaningful parts of words are morphemes.
- An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not compositional 
it cannot be worked out from knowledge of the meanings of its parts
and the way they have been put together. They have to be learned as
wholes; they are not derived.

ENTAILMENT

- The main point of choosing which words to use when talking or

writing is to select among entailments (consecuencia logica). The
sense of a word can now be defined in terms of the particular
entailment possibilities.
SUMMARY

- Listeners and readers (audience, addressee) have the task of guessing

what the sender of an utterance intend to communicate. If the guess
is satisfactory, the sender succeeded in communicating the meaning.

- Pragmatics is about how to interpret utterances and produce

interpretable utterances, taking into account the context and the
background knowledge. Such interpretations are guesses and they
can be mistaken.

- Explicature is the basic stage of pragmatic interpretation, involving

disambiguation and working out what is being referred to.

- Deictic words helps us to understand people’s acts of reference,

those expressions are tied to the situational context.

- Implicature is a further stage of pragmatic elaboration: they are the

guesses.

- Semantics is the study of meaning isolated from the context. It is

descriptive and not concerned in how words came historically. Its
central kind of inference is entailment: they are propositions
guaranteed to be true.