PRAGMATICS

Task One
Artikel 1
“Pragmatics”

Dra. Hasnawati Latief,M.Pd

Arrange by:
Riska Febrianti.AS
105351106020

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF TEACHER AND TRAINING
MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR
2022/2023
 PRAGMATICS
Task One
Artikel 2
“Linguistic Meaning Communicated Meaning and Cognitive Pragmatics”

Dra. Hasnawati Latief,M.Pd

Arrange by:
Riska Febrianti.AS
105351106020

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF TEACHER AND TRAINING
MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR
2022/2023
 PRAGMATICS
Task One
Artikel 3
“Defining Pragmatics”

Dra. Hasnawati Latief,M.Pd

Arrange by:
Riska Febrianti.AS
105351106020

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF TEACHER AND TRAINING
MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF MAKASSAR
2022/2023
 Pragmatics

1. Introduction
Pragmatics is the study of the relation between the structure of a semiotic system (notably
language) and its usage in context, and, along with semantics (see Semantics), forms part of
the general theory of the meaning. Within the theory of meaning, pragmatics is especially
concerned with implicit meaning, with inference and the unsaid, and the way in which language
structure trades on this background of the presumed and the inferred. Pragmatics has come to
play an important part in general linguistic theory in part because it has substantial intrinsic
subject matter, partly because it promises explanations for other linguistic phenomena, and
partly as a response to over-idealization in contemporary grammatical theory (see Generative
Grammar). Its has also become an area of interdisciplinary concern, with fundamental
contributions from philosophy of language, linguistics, psychology and the sociology of
language.
2. History
The use of the term ‘pragmatics’ in modern semiotics derives from the philosophical work of
C.S. Peirce and R. Carnap, reflected in C. Morris’s (1938) three divisions of semiotics, the
study of sign systems: syntax, which investigates the relation of signs to signs, semantics,
which investigates the relation of signs to the things referred to, and pragmatics, which studies
the relation of signs to users of them. Since then, the usage of the term has bifurcated into a
broad use, which subsumes sociolinguistics (see Sociolinguistics) and discourse analysis (see
conversation analysis, sociological, and discourse, anthropology of), and a narrower use
(associated especially with philosophy of language and approaches to the study of meaning
which derive from it) in which pragmatics deals with those aspects of meaning that are
systematically context-dependent.
3. Scope
Contemporary linguistic pragmatics is focussed on a number of special relations between
linguistic meaning and context. On the narrower scope for pragmatics, concerned with
contextdependent meaning, the following topics have come to be central: deixis,
presupposition, speech acts, implicature, and conversational inference, which are discussed
briefly in turn.

3.1 Deixis
Deixis, from the Greek for ‘pointing’ (the equivalent philosophical term indexicality is from
the corresponding Latin) is the phenomenon whereby some linguistic expressions are
systematically dependent on the context for their interpretation. Take for example the utterance
“Put this book over there” – which book is being referred to, and which place it is to be put,
are determined by features of the context outside the utterance itself, here typically gestures:
this and there act as place-holders for contextually-specified parameters. A good test for
whether an expression is deictic or not is whether an utterance in which it plays a part would
be equally true (or false) regardless of speaker, address, time or place of utterance: thus “The
square root of nine is three” has no obvious deictics, whereas “We are coming soon” has only
deictic expressions.
At first sight deixis seems to be a simple phenomenon, a left over from the direct ‘here and
now’ relevance of animal communication systems. But the intersection of this
contextdependence with the property of abstract symbolic representation in language (
Hockett’s displacement feature of language design) leads to deep complexities, and the
phenomena turn out to be very puzzling both philosophically and psychologically, for deixis
introduces contextdependency into almost every utterance (in English for example, nearly all
sentences are tensed, and tense is deictic, as in “It is Tuesday” where is locates the reference
time as today). One of the central philosophical puzzles is that deixis makes possible self-
reference in utterances, thus introducing, e.g., many paradoxes of the ‘Cretan-liar’ type: “This
sentence is false” is true if and only if it is false. One of the central psychological puzzles is
that deixis makes clear that there is a mismatch between what a sentence means and the thought
corresponding to its utterance. For example, what exactly is the thought corresponding to the
utterance “Today is Tuesday”; it is obviously not ‘Tuesday is Tuesday’, nor (if the day of
speaking is 31st December 2035) “31st December 2035 is a Tuesday” since the speaker may
have no idea of the date. Closer might be ‘The diurnal span in which I am now speaking falls
on the calendrical second day of the week’ – but now we have paraphrased one deictic term
(today) in terms of others (I, now). And the puzzle goes on. Languages incorporate deictic
context-dependency in many different places in their grammars and lexica, but it is
conventional to consider four main notional parameters:
First, there is person deixis, reflected in the traditional grammatical categories of first, second
and third person, where first and second person refer to members of the speech event (current
speaker and current addressee respectively) in contrast to the third person. These categories are
reflected in pronoun systems, verbal agreement and elsewhere. Many languages make
unfamiliar demands here: for example, in S.E. Asia languages like Korean or Javanese have
different word-forms for referring to entities like kinsmen, houses, food, according to the
relative status of speaker and addressee. Or in some Australian languages (like Dalabon)
pronouns make reference to whether the speaker and the referent, or the referents in the case
of plural third person pronouns, are one vs. two generations apart genealogically. This encoding
of the social relation between speaker, addressee and third-party referents is often recognized
as a separate deictic dimension, called social deixis.
A second important parameter is time. Temporal deixis is directly manifested in English in
words like now, and, as mentioned, in tense. True tenses locate time relative to the moment of
speaking, so that a past tense is used for events (or situations) preceding it, present for events
including it, and future for events succeeding it. Not all languages have tenses (e.g. Malay or
Chinese), and not all the grammatical categories that grammarians call tenses are truly deictic.
Some languages though (e.g. Bantu or Papuan languages) have up to six deictic tenses,
specifying e.g. that something happened the day before yesterday. There are many othe
manifestations of temporal deixis, from calendrical specifications like Yesterday to more covert
items like ago (as in ten years ago) or Good night which presumes that it is night and that the
speaker is parting.
A third parameter is spatial deixis, reflected in demonstratives like this and that, or adverbs like
here and there, where spatial locations are indicated by reference to the place of speaking.
Demonstrative systems vary greatly across languages, with some making distance from speaker
primary, others making a contrast between ‘this near speaker’ vs. ‘that near addressee’, and
others invoking attentional issues, so that one has a contrast between e.g. ‘this we are talking
about’ vs. ‘that to which I want to draw your attention’. Huge arrays of demonstratives are
found in some languages (e.g. Inuit) where these sorts of parameters intersect with, for
example, the shape of things referred to. Languages often have pairs of verbs, like come vs. go,
bring vs. take, which are often interpreted according to whether the motion is towards or away
from the place of speaking. Many other expressions in language are covertly place deictic. For
example, “the cat is behind the tree” implies that the tree is between the speaker and the cat,
and “Let’s go to the local pub” implies that the pub is near to the place of speaking.
Lastly, discourse deixis involves the possibility of referring from one utterance backwards or
forwards to others, as in “That was a good speech” vs. “It made a sound like this: goooo”.
Discourse deixis grades into anaphora, the use of expressions like pronouns to refer to entities
already introduced earlier, usually by fuller expressions (see anaphora, Discourse
Representation Theory). It is also closely related to definiteness (q.v.), as in The man vs. a man,
since all these phenomena rely on mental models of entities introduced into the discourse.
Considerable effort has gone into understanding how deixis works, and how it can be brought
within a formal theory of meaning. But for the most part theoretical models underestimate the
complexity and pervasiveness of deictic phenomena, and the richness of the contextual systems
that support them. For example, good studies of actual deictic usage are rare, and the study of
gesture is in its infancy (McNeill, 2000).
3.2 Presupposition
Presupposition is a second major topic in pragmatics, and concerns the way in which
propositions already presumed in a discourse context are usually not stated or questioned, but
encoded in a more ‘background’ way. For example, “Has he stopped bothering you?”
presupposes the proposition that you and I know that he has been bothering you, and asks
whether this has stopped. The classical test for presupposition is survival under negation: “He
hasn’t stopped bothering me” and “He has stopped bothering me” both presuppose that he was
bothering me. Languages have complex systems for foregrounding and backgrounding
information in this way. Thus mental attitude verbs, like know or regret, or change of state
verbs like start and stop presuppose their complements, definite descriptions (like the king of
Buganda) presuppose the existence of the entities referred to, iteratives like again (as in John
did it again) presuppose earlier occurrences, and so on. The phenomena and corresponding
explanations are complex, and are dealt with in a separate article (see Presupposition), but the
relevance to pragmatics is that presupposition clearly implies that natural languages are built
to trade on, and signal, the dependency of utterances on propositions already taken for granted.
The pragmatic aspects of the phenomena are often underplayed in semantic accounts of the
phenomena. For example consider the sentence Sue cried before she finished her thesis – this
would normally presume that she finished thesis, this being a presupposition from the
beforeclause. But the minimally different sentence Sue died before she finished thesis seems
to make no such presumption, because of course we happen to know that the dead do not
complete theses. This defeasibility, or cancellation of an inference in the context of contrary
assumptions, is a hallmark of pragmatic inference.
3.3. Speech acts.
A third major topic in pragmatics concerns the general force or point of utterances, and is
usually discussed under the rubric of Speech acts. We can take a simple underlying proposition
like ‘The wine is (put) on the table’, and we can embody it in utterances with different
illocutionary force (in the terminology of the philosopher J. L. Austin). We can assert or vouch
for the truth of the proposition, as in the assertion The wine is on the table. We can ask whether
it is the case, as in Is the wine on the table? We can demand that the proposition be made true,
as in Put the wine on the table, and we can forbid anyone making it true as in Do not put the
wine on the table. Languages typically indicate a handful of such illocutionary forces in the
grammar of sentence types (see that entry), as here in the English unmarked statement order,
the marked inversion of yes-no questions, or the covert subjects of imperatives. Beyond
statements, questions and imperatives, most languages have in addition minor sentence types,
e.g. exclamatives as in What a wonderful dress, or hortatives like Let’s start, or imprecatives
like Damn you! and other more exotic types (e.g. special forms for blessings, curses, warnings).
Thus the grammars of languages seem to presume a set of fundamental uses for language, and
there has been some philosophical and theoretical interest in these categories. However, actual
usage is much more complicated than this discussion would suggest. For example, one can use
the statements I suppose the wine is on the table to question whether it is, or I would like the
wine on the table to request that it be put there, or The wine should not be placed on the table
to forbid it. Some of these uses can be explained as secondary or derivative uses of one sentence
type to perform a speech act prototypically associated with another. For example, I would like
… could be said to indirectly hint, rather than directly request, and can thus be described as an
indirect speech act. What this discussion makes clear is that it is important to keep apart the
grammar of sentence types from the illocutionary forces or speech acts they can be used to
perform.
There has been much work on grammatical sentence types (and what the grammarians call
mood), speech acts, and indirect speech acts, and their relationship to one another. This is the
subject of a separate entry (see Speech Acts), but here one major point is that these phenomena
directly indicate that natural languages are designed not just as abstract systems, but as tools
for human communication, a point of view underlined in functional approaches to language
structure (see functional approaches to grammar). Speech acts can also be seen to be
fundamentally context dependent. First, speech acts are dependent on, and contribute to, the
context in which speech is taking place. One way of seeing this is to construe speech acts as
operations on the context (conceived of as sets of propositions taken for granted): a statement
adds a proposition to the context, a question requests that such a proposition is added, a denial
removes one, and so on. Note too how a permission presumes that a prohibition would
otherwise be in force. Second, the interpretation of a sentence as performing a specific speech
act is obviously context dependent. Consider the sentence What are you doing tonight? in, say,
the following discourse context where it has a straightforward informational query status:
A: “I can’t wait for this evening”
B: “What are you doing tonight?”
Now compare its role in a different context:
A: “What are you doing tonight?”
B: “Oh I don’t know, not much”
A: “Would you like to come to the movies?”
Here the utterance checks out a condition on an invitation, and in so doing can be seen to
prelude such an invitation (a ‘pre-invitation’), which is then (given an appropriate response)
expected to follow. Sequences of utterances thus set up specific expectancies, crucial in
interpretation, a matter dealt with more fully below.
3.4 Conversational implicature
So far we have considered ways in which the structures of languages build in presumptions of
use, as in pronouns, demonstratives, verbs of presupposition, or sentence-types as indicators of
speech acts. In these cases the semantics of the expressions triggers the pragmatic inferences,
which are themselves subject to pragmatic resolution. But another very important aspect of
pragmatics is concerned with inferences that are invited – or implicated – rather than required
or triggered by the semantics: often, synonymous expressions will have different implicatures.
The philosopher H. P. Grice noted that there are a number of different ways in which such
invited meanings can be invoked, all of which point to a set of background assumptions about
how language should be used, which he formulated as a set of maxims of conversation. He
sketched four such maxims, with attendant submaxims: the maxim of Quality (‘Say what you
believe to be true’), the maxim of Relevance (‘Make what you say relevant and timely’), the
maxim of Quantity (‘Don’t say more or less than is required’), and the maxim of Manner (‘Be
brief and clear’). Then he showed that if a speaker overtly violates them, the speaker isgenerally
credited with some implicit, indirect meaning – for example, if it is raining, and the speaker
says “Thank God I didn’t bother to bring my umbrella”, thereby clearly violating the maxim of
Quality, an ironic interpretation is generated. (Any such interpretations which are suggested by
reference to the maxims, Grice called conversational implicatures to distinguish them from
logical implications). If on the other hand the speaker just seems to be following the maxims,
then additional inferences are generated . For example, if you say “There are five gallons in the
tank”, I’ll assume that there are no more than five gallons in the tank, because otherwise by the
maxim of Quantity (“Say as much as is required”) you should have said so (note that if there
are more than five gallons, then of course what you have said is certainly true,but anyway
misleading). Grice went on to note a number of interesting applications of his theory of
implicature. For example, philosophers had long disagreed about just how close the ordinary
language words “if”, “or” and “and” are to their logical counterparts. Grice argued that the
divergence between ordinary language and logic was largely due to the implicatures of
language usage. For example, if I say “Glenn was an astronaut or he was a senator”, I suggest
that he was not both, but this does not mean that natural language or is not equivalent to logical
(inclusive) disjunction. That is because if I knew he was both, I should (following the maxim
of Quantity) have said so; since I didn’t, I implicate that I believe he was one or the other but
not both.
Although modern versions of implicature theory use somewhat different ‘maxims’, they follow
Grice’s idea that the presumption of background principles of language use can generate many
detailed inferences that are suggested but not entailed by what has been said. There are two
main branches of contemporary theory. One takes the line (following the trend in the cognitive
sciences) that these background principles are innate cognitive mechanisms of information
processing (see the separate entry Relevance theory). The other branch follows Grice more
closely, and argues that these principles follow from rational design characteristics
ofcommunication. The former line is more generally concerned with the nature of inference in
communication, while the second “Neo-Gricean” line of argumentation has been developed
more narrowly to give explanations of linguistic facts, and is thus of more direct relevance to
linguistic theory, and so is the focus of the following remarks. One central attraction of the
Gricean approach is that it promises to simplify the kinds of meanings we attribute to
expressions. For example, as mentioned, English or seems normally to have an exclusive use
(as in “The book is either in the bedroom or the sitting room”), but obviously this is not always
so (consider “I lent you my pen or my pencil, or both”). Grice’s tactic is to avoid positing an
ambiguity (between inclusive and exclusive or), by assuming that or has a wide, general
meaning (e.g. the inclusive meaning), which is then specialized in context where appropriate
by an extra pragmatic inference – namely the Quantity implicature ‘not both’. By generalizing
Grice’s observations we can note, first, that any pair of expressions (like and, or), where the
use of one expression would entail the other (as in p and q implying p or q), but not vice-versa,
form a scale of informativeness – the use of and is more informative than or, because p or q
allows not only for the circumstance that p, or that q, but also for the circumstance that p and
q. In short, p and q rules out more alternatives states of affairs. Then we can also note that for
any such pair of expressions, asserting the weaker or less informative member, will implicate
the inapplicability of the stronger expression (for if you had meant that, you should have said
it). Hence asserting p or q implicates that one is not in a position to assert p and q. Now consider
many other such ordered pairs, where each is of the form <strong, weak>:< and, or>, <all,
some>, <certain, possible>, <four, three>, <must, may>, <hot, warm>. For each of these,
asserting the weaker, less informative expression will implicate that the stronger expression
does not apply, as in “Some of the students are punctual”, which, other things being equal, will
implicate ‘not all of the students are punctual’. Modern treatments of these so-called scalar
implicatures are quite developed (Atlas 2000, Gazdar 1979, Horn 1989,Levinson 2000). Many
further systematic observations can be made. Consider the contrast between “John could solve
the problem” vs. “John had the ability to solve the problem” – the first suggests that he did
solve it, while the second suggests he didn’t. The opposition is one between a direct lexical
coding with the verb can and a more periphrastic expression have the ability to. More generally,
the opposition is between any simple, direct encoding, which invites a rich interpretation to the
stereotypical scenario, and a less direct, unusual, more prolix or marked expression, which
suggests a complementary interpretation. Consider for example “He went downtown and
bought a coat”, which suggests he a single complex action (a coat-buying expedition), vs. “He
went downtown and in addition he bought a coat”, which suggests two independent actions.
These opposing tendencies of interpretation can be related to iconicity in language (see that
entry), but what gives them reliability is mutual expectations between speaker and addressee –
that is, that they follow from general principles or maxims. Contemporary neo-Gricean theory
recognizes two or three maxims, for example a maxim of Quantity (or Q-principle, giving us
the scalar implicatures mentioned above), a maxim that maximizes information from direct,
unmarked expressions (an Informativeness or I-principle), and a maxim of Manner or
markedness (or M-principle) that curtails those informative interpretations (Levinson 2000).
Three such principles suffice to capture many detailed inferences which interact closely with
linguistic structure, and they can be thought of as stable heuristics which serve to amplify
message content with default inferences.
In this sort of way, Grice’s ideas can be given both precision and generality. The description of
many crucial aspects of meaning (for example those associated with the natural language
connectives, quantifiers and modals) can be simplified and improved by taking into account
these inferences which are closely associated with expressions by general principle, but not
actually encoded in them. Such inferences have a default or presumptive character, and are
easily confused with the semantics and syntax of expressions. These observations have
considerable importance for linguistic theory. If they are pushed home, they imply a rather
different view about the relation of language competence to non-linguistic abilities than is
usually assumed. For example, it turns out that pragmatics can not interface with semantics in
the way originally imagined, as a module or system of principles that given the proposition
coded in an utterance, would calculate additional non-coded inferences. The problem is that
pragmatic inferences clearly play a central role in deriving the proposition in the first place.
For example, in It is better to drive home and drink than to drink and drive home the proposition
expressed depends on the antecedent construal of and as temporarily asymmetrical (i.e. as ‘and
then’), which is a matter of implicature. Thus what is coded semantically and what is inferred
pragmatically are often necessarily integrated in the extraction of propositional content. The
implication is that there is a single level of representation to which quite different kinds of
principles contribute – semantics and logical inference on the one hand, and pragmatics and
presumptive reasoning on the other.
Another possible radical implication is that many correlations between form and meaning that
have been attributed to syntax are more properly ascribed to pragmatics. For example, it is
normally supposed that in a sentence like The chairman voted for him, the chairman and the
man voted for must be distinct by a rule of grammar. But in No-one else voted for the incumbent
chairman - only the chairman voted for him it is possible to understand the chairman as voting
for himself. Arguably, this is because normally one would express such co-reference by the
reflexive himself, and the use of the non-reflexive pronoun thereby implicates a
noncoreferential reading, unless there are other reasons to use it. Here there are such other
reasons. Only the chairman voted for himself would imply that everybody else voted for people
other than themselves, and that may not be what is intended. Many such reductions of alleged
syntactic patterns to general patterns in pragmatics may be possible (see Huang 1996, Levinson
2000).
3.5 Conversational structure
Conversational inferences seem to be of two kinds: first the implicature type, which relies on
general background presumptions or heuristics, and second, inferences that are tied to more
specific details of conversational interchange. Conversation – or the normal, informal exchange
of speech, where there is rapid alternation of speakers – can be contrasted with more formal,
specialized types of speech exchange (as in chaired meetings, interviews, or religious services).
Needless to say, conversation is the primary form of human verbal interaction, the context in
which all primary language-learning is accomplished and many details of linguistic structure
are intimately tied to it. For example, a primary property of conversation is rapid turn-taking,
and with this turn-taking the deictic centering also alternates: what was “I” is now referred to
as “you”, what was “here” becomes “there”, and so forth, an alternation that children initially
find difficult.
The characteristics of turn-taking (and indeed conversation in general) have been studied
primarily by sociologists (under the rubric of conversation analysis, q.v.) . In the model
advanced by Sacks and Schegloff, conversational turn-taking is organized as a sharing system
whereby the current speaker has rights only to the end of a sentential construction or turn taking
unit, at which point transition to another speaker is governed by an ordered set of rules – if the
speaker has selected a next speaker, that party should speak next, if not, other speakers may
start speaking, failing which the original speaker may continue. These rules explain many
details of conversational patterning, such as just where overlaps occur (e.g. as competing
starts). They also explain the differential significance of silence – if no-one decides to speak
after a unit which selects no following speaker, silence is likely to be interpreted simply as a
lapse in conversation, but after a next speaker is selected it is heard as a significant withholding
of speech (Levinson 1983:300 after Atkinson & Drew):
A: Is there something bothering you or not?
B: (1.0 second silence)
A: Yes or no?
B: (1.5 seconds silence)
A: Eh?
B: No.
Differential meanings attributed to silence eloquently make the point that the semiotic
significance of utterances is very much conditioned by the locus in which they occur. Consider
for example that after a request, an acceptance or refusal is due, but these options are not equal:
an acceptance is usually delivered immediately in simple form, whereas a refusal is typically
delayed, indirect and accompanied by excuses. Recollect too, that as noted above, many speech
acts are preceded by an utterance that checks out whether the conditions for that action are met
thus one can hint at an upcoming request for an appointment by asking whether the addressee
would be available at a certain time. Then we can readily understand the following, where a
telephone caller C already interprets a two-second pause as a negative answer (from Levinson
1983:320):
C: So I was wondering would you be in your office on Monday (micro-second pause) by any
chance? (2.0 second silence)
C: Probably not
Here the interpretation relies (a) on the asymmetry between what the conversation analysts call
preferred and dispreferred responses to specific speech acts, and (b) on the understanding that
the question is not idle, but functions as a prelude to a request. The study of conversation thus
shows that the attribution of meaning to utterances depends crucially on sequential location.
Arguably, this is exactly what Grice had in mind by his maxim of Relevance, where the
implicatures of an utterance would also derive from the expected goals of the speaker at a
particular point in discourse. Goal-driven accounts of conversational understandings have been
explored most thoroughly in artificial intelligence circles, where the construction of a machine
that could enter into functional dialogues has been a long-term objective.
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 Summary of journal article “Pragmatics”
Name : Riska Febrianti.AS
Nim : 105351106020
Class : BG6C

Title : Pragmatics
Author : Stephen C Levinson
Pragmatics is the study of the relation between the structure of a semiotic system (notably
language) and its usage in context, and, along with semantics (see Semantics), forms part of
the general theory of the meaning.
The use of the term ‘pragmatics’ in modern semiotics derives from the philosophical work of
C.S. Peirce and R. Carnap, reflected in C. Morris’s (1938) three divisions of semiotics, the
study of sign systems: syntax, which investigates the relation of signs to signs, semantics,
which investigates the relation of signs to the things referred to, and pragmatics, which studies
the relation of signs to users of them.
In addition to the topics reviewed here, there are pragmatic perspectives on many other
phenomena, for example register, style, jargon and other specializations of language, the
contrastive use of languages by multilingual speakers (see Code-Switching), and social
constraints on the use of language (see e.g. Politeness). From research on all these topics, an
overall picture is emerging of the systematic relations between semiotic systems and their
contexts of use. First, any sign system or language makes systematic provision for contextual
features, as in deixis or presupposition. Second, what is actually coded in signs or linguistic
expressions is only a small part of the meaning attributed in context, the remainder being
generated by presumptions of use. Third, the coded meaning or semantics is usually much less
fully specified than conventional wisdom implies. Consider a roadsign depicting falling rocks-
the depicted content is specific yet hardly conveys the full message: we must add the
illocutionary force (‘Beware!’), and the deictic inference (‘in this vicinity’ or ‘the next
kilometer’). Such a sign contrasts with other warning signs, e.g. a simple exclamation mark,
which indicates general danger but implicates that the danger is other than rocks (since 16
otherwise the rock sign would have been used). All such signs contrast with no sign, which
implicates no special foreseeable danger. In similar but much more complicated ways,
pragmatic principles remain the essential basis for linguistic communication. For lexical
limitations and the bounds of learning and memory deeply constrain natural language
semantics. In addition, the relatively slow articulation of speech compared to understanding
processes puts a clear premium on pragmatic inference. A pragmatic perspective offers
fundamental insights into both the structure and use of language.
 Summary of journal article “Linguistic Meaning Communicated Meaning and
Cognitive Pragmatics”
Name : Riska Febrianti.AS
Nim : 105351106020
Class : BG6C

Title : Linguistic Meaning Communicated Meaning and Cognitive Pragmatics

Author : Robyn Carston
1. Pragmatics as a Cognitive System
1.1 From Philosophy of language to Cognitive Science
Broadly speaking, there are two perspectives on pragmatics: the ‘philosophical’and the
‘cognitive’. From the philosophical perspective, an interest in pragmatics has been largely
motivated by problems and issues in semantics. A familiar instance of this was Grice’s concern
to maintain a close semantic parallel between logical operators and their natural language
counterparts, such as ‘not’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if’, ‘every’, ‘a/some’, and ‘the’, in the face of what
look like quite major divergences in the meaning of the linguistic elements (see Grice 1975,
1981).
1.2 Levels of Explanation: the Personal and the Sub-Personal
The distinction between the ‘personal’ and the ‘sub-personal’ levels of explanation of human
behaviour was first introduced by Daniel Dennett (1969).
Persons are conscious thinking agents, who engage in actions (voluntary behaviours) which
can be explained in terms of reasons, that is, in terms of commonsense psychological
attributions of beliefs, desires and practical inferences that would normally lead to such actions.
2. Pragmatic Processes of Explicature Derivation
2.1 Linguistic Input and Pragmatic Output
On the other hand, what is communicated, that is, the output of the pragmatic processor, is
usually a set of fully propositional thoughts or assumptions, which are either true or false of an
external state of affairs in the world. There are two kinds of communicated propositions, those
that are explicitly communicated and those that are implicitly communicated There is some
debate about the precise nature of this explicit/implicit distinction, how it is to be drawn, and
whether any such two-way distinction can do justice to the levelsand kinds of meaning involved
in utterance interpretation.
2.2 Unarticulated Constituents and ‘Free’ Pragmatic Enrichment
There is a wide range of cases where it seems that pragmatics contributes a component to the
explicitly communicated content of an utterance although there is no linguistic element
indicating that such a component is required. That is, there is no overt indexical, nor is there
any compelling reason to suppose there is a covert element in the logical form of the utterance,
and yet a contextually supplied constituent appears in the explicature.
2.3 Pragmatic Adjustments of Conceptual Encodings
Free enrichment is a process which involves the addition of a conceptual constituent to the
decoded logical form; for example, ‘it’s snowing [in Aberdeen]’. There are other cases where
it seems that a better way of construing what is going on is that a lexical concept appearing in
the logical form is pragmatically adjusted, so that the concept understood as communicated by
the particular occurrence of the lexical item is different from, and replaces, the concept it
encodes; it is narrower or wider (or some combination of the two) than the lexical concept from
which it was derived.
There are many other cases where any one of a wide range of related concepts might be
communicated by a single lexical item; for instance, think of all the different kinds, degrees
and qualities of feeling that can be communicated by each of ‘tired’, ‘anxious’, ‘frightened’,
‘depressed’, ‘well’, ‘happy’,‘satisfied’, ‘sweet’, etc. In one context, an utterance of ‘I’m happy’
could communicate that the speaker feels herself to be in a steady state of low-key wellbeing,
in another that she is experiencing a moment of intense joy, in yet another that she is satisfied
with the outcome of some negotiation, and so on.
3. Relevance Theory and the Mutual Adjustment of Explicatures and Implicatures
According to relevance theory, the pragmatic inferential system employs the following strategy
in order to arrive at the intended interpretation of the utterance
The result should consist of (sets of) premises and conclusions making up valid arguments, but
the important point is that the process need not progress strictly logically from the accessing of
premises to the drawing of conclusions. For instance, a particular conclusion, or type of
conclusion, might be expected on the basis of considerations of relevance and, via a backwards
inference process, premises constructed (explicatures and implicatures) which will make for a
sound inference to the conclusion.
4. How Many Pragmatic Systems?
The following three positions on these relationships have actually been taken up by different
pragmatists:
[1] The various different pragmatic tasks are performed by processes that comprise a single
system, which takes decoded linguistic meaning as its input and delivers the propositions
communicated (explicatures and implicatures).
[2] There is a crucial split between the processes involved in deriving explicit utterance content,
on the one hand, and the processes of implicature derivation, on the other, with the two sets of
processes each belonging to a distinct cognitive system, the output of the first (explicature or
‘what is said’) being the input to the second.
[3] There are distinct processes for at least some of the (conceptually) distinct pragmatic tasks
(disambiguation, indexical reference assignment, recovery of unarticulated constituents,
speech act assignment, etc) and each of these distinct processes is performed by a
distinctcognitive system.
 Summary of journal article “On the pragmatics of contrast”
Name : Riska Febrianti.AS
Nim : 105351106020
Class : BG6C

Title : On the pragmatics of contrast

Author : Eve V. Clark

In her recent paper, Gathercole (1989) argued that Contrast is a semantic rather than a pragmatic
principle. She therefore proposed to account for some of the consequences of Contrast in a
Gricean framework instead. She also argued that Contrast fails to account for children's
regularizations of irregular forms in morphology, and for the acquisition of allomorphs where
different shapes have the same meaning.
Contrast is a pragmatic principle
The two principles together have specific consequences for language use. Speakers make use
whenever possible of established wordforms with conventional meanings. They assume that
addressees make use of the same conventional meanings as themselves in interpreting such
expressions. As a result, each conventional expression CONTRASTS in meaning with all other
conventional expressions that might have been chosen instead. This applies to words (as in the
choice of osprey rather than heron or grebe), to affixes (as in the choice of singular boy rather
than plural boys), to grammatical functors (as in the rather than a), and to constructions (as in
the choice of the passive rather than the active). Finally, where conventional expressions prove
inadequate to express a particular meaning, speakers often have recourse to innovative
expressions. These contrast with conventional expressions as well as with other innovations.
This characterization of pre-emption and differentiation is clearly close kin to Gathercole's
(1989) alternative to Contrast. 'Bring me the chromium tray, not the red one'. It goes as follows:
(1) That person is using a word I don't know, chromium, in reference to those two trays.
(2) The only difference between the trays is that they are of different colours.
(3) Chromium must, therefore, refer to a colour.
(4) The colour of that one tray is called 'red'.
(5) I assume that person is trying to communicate with me.
(6) That person must not have meant the red tray or she would have asked me for the ' red' one.
(7) Therefore, she must want the other tray, and chromium must refer to the colour of that other
tray. (Gathercole, 1989:694)
Contrast in acquisition
That is, Contrast is pragmatic in children from the very first
(a) children, like adults, will give priority to known (i.e. familiar conventional) words over
other expressions that fail to contrast with those known terms. That is, children will give up
their own coinages in favour of the conventional terms used by adults: they replace innovative
verbs like to sand ('grind into powder' [of pepper]) or to crack out ('to crack a shell and get out'
[of chicks]), from twoyear-olds, with conventional grind and hatch, and they replace innovative
nouns like far-see-er or sleepers with conventional telescope and pyjamas (see also Clark,
1987).
The critical point is that the child has first to recognize that the two terms have the same
meaning; only then can he or she choose to retain only one of them - the conventional,
established one.
(b) Children will assign unfamiliar words they hear to gaps in their current lexicon. They will
treat an unfamiliar word as being pertinent to an unfamiliar object or action in a setting where
the other objects or actions are familiar and carry known labels. For example, when presented
with three or four familiar animals with familiar names (e.g. dog, pig, sheep), plus an unfamiliar
animal and an unfamiliar label (e.g., skunk), children will infer that the unfamiliar label
designates the unfamiliar animal.
(c) When wishing to talk about objects or events for which they have no conventional terms,
children will coin new words, using the most appropriate word-formation options mastered to
date. In talking about objects, for example, English-speaking two-year-olds often construct new
nouns from nouns already known to them (e.g. tea-sieve 'small strainer' from tea and sieve, in
contrast to water-sieve for a large one); bubble-hair 'curly hair' from bubble and hair; or baby-
towel 'face-cloth' from baby and towel).
Contrast in morphology
Contrast in the acquisition of morphology when they 'replace' irregular forms by regularized
ones with the same meaning. Indeed, Gathercole (1989) made just this argument. The problem
is this: superficially, the past tense of an irregular verb like go in English has the following
order of acquisition: (i) children use only the bare stem, go; (it) they make sporadic use of the
conventional irregular past form, went; (iii) they begin to produce a regularized form for the
past, goed; and (iv), sometimes only several years later, they drop the regularized past tense
goed in favour of went (e.g. Cazden, 1968).
This account assumes that children at stage (it) have recognized that went is in the fact the past
form oi go. This assumption is probably incorrect. An alternative is that children at stage (it)
have not recognized that went is some other tense of go, even if they have assigned some
motion-related meaning to it. Children at stage (Hi), therefore, in producing the form goed, are
simply constructing the past tense form on the regular model of jump/jumped, work/worked,
etc.
Contrast in allomorphy
Some grammatical morphemes have several realizations or allomorphs, depending on the
phonological shape of the stem they are added to. In English, for example, the plural morpheme
takes one of three shapes: /-s,/,/-z/, or /-iz/ depending on the final segment of the stem, but the
meaning is the same. In Finnish, back vowels and front vowels can never appear in the same
word, so each suffix has one realization for stems with front vowels, and another for stems with
back vowels. The meaning of each pair of front- and back-vowel realizations is the same. In
other words, phonology, and not meaning, accounts for the variations in shape of certain
morphemes.