Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of

English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

Lecture 2: Pragmatics

Main issues
1. What is Pragmatics

2. Key concepts in Pragmatics

• Context

• Deixis

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

1. What is Pragmatics
• Pragmatics is the study of what speakers mean
or speaker’s meaning . (Yule: 2010: 127)
• Sentence meaning: what a sentence means out of
context. Sentence meaning is derived from the
meaning of the words used in a sentence.
• Speaker’s meaning: what a speaker means when
he/she utters a sentence, usually in a particular
context. Speaker’s meaning can be completely
different from sentence meaning.
• “It’s raining”

Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics

• Syntax:
- the relationships between linguistic forms,
- how they are arranged in sequence,
- and which sequences are well-formed.

• Semantics:
- what linguistic expressions mean out of context
(= truth conditions).

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics

• Pragmatics:
- relationships between linguistic forms and the users
of those forms (speakers).

- how meaning arises from the interaction of linguistic

meaning with contextual factors: the physical situation,
general knowledge, the speaker’s apparent intentions,
the relationship between the speaker and hearer…

Pragmatics

• The advantage of studying language via

pragmatics is that one can talk about
people’s intended meanings, their
assumptions, their purposes or goals, and
the kinds of actions that they are
performing when they speak.

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

2. Key concepts in Pragmatics

• Context

• Deixis

CONTEXT

Physical Epistemic
context context

Context

Linguistic Social
context context

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

Physical context
where the conversation is taking place, what
objects are present, what actions are occurring…

A: Where’s the cheese sandwich sitting?

B: He’s over there by the window

→ In a restaurant.

Epistemic context

• What speakers know about the world.

• The background knowledge is shared by
the speakers.

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Linguistic context = Co-text

• The co-text of a word is the set of other

words used in the same phrase or
sentence or utterance.

Social context
• The social relationship between the
speaker(s) and hearer(s).

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Example
Imagine you are in the library. Two people
come into a library and they are talking
really loud. They sit at your table and
continue their babbling. So, you look up at
them and say:
• "Excuse me, could you please speak up
a bit more? I missed what you said."

• Physical context : the conversation occurs in a library

• Epistemic context : every one knows that libraries are

quiet places

• Linguistic context : sarcastic tone of voice (intonation

cues are linguistic)

• social context: you have the right to ask someone to be

quiet in a place where people are supposed to be quiet,
especially if their rule-breaking is injurious to the needs of
others, which overrides the social norm of not giving
orders to total strangers.

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Deixis
• A technical term known as deictic expressions
(from Greek) which means ‘pointing’ via language.

• Deixis usually requires a speaker and a hearer

sharing the same context and it is an application of
a general pragmatic principle which says that the
more two speakers have in common, the less
language they will need to identify familiar things.

Types of
Deixis

Spatial deixis
person deixis
( place )
(people , things )

Social deixis Discoursal

deixis
temporal deixis

( time )

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1. Person deixis

• Pointing to things:
- it , this, these boxes…

• Pointing to people :
- I , you, he, she, it , him , them , those idiots …

1. Person deixis
• Each person in a conversation shifts from being
‘I’ to being ‘you’ constantly.

Brother, I want to
Ok, Lisa, right have an ice-cream
after we get now
home, I’ll get you
a chocolate one. Thank you.

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2. Social deixis
• In some languages (Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean), the
deictic categories of speaker, addressee, and other(s) are
elaborated with markers of relative social status.
Expressions which indicate higher status are described as
‘honorifics’.

• Apparently social deixis is for the sake of politeness in

social interaction. An often cited example is the French “tu”
and “vous”, the former a plain way of referring to any
second person hearer while the latter a polite or indirect
way of referring to any second person hearer.

3. Spatial Deixis
here, there, near that…

• Some verbs of motion have a deictic sense:

- ‘come’ (movement toward the speaker)
- ‘go’ (movement away from the speaker).

e.g. Here she comes.

There she goes.

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4. Temporal Deixis
• now , then , last week, yesterday, today,
tonight, tomorrow , this week, next month,
from now on, in the future, ...

E.g. Tomorrow , my life will be better.

5. Discoursal Deixis
• A discoursal deixis is self-explicit in that it is used
primarily in a discourse unit and for discoursal
purpose.
• We employ discoursal deixis a lot for textual
coherence or as a procedural indicators. For
instance, we use ‘to begin with, first, next, in
the following paragraph, last but not least,
etc.’ to smooth the transitions or connections
between different parts of a textual units.

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