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UNIVERSITY OF RWANDA
College of Arts and Social Sciences
School of Arts and Languages
Year 4, Linguistics and Literature, 2016-2017
Module: Theories of Meaning
Component: PRAGMATICS
Lecturer: Dr Alphonse KABANO

COMPONENT OUTLINE

Aims:
The component intends to introduce students to the analysis of
meaning aspects which are context-sensitive. At the end of the
component, students should be able:
– Explain the complementarity between semantics and pragmatics
– Understand the key factors related to the notion of context
– Understand the inferential mechanisms involved in the compre-
hension of verbal information
– Analyse adequately any linguistic phenomenon that operates in
real social context
– Make appropriate use of linguistic resources and strategies in va-
rious social interactions and enhance their communicative com-
petence.

Content:
Chap.1: What is Pragmatics
Chap.2: Context
Chap.3: Pragmatic Competence
Chap.4: Speech Acts
Chap.5: Conversational Implicatures
Chap.6: Politeness
Chap.7: Indexicals
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Indicative references

AUSTIN, J.L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Ox-

ford University Press

BROWN, P. & S. C. LEVINSON. 1978. Politeness: some univer-sals

in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

CHIERCHIA, G. & S. McCONNELL-GINET. 1996. Meaning and

grammar. An introduction to semantics. Cambridge, Ms &
London: The MIT Press

DUCROT, O. 1984. Le Dire et le Dit. Paris : Minuit

FODOR, J.D. 1977. Semantics: Theories of meaning in generative

grammar. New York: Crowell

GACUTI, B. 2001. A pragmatic analysis of some kinyarwanda

inviting expressions. B.A dissertation. Butare: Université Nationale
du Rwanda

GRICE, H. P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66. 377-388

GRICE, H. P. 1968. Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and

word-meaning. Foundations of language 4. 225-242

GRICE, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. COLE & J.

MORGAN (eds). Syntax and semantics 3

HICKEY, L. 1989. The pragmatics of style. London: Routledge

JAUBERT, A. 1990. La lecture pragmatique. Paris: Hachette

KATZ, J. 1972. Semantic theory. New York : Harper and Row

KEMPSON, R. M. 1975. Presupposition and the delimitation of

semantics. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press
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KWITONDA, J.C. 2012. A pragmatic study of the meaning and

functions of silence in Rwandan culture. B.A. dissertation. Butare :
National University of Rwanda

LEECH, G. N. 1981. Semantics: the structure of meaning. Har-

mondworth: Penguin

LEECH, G.N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman

LEVINSON, S.C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge : Cambridge Uni-

versity Press

MINEZERO, D. 2012. The art of conducting negociation in busi-

ness. A pragmatic approach. B.A. dissertation. Butare : National
University of Rwanda

MIRA, A. (2010). Defining Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

MUNYESHURI, E. 1999. L’expression de la péjoration en kinya-

rwanda. Essai de pragmatique du langage. B.A. dissertation.
Butare : Université Nationale du Rwanda

NIYIBAHO, S. 2001. Les négateurs du kinyarwanda dans un

processus communicationnel non-négatif. Essai d’étude pragma-
tique. B.A dissertation. Butare : Université Nationale du Rwanda

NYIRANSANGA, A.M. 2012. A pragmatic analysis of uttered

word in Rwandan bride request ceremony ‘’Gusaba’’. Case study:
Ngoma and Rusatira sectors, in Huye District. B.A. dissertation.
Butare : National University of Rwanda

RECANATI, F. 1981. Les énoncés performatifs. Paris : Minuit

 4

RECANATI, F. 1987. Meaning and force: the pragmatics of per-

formative utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

TWAGIRIMANA, F. 2012. A pragmatic study of Kinyarwanda

hyperbolic expressions. B.A. dissertation. Butare : National Uni-
versity of Rwanda

SEARLE, J. 1965. What is a speech act? In M. BLACK (ed.). Phi-

losophy in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

SEARLE, J. 1969. Speech acts: an essay in philosophy of lan-

guage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

SPERBER, D. & D. WILSON. 1986. Relevance: communication

and cognition. Cambridge: Havard University Press

SPERBER, D. & WILSON, D. 2005 Pragmatics. In F. JACKSON

and M. SMITH (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philoso-
phy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 468-501

SLATNAKER, R. 1974. Pragmatic presupposition. In M. MU-

NITZ & P. UNGER (eds.). Semantics and philosophy. New York:
New York University Press

TULIKUMANA, J.D. 1985. An ethno-sociolinguistic study of

polite formulae in English and Kinyarwanda. B.A dissertation. Ru-
hengeri: Université Nationale du Rwanda

UWIMANA, J.C. 2012. A pragmatic analysis of the language used

in police interviews. B.A. dissertation. Butare : National University
of Rwanda

WARDAUGH, R. 1985. How conversation works. Oxford: Basil

Blackwell
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YULE, G. 1996. The study of language. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS PRAGMATICS?

Morris 1938. Semantics deals with the relation of signs to …

objects which they may or do denote. Pragmatics concerns the
relation of signs to their interpreters. By ‘pragmatics ’ is designated
the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters. ( …) Since
most, if not all, signs have as their interpreters living organisms, it
is a sufficiently accurate characterization of pragmatics to say that
it deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the
psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur
in the functioning of signs.

Carnap 1942. If in an investigation explicit reference is made to

the speaker, or, to put it in more general terms, to the user of a
lan-guage, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics. (…) If we
abs-tract from the user of the language and analyze only the
expres-sions and their designata, we are in the field of semantics.
And if, finally, we abstract from the designata also and analyze
only the relations between expressions, we are in (logical) syntax.

Bar-Hillel 1954. I believe, therefore, that the investigation of inde-

 6

xical languages and the erection of indexical language-systems are

urgent tasks for contemporary logicians. May I add, for the sake of
classificatory clarity, that the former task belongs to descriptive
pragmatics and the latter to pure pragmatics (in one of the many
senses of the expression)?

Stalnaker 1970. Syntax studies sentences, semantics studies pro-

positions. Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the
contexts in which they are performed. There are two major types
of prob-lems to be solved within pragmatics: first, to define
interesting types of speech acts and speech products; second, to
characterize the features of the speech context which help
determine which pro-position is expressed by a given sentence. …
It is a semantic problem to specify the rules for matching up
sentences of a natural language with the propositions that they
express. In most cases, ho-wever, the rules will not match
sentences directly with proposi-tions, but will match sentences
with propositions relative to featu-res of the context in which the
sentence is used. Those contextual features are part of the subject
matter of pragmatics.

Katz 1977. [I] draw the theoretical line between semantic interpre-
tation and pragmatic interpretation by taking the semantic
 7

compo-nent to properly represent only those aspects of the

meaning of the sentence that an ideal speaker-hearer of the
language would know in an anonymous letter situation,… [where
there is] no clue wha-tever about the motive, circumstances of
transmission, or any other factor relevant to understanding the
sentence on the basis of its context of utterance.

Gazdar 1979. PRAGMATICS = MEANING-TRUTH CONDI-TIONS.

What we need in addition is some function that tells us about the
meaning of utterances. (…) The domain of this prag-matic function
is the set of utterances, which are pairs of sentences and contexts,
so that for each utterance, our function will return as a value a
new context: the context as changed by the sentence uttered. ( …)
And we can treat the meaning of the utterance as the difference
between the original context and the context arrived at by
utterance of the sentence. [This applies to only] a restricted sub-
set of pragmatic aspects of meaning.

Kempson 1988. Semantics provides a complete account of sen-

tence meaning for the language, [by] recursively specifying the
truth conditions of the sentence of the language. … Pragmatics
provides an account of how sentences are used in utterances to
convey information in context.
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Kaplan 1989. The fact that a word or phrase has a certain meaning
clearly belongs to semantics. On the other hand, a claim about the
basis for ascribing a certain meaning to a word or phrase does not
belong to semantics… Perhaps, because it relates to how the lan-
guage is used, it should be categorized as part of … pragmatics …,
or perhaps, because it is a fact about semantics, as part of …
Meta-semantics.

Davis 1991. Pragmatics will have as its domain speakers' commu-

nicative intentions, the uses of language that require such inten-
tions, and the strategies that hearers employ to determine what
these intentions and acts are, so that they can understand what
the speaker intends to communicate.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Fotion 1995). Pragmatics is

the study of language which focuses attention on the users and
the context of language use rather than on reference, truth, or
gra-mmar.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Lycan 1995). Pragma-

tics studies the use of language in context, and the context-depen-
dence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation. … [Its bran-
 9

ches include the theory of how] one and the same sentence can
express different meanings or propositions from context to
context, owing to ambiguity or indexicality or both, … speech act
theory, and the theory of conversational implicature.

The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (Davies 1995). The

distinction between semantics and pragmatics is, roughly, the dis-
tinction between the significance conventionally or literally atta-
ched to words, and thence to whole sentences, and the further
sig-nificance that can be worked out, by more general principles,
using contextual information.

Carston 1999. The decoding process is performed by an autono-

mous linguistic system, the parser or language perception module.
Having identified a particular acoustic stimulus as linguistic, the
system executes a series of deterministic grammatical computa-
tions or mappings, resulting in an output representation, which is
the semantic representation, or logical form, of the sentence or
phrase employed in the utterance. (…) The second type of cogni-
tive process, the pragmatic inferential process (constrained and
guided by the communicative principle of relevance) integrates
the linguistic contribution with other readily accessible
information in order to reach a confirmed interpretive hypothesis
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concerning the speaker's informative intention.

Bach 2004. Semantic information is information encoded in what

is uttered — these are stable linguistic features of the sentence —
together with any extralinguistic information that provides
(seman-tic) values to context-sensitive expressions in what is
uttered. Pra-gmatic information is (extralinguistic) information
that arises from an actual act of utterance, and is relevant to the
hearer's determina-tion of what the speaker is communicating.
Whereas semantic in-formation is encoded in what is uttered,
pragmatic information is generated by, or at least made relevant
by, the act of uttering it.

Wikipedia on Answers.com: Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics

which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning.
Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational
implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language
behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the
transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic
knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener,
but also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status
of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on. In
this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to
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overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner,

place, time etc. of an utterance. The ability to understand another
speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. So an
utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metaprag-
matic. Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the most chal-
lenging aspects of language learning, and comes only through ex-
perience.

In brief: Pragmatics is a systematic way of explaining language

use in context. It seeks to explain aspects of meaning which cannot
be found in the plain sense of words or structures, as explained by
semantics. As a field of language study, pragmatics is fairly new.
Its origins lie in philosophy of language and the American philoso
phical school of pragmatism. As a discipline within language
science, its roots lie in the work of (Herbert) Paul Grice on
conversational implicature and the cooperative principle (example
of volcano traveler), and on the work of Stephen Levinson,
Penelope Brown and Geoff Leech on poli-teness.

We use language all the time to make things happen. We ask

someone to pass the salt or marry us - not, usually at the same
time. We order a pizza or make a dental appointment. Speech acts
include asking for a glass of beer, promising to drink the beer,
threatening to drink more beer, ordering someone else to drink
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some beer, and so on. Some special people can do extraordinary

things with words, like baptizing a baby, declaring war, awarding
a penalty kick to Arsenal FC or sentencing a convict.

Linguists have called these things “speech acts” - and developed a

theory (called, unsurprisingly, “speech act theory”) to explain how
they work. Some of this is rooted in common sense and stating the
obvious - as with felicity conditions. These explain that merely
saying the words does not accomplish the act. Judges (unless they
are also referees) cannot award penalty kicks to Arsenal, and foot-
ball referees (unless they are also heads of state) cannot declare
war. Speech act theory is not the whole of pragmatics, but is
perhaps currently the most important established part of the subject.
Contemporary debate in pragmatics often focuses on its relations
with semantics. Since semantics is the study of meaning in
language, why add a new field of study to look at meaning from a
novel viewpoint?

This is an elementary confusion. Clearly linguists could develop a

model of semantics that included pragmatics. Or they could pro-
duce a model for each, which allows for some exploration and
explanation of the boundary between them - but distinguishes them
as in some way different kinds of activity. However, there is a con-
sensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is necessary be-
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cause it explains meanings that semantics overlooks.

Origins of pragmatics
Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics as outlined by
Ferdinand de Saussure. In many cases, it expanded upon his idea
that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that
can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only
in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical deve-
lopment of language. However, it rejected the notion that all mea-
ning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of lan-
gue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being.

Areas of interest
 The study of the speaker's meaning, not focusing on the phonetic
or grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what the
speaker's intentions and beliefs are.
 The study of the meaning in context, and the influence that a
given context can have on the message. It requires knowledge of
the speaker's identities, and the place and time of the utterance.
 The study of implicatures, i.e. the things that are communicated
even though they are not explicitly expressed.
 The study of relative distance, both social and physical, between
speakers in order to understand what determines the choice of
what is said and what is not said.
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 The study of what is not meant, as opposed to the intended

meaning, i.e. that which is unsaid and unintended, or
unintentional.
 Information Structure, the study of how utterances are marked
in order to efficiently manage the common ground of referred
entities between speaker and hearer
 Formal Pragmatics, the study of those aspects of meaning and
use, for which context of use is an important factor, by using the
methods and goals of formal semantics.
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CHAPTER 2: CONTEXT

‘Context’ is an all-pervasive concept in pragmatics. For some au-

thors ‘context’ is the defining concept of pragmatics. But many,
perhaps too many, different concepts are included under this term.
In Linguistics, ‘context’ commonly means the previous and sub-
sequent linguistic material in a given text. In Kaplan's scheme, the
context is objective, it comprises the actual basic facts about an
utterance: the speaker, time, place, and possible world in which it
occurs. (4 PARAMETTERS TO UNDERSTAND CONTEXT:
Participants: who (social status), Setting: where (space time),
Topic: about what and Channel: how). In Stalnaker's scheme,
context is basically subjective: a matter of common ground: that is,
shared beliefs that serve as com-mon presuppositions for the
interpretation of assertions. Often the term is used for anything in
the indefinitely large surrounding of an utterance, from the
intentions of the speaker to the previous topics of conversation to
the object discernible in the environment.

Here are a number of distinctions that have been made with respect
to the concept(s) of context that the reader may find helpful. The
list is not intended to be exhaustive, mutually exclusive, or to
represent a single coherent view of pragmatic phenomena.
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Linguistic context versus extra linguistic context. Considering

the context of an utterance, one of the most intuitive distinctions is
between the context as consisting of its previous and subsequent
utterances — the linguistic contexts — and any other extra-
linguistic circumstance surrounding the utterance. In the case of
ellipsis and anaphoric (and cataphoric) pronouns the designation is
determined, or at least constrained, by the linguistic context of the
utterance, while the designation of deictic demonstratives is fixed
by contextual extralinguistic facts.

Narrow versus broad. Narrow context is usually understood as

the list of parameters for basic indexicals, parameters that corres-
pond to basic facts about the utterance. Speaker, place and time are
on almost everyone's list, as required for the interpretation of ‘I,’
‘here,’ ‘now’ and tense. Kaplan adds the possible world, for the
interpretation of ‘actual.’ Arguably, every utterance occurs in a
world, at a time, in a place, and with a speaker. In contrast, wide or
broad context is understood as all other kinds of information, in
particular, information relative to the speaker's communicative
intention, used for the interpretation of ‘pragmatic aspects' of the
utterance. In Bach's words: Wide context concerns any contextual
information relevant to determining the speaker's intention and to
the successful and felicitous performance of the speech act…
Narrow context concerns information specifically relevant to deter-
mining the semantic values of [indexicals]… (Bach 1999a). Bach
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goes on to say, Narrow context is semantic, wide context prag-

matic. But on this there would be some disagreement, as many
would hold that information about the speaker's intentions, and
perhaps also about causal and informational chains, ongoing topics
of conversations, and much else, are needed for semantics.

Epistemic versus doxastic. It is sometimes assumed, particularly

by writers with a psychological orientation, that, together with
speaker's intentions, it is speaker's beliefs that determine the con-
tent of expressions in her utterance, with the issue of the truth (or
falsity) of her beliefs having no relevance. So, belief rather than
knowledge is the relevant concept to characterize context. Accor-
ding to this view, there would not be a significant difference bet-
ween ‘intending to say’ (and, for that matter, ‘believing that it ha-
ving had said’) and ‘saying,’ which goes about some truths of
intentions and general: one usual way of failing to perform an ac-
tion comes from the falsity of some agent's belief. This is related to
another distinction between objective and subjective contexts.

Objective versus subjective. There are a number of cases, howe-

ver, in which the speaker's beliefs, even if shared by everyone in
the conversation, do not seem to determine content. Suppose, for
example, that Elwood's hero worship of John Searle has reached
such a point that he now takes himself to be John Searle. He intro-
 18

duces himself to the new class of Stanford graduate students by

saying, "I'm John Searle, from across the Bay." It seems that even
if he and everyone in the conversation believes he is Searle, what
he has said is the falsehood, that Elwood is John Searle. Or,
suppose a group of golfers is standing on the small portion of the
Stanford golf course that juts into San Mateo County, but none of
them realize it. "The county seat of this county is San Jose," one of
them says, for some reason or other. He believes he has informed
them of the truth that the county seat of Santa Clara County is San
Jose, and in fact the other members of the foursome learn this fact
from what he says. Nevertheless, many would argue, what he said
was false, and only fortuitous ignorance led his partners to learn a
truth from the falsehood he uttered.

Pre-semantic context. Pre-semantic context provides information

for identifying the utterance: which words in which language with
which syntactic structure, and with which meanings are being used.

Semantic context. Semantic context comprises those contextual

features that determine or partly determine the content of context-
sensitive expressions. This is the case of pronouns, whose linguis-
tic meanings do more or less strictly constrain but do not determine
their designata. Their meaning direct us to the context (linguistic
context, in cases of anaphoric co-designation; extra-linguistic con-
 19

text in cases of indexicals and deictic uses of demonstratives) to

look for the designation of the pronoun. But there are more
context-sensitive expressions than indexical, deictic and anaphoric
pronouns. Sentence mood, for instance, is an indicator of illocutio-
nary point, but it does not determine the precise illocutionary force
of an utterance without the help of contextual factors. The contri-
bution to utterance-content of some particles like ‘but’ (that, ac-
cording to Grice, produce ‘conventional implicatures) are another
case in point.

Post-semantic context. Third, there is (or may be) what Perry

(2001) calls post-semantic context. This comprises facts that pro-
vide unarticulated content. For example, the fact that a conversa-
tion is about Palo Alto may determine, perhaps together with spea-
ker intentions, that the statement "It is raining," has the content that
it is raining in Palo Alto. Arguably, such contextual contributions
are not triggered by the meaning-rules of the words used, but more
global considerations. The fact that we usually are talking about
rain in a particular place has to do with the nature of rain and the
way humans are concerned with it and conceptualize the phenome-
na, rather than the syntax of ‘rain.’

(Far-side) Pragmatic Context. It comprises contextual factors

needed to get at (calculate, infer) what is communicated or done in
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and by saying what one says. This concerns the speaker's intentions
concerning indirect speech acts, implica-tures, and non-literal
contents. It may also include institutional facts and indeed, all sorts
of other things relevant to the effects of the utterance.
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CHAPTER 3: PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

It is the ability to use language in a contextually appropriate

fas-hion. Pragmatic competence is a fundamental aspect of a more
general communicative competence. "[P]ragmatic
competence . . . is understood as the knowledge of the linguistic
resources available in a given language for realising particular
illocutions, knowledge of the sequential aspects of speech acts, and
finally, knowledge of the appropriate contextual use of the
particular language's linguis-tic resources." (Anne Barron,
Acquisition in Interlanguage Prag-matics: Learning How to Do
Things With Words in a Study-Abroad Context. John Benjamins,
2003).

"Intrinsic to this decision-making process [in using language to

communicate] are several principles that concur to define the na-
ture of pragmatic competence. In particular, individuals make
choices and build strategies based on some of the unique properties
of pragmatic/communicative competence, such as:
- Variability: the property of communication that defines the range
of communicative possibilities, among which is formulating com-
municative choices;
- Negotiability: the possibility of making choices based on flexible
strategies;
 22

- Adaptibility; the ability to modulate and regulate communicative

choices in relation to the communicative context;
- Salience: the degree of awareness reached by communicative
choices;
- Indeterminacy: the possibility to re-negotiate pragmatic choices
as the interaction unfolds in order to fulfill communicative inten-
tions;
- Dynamicity: development of the communicative interaction in
time." (M. Balconi and S. Amenta, "From Pragmatics to Neuro-
pragmatics." Neuropsychology of Communication, ed. by Michela
Balconi. Springer, 2010)

"[Noam] Chomsky accepts that language is used purposefully;

indeed, in later writings he introduced the term pragmatic com-
petence -- knowledge of how language is related to the situation in
which it is used. Pragmatic competence 'places language in the
institutional setting of its use, relating intentions and purposes to
the linguistic means at hand' (Chomsky, 1980a, p. 225). As well as
knowing the structure of a language, we have to know how to use
it. There is little point in knowing the structure of: ‘’Can you lift
that box?’’ if you can't decide whether the speaker wants to dis-
cover how strong you are (a question) or wants you to move the
box (a request).
 23

"It may be possible to have grammatical competence without prag-

matic competence. A schoolboy in a Tom Sharpe novel Vintage
Stuff (Sharpe, 1982) takes everything that is said literally; when
asked to turn over a new leaf, he digs up the headmaster's came-
llias. But knowledge of language use is different from knowledge

of language itself; pragmatic competence is not linguistic compe-

tence. The description of grammatical competence explains how
the speaker knows that ‘’Why are you making such a noise?’’is a
possible sentence of English, and that ‘’*Why you are making such
a noise?’’. is not. It is the province of pragmatic competence to ex-
plain whether the speaker who says: ‘’Why are you making such a
noise?’’ is requesting someone to stop, or is asking a genuine ques-
tion out of curiosity, or is muttering a sotto voce comment." (V.J.
Cook and M. Newson, Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Intro-
duction. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996).
 24

CHAPTER 4: SPEECH ACTS

The philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) claims that many utte-

rances (things people say) are equivalent to actions. When some-
one says: “I name this ship” or “I now pronounce you man and
wife”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality.
We can add many more examples :
 Sergeant Major: Squad, by the left… left turn!
 Referee: (Pointing to the centre circle) Goal!
 Groom: With this ring, I thee wed.
Speech act theory broadly explains these utterances as having
three parts or aspects: locutionary, illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts.
 Locutionary acts are simply the speech acts that have taken
place.
 Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by
the utterance, where saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting
one's troth, welcoming and warning.
 Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the lis-
tener, who accepts the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or
warned.

Some linguists have attempted to classify illocutionary acts into a

number of categories or types. David Crystal, quoting J.R. Searle,
gives five such categories: representatives, directives, commis-
sives, expressives and declarations. (Perhaps he would have
 25

prefer-red declaratives, but this term was already taken as a

description of a kind of sentence that expresses a statement.)
 Representatives: here the speaker asserts a proposition to be true,
using such verbs as: affirm, believe, conclude, deny, report.
 Directives: here the speaker tries to make the hearer do some-
thing, with such words as: ask, beg, challenge, command, dare,
invite, insist, request.
 Commissives: here the speaker commits himself (or herself) to a
(future) course of action, with verbs such as: guarantee, pledge,
promise, swear, vow, undertake, warrant.
 Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude to or about a state
of affairs, using such verbs as: apologize, appreciate, congra-
tulate, deplore, detest, regret, thank, welcome.
 Declarations the speaker alters the external status or condition of
an object or situation, solely by making the utterance: I now pro-
nounce you man and wife, I sentence you to be hanged by the
neck until you be dead, I name this ship...

Performatives
These are speech acts of a special kind where the utterance of the
right words by the right person in the right situation effectively is
(or accomplishes) the social act. In some cases, the speech must
be accompanied by a ceremonial or ritual action. Whether the
speaker in fact has the social or legal (or other kind of) standing to
 26

accomp-lish the act depends on some things beyond the mere

speaking of the words. These are felicity conditions, which we can
also explain by the “hereby” test. But let's look, first, at some
examples.

In the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 19, verses 13-20) we read of

some exorcists in Ephesus who tried to copy St. Paul and cast out
evil spirits in the name of Jesus: “I adjure you by the Jesus whom
Paul proclaims”. On one occasion the possessed man (or the evil
spirit) attacked them, and said, “Jesus I know and Paul I know; but
who are you?” Evidently St. Paul not only knew the words, but
also had the means to call on divine aid for his exorcisms. In a
slightly similar vein, Claudius, in Hamlet, sees that his prayer is
ineffectual because “Words without thoughts never to Heaven
go”.
Outside of miracle or magic, there are social realities that can be
enacted by speech, because we all accept the status of the
speaker in the appropriate situation. This is an idea expressed in
the Ame-rican Declaration of Independence where we read,
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
Powers from the Consent of the Governed”.
 27

Here are some examples from different spheres of human activity,

where performatives are found at work. These are loose
categories, and many performatives belong to more than one of
them:
 Universities and schools: conferring of degrees, rusticating or
excluding students.
 The church: baptizing, confirming and marrying, exorcism, com-
mination (cursing) and excommunication.
 Governance and civic life: crowning of monarchs, dissolution of
Parliament, passing legislation, awarding honours, ennobling or
decorating.
 The law: enacting or enforcing of various judgements, passing
sentence, swearing oaths and plighting one's troth.
 The armed services: signing on, giving an order to attack, retreat
or open fire.
 Sport: cautioning or sending off players, giving players out, ap-
pealing for a dismissal or declaring (closing an innings) in cri-
cket.
 Business: hiring and firing, establishing a verbal contract, na-
ming a ship.
 Gaming: placing a bet, raising the stakes in poker.

The “hereby” test

 28

One simple but crude way to decide whether a speech act is of

such a kind that we can aptly call it a performative is to insert the
word “hereby” between subject and verb. If the resulting
utterance makes sense, then the speech act is probably a
performative. For example,
 “I hereby confer upon you the honourable degree of Bachelor of
Arts…”
 “I hereby sentence you to three months' probation, suspended for
a year…”
 “I hereby appoint you Grandmaster of the Ancient, Scandalous
and Disreputable Order of Friends of the Hellfire Club …”
It is crude, because it implies at least one felicity condition – wha-
tever it is to which “hereby” refers. In the first example, “hereby ”
may refer to a physical action (touching on the head or shoulder
with a ceremonial staff or mace, say). In the second example it
may refer to the speaker's situation - in sitting as chairman of the
bench of magistrates. The third example is my (plausible) inven-
tion - showing how all sorts of private groups (Freemasons, Ro-
tarians, even the school Parent Teacher Association) can have
their own agreements, which give to some speakers the power to
enact performatives.

Felicity conditions
 29

These are conditions necessary to the success of a speech act.

They take their name from a Latin root - “felix” or “happy”. They
are conditions needed for success or achievement of a
performative. Only certain people are qualified to declare war,
baptize people or sentence convicted felons. In some cases, the
speaker must be sincere (as in apologizing or vowing). And
external circumstances must be suitable: “Can you give me a lift?”
requires that the hearer has a motor vehicle, is able to drive it
somewhere and that the speaker has a reason for the request. It
may be that the utterance is meant as a joke or sarcasm, in which
case a different interpretation is in order. Loosely speaking,
felicity conditions are of three kinds: preparatory conditions,
conditions for execution and since-rity conditions.

Preparatory conditions
Preparatory conditions include the status or authority of the spea-
ker to perform the speech act, the situation of other parties and
so on. So, in order to confirm a candidate, the speaker must be a
bishop; but a mere priest can baptize people, while various minis-
ters of religion and registrars may solemnize marriages (in Eng-
land). In the case of marrying, there are other conditions - that
neither of the couple is already married, that they make their own
speech acts, and so on. We sometimes speculate about the status
of people (otherwise free to marry) who act out a wedding scene
 30

in a play or film - are they somehow, really, married? In Romeo

and Juliet, Shakespeare has no worries, because the words of the
ceremony are not spoken on stage, and, anyway, Juliet's part is
played by a boy. (Though this may make the wedding scene seem
blasphemous to some in the audience.). In the UK only the
monarch can dissolve parliament. A qualified referee can caution
a player, if he or she is officiating in a match. The referee's
assistant (who, in the higher leagues, is also a qualified referee)
cannot do this. The situation of the utterance is important. If the
US President jokingly “declares” war on another country in a
private conver-sation, then the USA is not really at war. This, in
fact, happened (on 11 August 1984), when Ronald Reagan made
some remarks off-air, as he thought, but which have been
recorded for posterity:

“My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've
signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin
bombing in five minutes.” One hopes that this utterance also failed
in terms of sincerity conditions.

Conditions for execution

Conditions for execution can assume an exaggerated importance.
We are so used to a ritual or ceremonial action accompanying the
speech act that we believe the act is invalidated, if the action is
lacking - but there are few real examples of this. Take refereeing
 31

of association football. When a referee cautions a player, he (or

she) should take the player's name, number and note the team
for which he plays. The referee may also display a yellow card, but
this is not necessary to the giving of the caution: “The mandatory
use of the cards is merely a simple aid for better communication.”
The Football Association (1998); Advice on the Application of the
Laws of the Game, p. 9

In knighting their subjects, English monarchs traditionally touch

the recipient of the honour on both shoulders with the flat side of
a sword blade. But this, too, is not necessary to the performance
of the speech act.

A story is told in Oxford of a young man, taking his final exams,

who demanded a pint of beer from the invigilators. He pointed
out that he was wearing his sword, as required by the mediaeval
statute that made provision for the drink. The invigilator (exam
super-visor), believing the young man's version of events, brought
the beer, but checked the statutes. Later the young man received
a fine - he had not, as the statute also required, been wearing his
spurs. The story may well be an urban myth (the writer heard it
several times from different sources), but illustrates neatly a
condition of execution.
 32

Sincerity conditions
At a simple level these show that the speaker must really intend
what he or she says. In the case of apologizing or promising, it
may be impossible for others to know how sincere the speaker is.
Moreover sincerity, as a genuine intention (now) is no assurance
that the apologetic attitude will last, or that the promise will be
kept. There are some speech acts - such as plighting one's troth or
taking an oath - where this sincerity is determined by the
presence of witnesses. The one making the promise will not be
able later to argue that he or she didn't really mean it.

A more complex example comes in the classroom where the

teacher asks a question, but the pupil supposes that the teacher
knows the answer and is, therefore, not sincere in asking it. In this
case “Can you, please, tell me X?” may be more acceptable to the
child than “What is X?”

We can also use our understanding of sincerity conditions humo-

rously, where we ask others, or promise ourselves, to do things
which we think the others know to be impossible: “Please can you
make it sunny tomorrow?”
 33

CHAPTER 5: CONVERSATION IMPLICATURES

In a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1967, the English

language philosopher H.P. (Paul) Grice outlined an approach to
what he termed conversational implicature - how hearers manage
to work out the complete message when speakers mean more
than they say. An example of what Grice meant by conversational
imp-licature is the utterance: “Have you got any cash on you? ”
where the speaker really wants the hearer to understand the
meaning: “Can you lend me some money? I don't have much on
me.”

The conversational implicature is a message that is not found in

the plain sense of the sentence. The speaker implies it. The hearer
is able to infer (work out, read between the lines) this message in
the utterance, by appealing to the rules governing successful
conversa-tional interaction. Grice proposed that implicatures like
the second sentence can be calculated from the first, by
understanding three things:
 The usual linguistic meaning of what is said.
 Contextual information (shared or general knowledge).
 The assumption that the speaker is obeying what Grice calls the
cooperative principle.
 34

Conversational maxims and the cooperative principle

The success of a conversation depends upon the various speakers'
approach to the interaction. The way in which people try to make
conversations work is sometimes called the cooperative principle.
We can understand it partly by noting those people who are
excep-tions to the rule, and are not capable of making the
conversation work. We may also, sometimes, find it useful
deliberately to infri-nge or disregard it - as when we receive an
unwelcome call from a telephone salesperson, or where we are
being interviewed by a police officer on suspicion of some terrible
crime.

Paul Grice proposes that in ordinary conversation, speakers and

hearers share a cooperative principle. Speakers shape their utte-
rances to be understood by hearers. The principle can be
explained by four underlying rules or maxims. (David Crystal calls
them conversational maxims. They are also sometimes named
Grice's or Gricean maxims.)
They are the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner.
 Quality: speakers should be truthful. They should not say what
they think is false, or make statements for which they have no
evidence.
 Quantity: a contribution should be as informative as is required
for the conversation to proceed. It should be neither too little, nor
 35

too much. (It is not clear how one can decide what quantity of
information satisfies the maxim in a given case.)
 Relevance: speakers' contributions should relate clearly to the
purpose of the exchange.
 Manner: speakers' contributions should be perspicuous: clear,
orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.
Grice does not of course prescribe the use of such maxims. Nor
does he (I hope) suggest that we use them artificially to construct
conversations. But they are useful for analysing and interpreting
conversation, and may reveal purposes of which (either as
speaker or listener) we were not previously aware. Very often, we
com-municate particular non-literal meanings by appearing to
“violate” or “flout” these maxims. If you were to hear someone
described as having “one good eye”, you might well assume the
person's other eye was defective, even though nothing had been
said about it at all.

Relevance
Some linguists (such as Howard Jackson and Peter Stockwell, who
call it a “Supermaxim”) single out relevance as of greater impor-
tance than Grice recognised (Grice gives quality and manner as
supermaxims). Assuming that the cooperative principle is at work
in most conversations, we can see how hearers will try to find
meaning in utterances that seem meaningless or irrelevant. We
 36

as-sume that there must be a reason for these. Jackson and

Stockwell cite a conversation between a shopkeeper and a 16-
year old cus-tomer:
Customer: Just these, please.
Shopkeeper: Are you eighteen?
Customer: Oh, I'm from Middlesbrough.
Shopkeeper: (after a brief pause) OK (serves beer to him).
Jackson H., and Stockwell, P. (1996), An Introduction to the
Nature and Functions of Language, p. 142

Jackson and Stockwell suggest that “there is no explanation for

[the customer's] bizarre reply”. Perhaps this should be qualified:
we cannot be sure what the explanation is, but we can find some
plausible answer. Possible explanations might include these:
 The young man thought his being from Middlesbrough might
explain whatever it was about him that had made the shopkeeper
suspicious about his youth.
 The young man thought the shopkeeper's question was provoked
by his unfamiliar manner of speaking, so he wanted to explain
this.
 The young man was genuinely flustered and said the first thing
he could think of, while trying to think of a better reason for his
looking under-age.
 37

 The young man thought that the shopkeeper might treat someone
from Middlesbrough in a more indulgent manner than people
from elsewhere.

Jackson and Stockwell suggest further that the shopkeeper “deri-

ved some inference or other” from the teenager's reply, since she
served him the beer. It might of course be that she had raised the
question (how old is this customer?) once, but when he appeared to
have misunderstood it, was not ready to ask it again or clarify it -
perhaps because this seemed too much like hard work, and as a
stranger, the teenager would be unlikely to attract attention (from
the police or trading standards officers) as a regular under-age pur-
chaser of beer. In analysing utterances and searching for relevance
we can use a hierarchy of propositions - those that might be
asserted, presupposed, entailed or inferred from any utterance.
 Assertion: what is asserted is the obvious, plain or surface mea-
ning of the utterance (though many utterances are not assertions)
 Presupposition: what is taken for granted in the utterance. “I saw
the Mona Lisa in the Louvre” presupposes that the Mona Lisa is
in the Louvre.
 Entailments: logical or necessary corollaries of an utterance,
thus, the above example entails: “I saw something in the Lou-
 38

vre.”, “I saw something somewhere.”, “Something was seen.”,

“There is a Louvre.There is a Mona Lisa”, and so on.
 Inferences: these are interpretations that other people draw from
the utterance, for which we cannot always directly account.
From this example, someone might infer, rationally, that the
Mona Lisa is, or was recently, on show to the public. They might
infer, less rationally, that the speaker has been to France recently
 39

CHAPTER 6: POLITENESS

The politeness principle is a series of maxims, which Geoff Leech

has proposed as a way of explaining how politeness operates in
conversational exchanges. Leech defines politeness as forms of
be-haviour that establish and maintain comity. That is the ability
of participants in a social interaction to engage in interaction in an
atmosphere of relative harmony. In stating his maxims Leech uses
his own terms for two kinds of illocutionary acts. He calls repre-
sentatives “assertives”, and calls directives “impositives”.

 Each maxim is accompanied by a sub-maxim (between square

brackets), which is of less importance. These support the idea
that negative politeness (avoidance of discord) is more important
than positive politeness (seeking concord).
 Not all of the maxims are equally important. For instance, tact
influences what we say more powerfully than does generosity,
while approbation is more important than modesty.
 Note also that speakers may adhere to more than one maxim of
politeness at the same time. Often one maxim is on the forefront
of the utterance, with a second maxim being invoked by impli-
cation.
 If politeness is not communicated, we can assume that the poli-
teness attitude is absent.
 40

Leech's maxims
 Tact maxim (in directives [impositives] and commissives): mini-
mise cost to other; [maximise benefit to other]
 Generosity maxim (in directives and commissives): minimise be-
nefit to self; [maximise cost to self]
 Approbation maxim (in expressives and representatives [asserti-
ves]): minimise dispraise of other; [maximise praise of other]
 Modesty maxim (in expressives and representatives): minimise
praise of self; [maximise dispraise of self]
 Agreement maxim (in representatives): minimise disagreement
between self and other; [maximise agreement between self and
other]
 Sympathy maxim (in representatives): minimise antipathy be-
tween self and other; [maximise sympathy between self and
other]

Face and politeness strategies

“Face” (as in “lose face”) refers to a speaker's sense of linguistic
and social identity. Any speech act may impose on this sense, and
is therefore face threatening. And speakers have strategies for
lessening the threat. Positive politeness means being complimen-
tary and gracious to the addressee (but if this is overdone, the
speaker may alienate the other party). Negative politeness is
found in ways of mitigating the imposition:
 41

 Hedging: Er, could you, er, perhaps, close the, um , window?

 Pessimism: I don't suppose you could close the window, could
you?
 Indicating deference: Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I asked
you to close the window?
 Apologizing: I'm terribly sorry to put you out, but could you
close the window?
 Impersonalizing: The management requires all windows to be
closed.

A good illustration of a breach of these strategies comes from

Alan Bleasdale's 1982 TV drama, The Boys from the Black Stuff,
where the unemployed Yosser Hughes greets potential employers
with the curt demand: “Gizza job!”

Perhaps the most thorough treatment of the concept of

politeness is that of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, which
was first published in 1978 and then reissued, with a long
introduction, in 1987. In their model, politeness is defined as
redressive action taken to counter-balance the disruptive effect of
face-threatening acts (FTAs).

In their theory, communication is seen as potentially dangerous

and antagonistic. A strength of their approach over that of Geoff
 42

Leech is that they explain politeness by deriving it from more fun-

damental notions of what it is to be a human being. The basic
notion of their model is “face”. This is defined as “the public self-
image that every member (of society) wants to claim for himself ”.
In their framework, face consists of two related aspects.
 One is negative face, or the rights to territories, freedom of
action and freedom from imposition - wanting your actions not
to be constrained or inhibited by others.
 The other is positive face, the positive consistent self-image that
people have and their desire to be appreciated and approved of
by at least some other people.
The rational actions people take to preserve both kinds of face,
for themselves and the people they interact with, add up to
politeness. Brown and Levinson also argue that in human
communication, either spoken or written, people tend to maintain
one another's face continuously. In everyday conversation, we
adapt our conversation to different situations. Among friends we
take liberties or say things that would seem discourteous among
strangers. And we avoid over-formality with friends. In both
situations we try to avoid making the hearer embarrassed or
uncomfortable. Face-threatening acts (FTAs) are acts that infringe
on the hearers' need to maintain his/her self-esteem, and be
respected. Politeness stra-tegies are developed for the main
 43

purpose of dealing with these FTAs. Suppose I see a crate of beer

in my neighbour's house. Being thirsty, I might say:
 I want some beer.
 Is it OK for me to have a beer?
 I hope it's not too forward, but would it be possible for me to
have a beer?
 It's so hot. It makes you really thirsty.

Brown and Levinson sum up human politeness behaviour in four

strategies, which correspond to these examples: bald on record,
negative politeness, positive politeness, and off-record-indirect
strategy.
 The bald on-record strategy does nothing to minimize threats to
the hearer's “face”
 The positive politeness strategy shows you recognize that your
hearer has a desire to be respected. It also confirms that the rela-
tionship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity.
 The negative politeness strategy also recognizes the hearer's
face. But it also recognizes that you are in some way imposing
on them. Some other examples would be to say, “I don't want to
bother you but...” or “I was wondering if...”
 Off-record indirect strategies take some of the pressure off of
you. You are trying to avoid the direct FTA of asking for a beer.
 44

Instead you would rather it be offered to you once your hearer

sees that you want one.
These strategies are not universal - they are used more or less fre-
quently in other cultures. For example, in some eastern societies
the off-record-indirect strategy will place on your hearer a social
obligation to give you anything you admire. So speakers learn not
to express admiration for expensive and valuable things in homes
that they visit.

Examples from Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies

Bald on-record
 An emergency: Help!
 Task oriented: Give me those!
 Request: Put your jacket away.
 Alerting: Turn your lights on! (while driving)

Positive Politeness
 Attend to the hearer: You must be hungry, it's a long time since
breakfast. How about some lunch?
 Avoid disagreement: A: What is she, small? B: Yes, yes, she's
small, smallish, um, not really small but certainly not very big.
 Assume agreement: So when are you coming to see us?
 Hedge opinion: You really should sort of try harder.
 45

Negative Politeness
 Be indirect: I'm looking for a pen.
 Request forgiveness: You must forgive me but....
 Minimize imposition: I just want to ask you if I could use your
computer?
 Pluralize the person responsible: We forgot to tell you that you
needed to by your plane ticket by yesterday.
Off-record (indirect)
 Give hints: It's a bit cold in here.
 Be vague: Perhaps someone should have been more
responsible.
 Be sarcastic, or joking: Yeah, he's a real Einstein (rocket scien-
tist, Stephen Hawking, genius and so on)!

Phatic tokens
These are ways of showing status by orienting comments to one-
self, to the other, or to the general or prevailing situation (in Eng-
land this is usually the weather).
 Self-oriented phatic tokens are personal to the speaker: “I'm not
up to this” or “My feet are killing me”.
 Other-oriented tokens are related to the hearer: “Do you work
here?” or “You seem to know what you're doing”.
 A neutral token refers to the context or general state of affairs:
“Cold, isn't it?” or “Lovely flowers”.
 46

A superior shows consideration in an other-oriented token, as

when the Queen says to the factory worker: “It must be jolly hard
to make one of those”. The inferior might respond with a self-
orien-ted token, like “Hard work, this”. On the surface, there is an
ex-change of information. In reality there is a suggestion and
accep-tance of a hierarchy of status. The factory worker would be
unli-kely to respond with, “Yes, but it's not half as hard as
travelling the world, trooping the colour, making a speech at
Christmas and dissolving Parliament.”
CHAPTER 7: INDEXICALS

Note: this section is seriously hard. You have been warned. But
first, how do you pronounce it? The term comes from the Greek
deiktikos (=“able to show”). This is related to Greek dèiknymi
(dyke-nimmy) meaning “explain” or “prove”. The standard pro-
nunciation has two syllables (dyke-sis) while the adjective form is
deictic (dyke-tik).

According to Stephen Levinson: “Deixis concerns the ways in

which languages encode...features of the context of utterance ...
and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utte-
rances depends on the analysis of that context of
utterance.”Deixis is an important field of language study in its own
right - and very important for learners of second languages. But it
 47

has some relevance to analysis of conversation and pragmatics. It

is often and best described as “verbal pointing”, that is to say
pointing by means of language. The linguistic forms of this
pointing are called deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic
words; they are also sometimes called indexicals. Deictic
expressions include such lexemes as:

 Personal or possessive pronouns (I/you/mine/yours),

 Demonstrative pronouns (this/that),
 (Spatial/temporal) adverbs (here/there/now),
 Other pro-forms (so/do),
 Personal or possessive adjectives (my/your),
 Demonstrative adjectives (this/that),
 Articles (the).

Deixis refers to the world outside a text. Reference to the context

surrounding an utterance is often referred to as primary deixis,
exophoric deixis or simply deixis alone. Primary deixis is used to
point to a situation outside a text (situational deixis) or to the
spea-ker's and hearer's (shared) knowledge of the world
(knowledge deixis). Contextual use of deictic expressions is known
as seconda-ry deixis, textual deixis or endophoric deixis. Such
expressions can refer either backwards or forwards to other
elements in a text:
 48

 Anaphoric deixis is backward pointing, and is the norm in Eng-

lish texts. Examples include demonstrative pronouns: such, said,
similar, (the) same.
 Cataphoric deixis is forward pointing. Examples include: the
following, certain, some (“the speaker raised some objec-
tions...”), this (“Let me say this...”), these, several.
Deictic expressions fall into three categories:
 Personal deixis (you, us),
 Spatial deixis (here, there) and
 Temporal deixis (now, then).
Deixis is clearly tied to the speaker's context, the most basic
distin-ction being between near the speaker (proximal) and away
from the speaker (distal).
 Proximal deictic expressions include this, here and now.
 Distal deictic expressions include that, there and then.
Proximal expressions are generally interpreted in relation to the
speaker's location or deictic centre. For example now is taken to
mean some point or period in time that matches the time of the
speaker's utterance. When we read, “Now Barabbas was a thief ”
(John 18.40) we do not take the statement to mean the same as
“Barabbas was now a thief” (i.e. he had become a thief, having
not been so before). Rather we read it as St. John's writing, “I'm
telling you now, that Barabbas was a thief”.
 49

Personal deixis
English does not use personal deixis to indicate relative social
status in the same way that other languages do (such as those
with TV pronoun systems). But the pronoun we has a potential for
ambiguity, i.e. between exclusive we (excludes the hearer) and
the hearer-including (inclusive) we.

Spatial deixis
The use of proximal and distal expressions in spatial deixis is
confused by deictic projection. This is the speaker's ability to pro-
ject himself or herself into a location at which he or she is not yet
present. A familiar example is the use of here on telephone ans-
wering machines (“I'm not here at the moment...”). While writing
e-mails, I often edit out the use of here, when I see that the
reader will not understand the intended meaning. (My here is this
room in East Yorkshire, England, while yours may be this school in
Maryland, this flat in Moscow or this university in Melbourne.)

It is likely that the basis of spatial deixis is psychological distance

(rather than physical distance). Usually physical and (metapho-
rical) psychological distance will appear the same. But a speaker
may wish to mark something physically close as psychologically
distant, as when you indicate an item of food on your plate with “I
don't like that”. Perhaps a better (real example) was Graham
 50

Taylor's famous remark on his England soccer team's conceding a

goal: “Do I not like that!” This moment, from the qualifying
competition for the 1994 World Cup, was recorded for, and
broadcast on a documentary film for, Channel 4.

Temporal deixis
Psychological distance can apply to temporal deixis as well. We
can treat temporal events as things that move towards us (into
view) or away from us (out of view). For instance, we speak of the
coming year or the approaching year. This may stem from our
per-ception of things (like weather storms) which we see
approaching both spatially and in time. We treat the near or
immediate future as being close to utterance time by using the
proximal deictic expres-sion this alone, as in “this (that is the next)
weekend” or “this evening” (said earlier in the day).
 51

CONCLUSION

A traditional criticism has been that pragmatics does not have a

clear-cut focus. Other complaints are that, unlike grammar which
resorts to rules, the vague and fuzzy principles in pragmatics are
not adequate in telling people what to choose in face of a range of
possible meanings for one single utterance in context. Pragmatics
may also be considered as redudant in that semantics already co-
vers the territory adequately. However, there is a consensus view
that pragmatics as a separate study is necessary because it handles
apects of meaning that semantics overlooks (Leech, 1983). The
study of speech acts, for instance, provides explanations of socio-
linguistic conduct and illuminates social language interactions. The
findings of the cooperative principle and politeness principle also
provided insights into person-to-person interactions. Deixis, for
instance, is important in the teaching of reading. Speech acts are
often helpful for improving translation and writing.

In language investigations or research into language, you can

choose whether to undertake a task in which pragmatic analysis is
appropriate. So if you really don't like it (or fear it), then you
should avoid a task where its absence will look suspicious, and
draw attention to your dislike. One area of language study where
pragmatics is more or less unavoidable is any kind of study of
spoken language in social interactions (and written forms like e-
 52

mail or computer chat that approximate to speech). In studying

language and occupation or language and power, you cannot easily
avoid the use of pragmatic frame-works for analysis.
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Questions for Assignment, CAT, Final examination
1. TP
Here are some speech acts
- Euphemism(iyoroshyamvugo, e.g:kunnya=kwihagarika)
- Sarcasm(almost irony)
- Vagueness in politician’s language
- Irony
- Hate speech
- Apologizing & forgiving
- Promissing
- Warning
- Threatening
- Ordering
- Inviting
- Swearing
- Appreciating
- Challenging
-Any other speech act of your own choice
What to do
- Choose one speech act
- Find relevant context
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- Give examples of expressions and syntactic structures

- Use speech act theory, read carefully chap. 4
- Work out locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary
- Work out felicity conditions
- Work out cases of violation of Grice’s maxims
- Discuss in groups
- Summarize ideas
- Prepare a brief presentation in class
- Prepare a brief written report
2. Some study questions for CAT and Final exam
- Explain the difference between pragmatics and semantics, and to
what extent the two disciples are complementary.
- The notion of ‘context’ encompasses a certain number of parame-
ters. Explain them.
- What is ‘conversational implicature’? Why does speakers use
implicature instead of direct expressions? Explain what kind of
procedures are used by listeners in interpreting it. Give 3 examples
(English, French or Kinya).
- Consider the following utterance: Yesterday, I met John in the
restaurant in Kigali. Give examples (English, Frenc, or Kinya) of
propositions that are or can be considered as: a) asserted, b) pre-
supposed, c) entailed, d) inferred. Explain the differences between
those proposition in terms of interpretation.
- Enumerate the politeness principles according to Leech. What is
the importance of those principles in verbal exchange?
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- What does it means when we say that deixis has to be better des-
cribed as ‘verbal pointing’? Give 3 examples (English, French or
Kinya).
- What is ‘proximal deictic expressions’? Give 3 examples (Eng-
lish, French, or Kinya).