Context in/for Discourse

Interpretation
CONTEXT- characteristics of the
social situation or the
communicative event that may
systematically influence text & talk
 Introduction: Major Features of
Discourse
 Knowledge;
 SPEAKING grid (D. Hymes)

Setting,
Participants,
Event, ends (the results and the purpose of communication),
Act sequence,
Key
Instrumentalities (the channel of communication and the
code)
Norms
Genres;
 The impact on the textual information, or what is said.
 Revision: Major Features of
Discourse
 Discourse features do not comprise a
general list; we choose from the list
those which are relevant to the
situation
 If you alter the condition specified by
any of the coordinates, you alter
context.
 Lecture Overview
 Basic pragmatic aspects of contextual
description which are required in the
analysis of discourse;

 Co-text and expanding context.

 1. Basic pragmatic aspects in the
analysis of discourse
‘doing DA’ = primarily ‘doing Pragmatics’
Sentence vs. utterance

Textual
information Contextual
(propositional UTTERANCE
verbal unit of communication information
meaning of
an utterance)
DA- RECORD OF A DYNAMIC PROCESS in which LANGUAGE WAS USED AS AN
INSTRUMENT OF COMMUNICATION
 Reference
Reference - the relationship between words and
things (traditional: lexical semantics)
DA: Reference =something that someone can USE
AN EXPRESSION FOR; an ACTION ON THE PART OF
THE SPEAKER/ WRITER ((s)he invests the
expression with reference by using it)
 The main INDEXICALS (or deictic forms):

 demonstratives

 deictic adverbials

 personal pronouns

 tense and time adverbials (or deictic expression of

time, person and place).

 Personal Deixis
 Deictic expressions of person are expressed
by personal pronouns.
 Personal pronouns are used to:
 index the people with whom we are
speaking,
 DISTINGUISH BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL
PARTICIPANTS in a situation
 show who is within the social gathering at
the moment and who is outside of it.
 Place Deixis
E.g. I’ve been very busy since I have
been here.

Osijek

J.J Strossmayer
University

The
academic
world
 Time Deixis
 Time reference is also not always absolute:
Examples:
 An announcement about the lecture which
will take place in September (the
announcement was noticed at the end on
November).
 The message on your answering machine: I

am sorry I cannot answer your call right now.

 Deictic Center
 The deictic centre is characterized as follows
 the central person is the speaker;
 the central time is the time at which the speaker
produces an utterance;
 the central place is the speaker’s location at
utterance time;
 the discourse centre is the point which the speaker is
currently at in the production of the utterance;
 the social centre is the speaker’s social status and
rank compared to the social status and rank of an
addressee.
 Presupposition
Prerequisite for communication

A: My uncle is coming from Canada next week.

B: Oh really, how long has he been away?

 Presupposition is what is taken by the speaker to

be the common ground of the participants in
the conversation; the set of propositions
constituting the ongoing discourse context.

1. The game is played in Cleveland.

2. Our team wins the championship.
3. Bob goes to school in Indiana.
4. Bill is no longer single.
 Speech acts
 Austin (1955/ 1962)

I christen this ship the Titanic.

I now pronounce you man and wife.

 PERFORMATIVES
Saying something= doing something (performing speech acts)

Any utterance simultaneously performs TWO TYPES OF ACTS:

 Locutionary act : what is said (e.g. Open your books to page 20)
 Illocutionary act: what the speaker does in uttering a linguistic
expression (the utterance has the illocutionary force of a directive)

A theory on how to do things with words

 Implicatures
 Exercise 1 handout!!
 Alan: Are you going to Paul's party?
Barb: I have to work.
 H.P. Grice
 Implicature is an additional unstated (intended) meaning
which has to be assumed in order to understand an
utterance.

 Dependent on the context (utterances can be used to

perform multiple functions/ speech acts): exercise 1,
example 4!!)

 Goal: provide a SYSTEMATIC account of such

COMMUNICATIVE INTENTIONS and HOW THEY ARE
LINGUISTICALLY ENCODED IN CONTEXT

 Conversational implicatures are derived from a general

principle of cooperation and conversational maxims.
 The Cooperative principle and conversational
maxims
(Grice (1975: 26–30) )

 Cooperative Principle. Contribute what is required

by the accepted purpose of the conversation.

 Maxim of Quality. Make your contribution true; so do

not convey what you believe false or unjustified.
 Maxim of Quantity. Be as informative as required.
 Maxim of Relation. Be relevant.
 Maxim of Manner. Be perspicuous; so avoid obscurity
and ambiguity, and strive for brevity and order.

- flouting the maxims:

Sam is a pig.
Men are men.
'He is a good friend'
 Inference
 Inference is listener’s/viewer’s/interpreter’s
usage of additional knowledge to make
sense of what is implicit information in an
utterance.
 Inferences are based on social-cultural
knowledge and depend on the context at
hand:
A: I'm out of petrol.
B: There is a petrol station round the corner.
Implicature and inference (cont.)

 Speakers imply, hearers infer

 Searle: indirect speech acts:

'Please close the door'

 May I ask you to close the door?

 Could you please close the door?

 It seems a bit chilly in here.

2. Co-text and Expanding
Context
 As for the aforementioned subject, we will now
deal with one of its aspects
 Co-text (Halliday) , previous discourse – all the
utterances that occurred before the analyzed
utterance.
 Discourse deixis concerns the usage of
deictic expressions which refer to some portion
of discourse that contains that utterance
(including the utterance itself).
 Discourse pragmatics
 Issues:
 Participants in actual conversations
NEGOTIATE implicit meanings IN
INTRICATE WAYS
 An utterance in context may carry multiple
functions
the speech act we assign to a particular
utterance derives partly
a) from where it is placed sequentially in
discourse
b) From our familiarity with the context
 Delimiting the units of analysis
 Example (Blum Kulka 1992, 1997)

1. Gaddi: What’s on the menu? (speech act: question? request?)

2. Sarah: Rice, at the request of Nadav. (interpretation of 1)
3. Gaddi: The truth is I have not had lunch today, so I’m hungry.
4. Sarah: So, Gaddi, do you want me to warm you up some chicken?
5. Gaddi: No, what I thought was to…
6. Sarah: Yes?
7. Gaddi: Make myself some eggs and such, but I don’t feel comfortable in
this formal situation.
……..
21. Gaddi: So, is it all right for me to go and prepare something for myself?
 Politeness phenomena/strategies
 important for examining
 contextual and cultural variability in linguistic actions
 social MOTIVATIONS and IMPLICATIONS of
INDIRECTNESS

 Verbal strategies for accomplishment of communicative

goals by fending off and redressing risks to face

 face: the positive social value a person effectively claims for

him/herself by the line others assume s/he has taken during
a particular contact

 basic motivation of human interaction

 positive vs. negative face

 References
 Brown G., Yule G. Discourse Analysis. (1983). Cambridge, etc.:
Cambridge University Press. (p. 27 – 35, 46 – 67).

 Blum-Kulka, S. (1997). Discourse pragmatics. In T. van Dijk

(Ed.),Discourse as social interaction, Vol. 2 (pp. 38–63). London:
Sage.

 Grice, H. P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In Syntax and

Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole & J. Morgan. New York:
Academic Press.

 Levinson, S. C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

 Searle, J. (1975) Indirect speech acts. In Syntax and Semantics,

3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, pp. 59–82. New York:
Academic Press.