An Introduction to

Pragmatics and Discourse

Lecture 3
Topics of this lecture
 Context
 Deixis
 Communication is a social activity
 Communication is a social activity
which requires the joint cooperation of
the participants in order to be effective
 Clark’s (1996) psycholinguistic notion
of common ground: the sum of the
joint and mutual knowledge, beliefs
and suppositions of the participants in
social activities
 What is context?
 Any relevant features of the dynamic
setting or environment in which a
linguistic unit is systematically used
 It is composed of 3 sources:
 The context of utterance (i.e. the
situation)
 The linguistic context
 The general knowledge context (or
encyclopedic knowledge)
 The context of situation
 An utterance is located in a specific
time and space
 Ex. Can you move that there now?
 The full meaning of this utterance is
retrieved only if we’re able to identify
the referents of the deictics.
 Referents can only be identified in a
specific spatio-temporal location
 The linguistic context
 It refers to the surrounding utterances
in the same discourse.
 For ex., elliptical constructions can be
understood with reference to previous
(or following) discourse:
A. Who gave the waiter a large tip?
B. Helen.
 General knowledge
 It includes an individual’s cultural
knowledge as well as interpersonal
knowledge.
 Ex.
1. I went to Milan last month, but the
Coliseum was closed.
2. How’s Michael?
 Example 1
Place two fingers in the two holes
directly to the left of the finger stop.
Remove finger nearest stop.
 Example 1: context
It is worth remembering how to dial 999
in darkness or smoke.
Place two fingers in the two holes
directly to the left of the finger stop.
Remove finger nearest stop.
The info added by the context
 Linguistic context: clarifies why/when
we might do the action described.
 Situational context: where we can find
this utterance (a printed notice in a
phone booth with a dial wheel phone).
 General knowledge: 999 is dialled for
urgent assistance.
 Deixis
 Deixis is concerned with the
relationship between the structure of
a language and its context of use:
features of the context of utterance
are encoded by lexical and/or
grammatical means.
 Why? It serves the communicative
needs of the users in an efficient way.
 Deictics
 These are linguistic expressions that
encode aspects of the context of
utterance
 They include
 Demonstratives
 First- and second-person pronoun
 Tense markers
 Adverbs of time and place
 Motion verbs
The importance of deictic info
(Found in a bottle at sea)

Meet me here a month from now with a

magic wand about this long

Can you make sense of this message?

 How can I identify a deictic?
 Deictics have a deictic usage as basic:
i.e. they point at contextual elements
 Which of the following is a deictic?
1. You and you, go back to your seats!
2. Mary wishes she could visit Sardinia
3. If you travel on a train without ticket,
you will be liable to pay a fine
4. She’s not the principal. She’s the
secretary
 Categories of deixis

 Person (identification of the interlocutors)

 Time (encoding temporal points and spans
relative to time of utterance)
 Space (location in space relative to that of time
of utterance)
 Discourse (pointing to current, previous,
following utterances in the same discourse)
 Social (codification of participants’ soc.
status/relationship)
 Proximal/distal deixis
 The most basic distinction between deictic
expressions is being NEAR v. AWAY FROM
speaker, i.e. proximal v. distal:
 this, here, now v. that, there, then.
Psychological distance: if we like sth., we
may mark it as being physically close;
viceversa, if we dislike it, we may mark it as
being distant;
EX. What’s that? (referring to an insect on my sleeve)
 Deictic centre
 Deixis is organized in an egocentric
way: its typical centre is ‘I-here-now’
 The central point for person is the
speaker  I
 The central point for time is the time of
utterance  now
 The central point for place is the place
of utterance  here
 Deictic projection
 The deictic centre can shift:
1. I’ll come to your house tomorrow
2. Just along the corridor on your left
 In both cases the motion verb and
the adverbial of place indicate a
projection of the deictic centre onto
the addressee
 Exercise 1
 Can you identify deictic projection?
1. We may lose customers if our prices
are very high
2. The next station is Piccadilly Circus.
Please change here for the Picadilly
line
3. Can you prepare a list of hints for
safe camping now?
4. I’ll bring the DVD to you tomorrow
 Discourse deixis
 Some words are used to refer to some
portions of the same text, i.e.
 A following stretch of text
 A preceding stretch of text

 The current stretch of text

 Discourse deixis (1)
 Which function is performed by this?
This is how the story went
I met someone by accident
It blew me away
It blew me away

(Adele – Hiding my heart)

 Discourse deixis (2)
 Which function is performed by that?

Goodnight, it’s over with,

that’s all she wrote

(T.I. – That’s all she wrote)

 Discourse deixis (3)
 Identify the deictic items and their
functions:

In the last section, we discussed the

evolution of birds, in this section we
consider the main bird species, and in
the next section we shall compare birds
and mammals.
 Social Deixis
 People’s social statuses and
relationships are codified in language;
ex. Tu/Vous (du/Sie, tu/usted, ty/vy, tu/Lei)
 Ex. forms of address in current English
first/last name  John, Smith, John Smith;
kinship term  mother, uncle; mum(my), granny, grandpa;
professional title  doctor, professor;
rank  captain, general;
markers of status  Mr. President, Father, Sister;
titles of respect  sir, your Majesty;
epithet  love, honey; brother, buddy; man, mate;
 Naming practices in English
 Asymmetric use of title, last name and first
name (TLN/FN)  inequality in power;
 Mutual TLN  inequality + unfamiliarity;
 Mutual FN  equality + familiarity;
 T only  least intimate form of address;
 FN only  intimacy; (pet names  greater
intimacy); FNLN  less intimacy than FN
only;
 Social factors at work
 The choice of the appropriate term of
address is based on various
assumptions about the context:
 the particular occasion;
 the social status, rank, occupation of
participants;
 sex, age, race of participants;
 transactional status (e.g. doctor-patient;
priest-penitent);
 degree of intimacy or solidarity;
Functions of terms of address
 Terms of address encode the social
status and the relationship between
the interlocutors; e.g. they mark the
 social status of addressee (power);
 social distance between speaker and
addressee (unfamiliar  intimate);
 nature of the transaction (formal to
informal).
 Relationships are never static.
A racist use of FN in the US
 In the southern states of the US,
whites often used the naming and
addressing practice to put blacks in
their place: e.g. boy or FN to address
black men/women (without reciprocity)
as a sign of their social superiority in
situations in which they would have
used T or TLN to address whites.
Use of address terms by different cultures
(U.S. v. Chinese speakers) (1)
 Formal v. Informal settings
Settings US Chinese
NN 36% NN 25%
Informal FN 50% FN 27%
TLN 13% TLN 23%
FN 44% Full 19%
Formal
TLN 48% TLN 81%

NN = no name; FN = first name; TLN = title and last name; Full =FNLN
Use of address terms by different cultures
(U.S. v. Chinese speakers) (2)
 Role of status consciousness
Settings US China
Addressing FN 26% FN 0%
superiors TLN 7% TLN 66%
How expected to NN + TLN 90%
be addressed by FN 70%
subordinates
Use of address terms by different cultures
(U.S. v. Chinese speakers) (3)
 Motivation for choosing an address term
Same-cultural Cross-cultural
GROUP
contact contact
P 70% P 55%
US
R 19% R 33%
P 75% P 54%
Chinese R 25% R 20%
S 17%
P = politeness; R = respect; S = solidarity
 Use of address terms by different
cultures (U.S. v. Chinese speakers) (4)
 Some conclusions
 Use of address terms governed by social norms
and cultural rules (status, respect, politeness,
solidarity);
 Informal settings: US use mostly FN/NN; CH use
TLN ( status important);
 Formal settings: CH particularly conscious of social
status use TLN to show respect;
 US more democratic society: trend to ignore
markers of status, pref. familiarity/solidarity;
 China more hierarchical society: status conscious
markers of deference and respect.
 Conclusion
 Deixis is an important phenomenon
which shows how discourse and
context may be deeply connected.
 It shows how we may encode features
of the context and socio-cultural norms
in a given speech event to
communicate rapidly and efficiently.