Pragmatics and Speech Acts Quiz

Pragmatics

• Pragmatics is the study of intended speaker meaning in discourse, going beyond explicitly stated meaning.

Pragmatic Competence

• The ability to understand intended meaning in discourse.
• The ability to communicate effectively, encompassing grammar and pragmatic knowledge.
• This competence can be developed through natural environments and explicit instruction.
• Includes understanding cultural norms and the multiplicity of cultures.
• Instruction has a demonstrably positive impact.

Pragmatic Inference

• The ability to understand intended meaning through indirect utterances.

Context and Co-text

• Co-text refers to linguistic material; it limits possible interpretations.
• Context encompasses the physical environment, beliefs, time, setting, speaker, hearer, and any relevant other individuals involved in the conversation.
• Context has a substantial effect on interpretation.

Speech Acts

• Speech acts are actions performed through utterances.
• They have specific labels such as apologies, complaints, compliments, invitations, promises, and requests.
• Three related acts are:
  • Locutionary Act (Direct Speech Acts): The basic utterance or production of a meaningful expression.
  • Illocutionary Act (Indirect Speech Acts): The communicative force of an utterance—the implied action, such as making a statement, an offer, or an explanation.
  • Perlocutionary Act: The effect the utterance has on the listener.

Felicity Conditions

• These are the expected or appropriate circumstances for a speech act to be considered successful.
• There are four stages.
  • The sender believes the action should occur.
  • The receiver has the ability to complete the action.
  • The receiver has the obligation to complete the action.
  • The sender has the right to request the action.

Speech Events

• Speech events are the circumstances surrounding an utterance, impacting its interpretation, including other utterances.

Performative Hypothesis

• Every utterance contains a clause with a performative verb, making its illocutionary force explicit.

Explicit and Implicit Performatives

• Explicit performatives contain a performative verb, explicitly indicating the act being performed.
• Implicit performatives do not have a performative verb.

Reference

• Acts used by a speaker to enable a hearer to identify something within a text.

• Realized through pronouns.

• Anaphor: Subsequent expressions referring back to previous ones.

• Antecedent: The initial expression.

• Cataphora: Forward reference.

Deixis

• Deixis uses language to point.
• Needs physical context for interpretation.
• Includes temporal, spatial, and personal expressions.

Presupposition

• Relationships between two propositions; what the speaker assumes the hearer knows.

Implicatures

• Implicatures are conveyed meanings beyond the literal meaning of an utterance, following conversational maxims.

Co-Operative Principle

• The idea that conversational participants will cooperate with each other, assuming a shared goal/structure.
• Contains four sub-principles/maxims.
  • Quantity: Offer the amount of information required but not more.
  • Quality: Be truthful and don't say anything you don't have evidence for.
  • Relation: Be relevant.
  • Manner: Be perspicuous (avoid ambiguity, obscurity).

Face Wants/Wants

• Person's expectations regarding respect of their public self-image.

Solidarity and Deference Strategies

• Solidarity strategies emphasize closeness between speaker and listener.
• Deference strategies emphasize the hearer's right to freedom.

Conversation Analysis

• Approach to study social interaction and talk-in-interaction. Includes five parts: floor, turns, turn-taking, local management system, and transition relevance places/completion points.

Conversational Style

• Two types: High Involvement and High Considerateness.

Adjacency Pairs

• Automatic conversational patterns composed of two utterances by different speakers.

Preference Structure

• Socially determined patterns of interaction (e.g., a request is preferably met with an acceptance).

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

• Language structures affect how a linguistic person perceives the world and constructs reality.

Cross-Cultural Awareness

• Recognizing the subject of culture in oneself as well as the target culture.

Intercultural Pragmatics

• Studying how language is used in social encounters and interactions between individuals representing different cultures.

Intercultural Competence

• The ability to understand and effectively communicate in interactions with people of different cultural backgrounds.
• Includes knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards other cultures.
• Models exist illustrating its development, implementation, and measurement.

Discourse Completion Tasks

• Tools used in linguistic and pragmatics to evoke particular speech acts, often using role-playing contexts.

Test your knowledge on the principles of pragmatics, including pragmatic competence, inference, context, and speech acts. This quiz explores how intended meanings are conveyed in discourse and the impact of cultural norms on communication. Enhance your understanding of effective communication strategies and context in language use.