Pragmatics Quiz

Pragmatics: Speech Acts, Cooperative Principle, Implicatures, and Politeness Theory

• Pragmatics studies the relationship between language and context, and how people perform speech acts in spoken and written discourse.
• Context of situation is crucial to understanding and interpreting the meaning of what is being said, and includes physical, social, and mental worlds of the people involved.
• Background knowledge context includes cultural and interpersonal knowledge, as well as knowledge about the world and norms of a particular discourse community.
• Meaning is not inherent in words alone, but is jointly accomplished by both speaker and listener, involving social, psychological, and cognitive factors.
• Speech acts are utterances that perform actions in language and communication, classified by Searle into representatives, directives, commissions, expressives, and declarations.
• The cooperative principle describes how effective communication in conversation is achieved through the acceptance of conversational maxims, including quantity, quality, relation, and manner.
• Flouting a maxim is done for the purpose of getting a conversational implicature, which is something suggested or implied by the speaker even though it is not literally expressed.
• Politeness theory accounts for politeness in terms of the redressing of a person's sociological face by face-threatening acts, where face refers to an individual's need for appreciation and freedom from imposition.
• Face-threatening acts can be determined by considering the power dynamics, social distance, and cultural ranking of the subject.
• Positive face reflects an individual's need for appreciation and consistent self-image, while negative face reflects an individual's need for freedom of action and decision-making.
• Politeness is a necessary component of non-face threatening communication, involving the redressing of negative face.
• Off-record politeness involves the use of vague language that is not understood as intended, while on-record politeness involves direct language that is clearly understood.

The Cooperative Principle and Grice's Maxims in Linguistic Pragmatics

• The cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations.
• The principle is divided into Grice's four maxims of conversation: quantity, quality, relation, and manner.
• The maxims describe specific rational principles observed by people who follow the cooperative principle in pursuit of effective communication.
• Applying the Gricean maxims is a way to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them.
• The maxims are not prescriptive commands, but rather a description of how people normally behave in conversation.
• Flouting a maxim can result in conversational implicatures, which add to the meaning of the utterance.
• The maxim of quantity is to be informative, and the maxim of quality is to be truthful.
• The maxim of relation is to be appropriate to the immediate needs at each stage of the transaction.
• The maxim of manner is to be clear and concerned with how what is said is said.
• Speakers who deliberately flout the maxims usually intend for their listener to understand their underlying implicature.
• Violating a maxim means that the speaker is either outright lying by violating the maxim of quality or being intentionally misleading by violating another maxim.
• The Gricean maxims have been criticized for not universally applying due to cultural differences and being vague, but they are only meant to describe commonly accepted traits of successful cooperative communication.