Understanding Pragmatics

• Pragmatics studies language use in context, focusing on how meaning is shaped by the speaker's intent, the listener’s interpretation, and situational factors.
• Pragmatics deals with inferred and intended meaning, unlike semantics, which deals with literal meaning.
• Pragmatics studies the additional meanings arising from the interaction between speaker, listener, and context.

Pragmatics vs. Semantics

• Semantics deals with literal meaning, independent of context.
• Pragmatics focuses on context-dependent meaning and how people infer meaning beyond the literal words.

Key Concepts in Pragmatics

• Competence is the internal knowledge of a language's rules, including grammar, syntax, and pragmatics.
• Performance is the actual use of language in conversation, which may include errors, hesitations, and false starts.
• People understand meaning based on shared knowledge and implicit language rules.
• Pragmatic meaning is often non-literal, context-dependent, inferential, and not truth-conditional.

Situating Pragmatics in Linguistics

• Phonetics involves the sounds of speech.
• Phonology describes how sounds pattern in a language.
• Morphology is the structure of words.
• Syntax refers to the structure of sentences.
• Semantics examines the meaning of words and sentences.
• Pragmatics involves meaning inferred from context.

Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

• Discourse analysis studies connected sentences in conversation.
• Pragmatics uses discourse data to form general rules about how meaning is inferred.

Research Methods in Pragmatics

• One method involves native-speaker intuitions.
• Introspection uses the researcher's own judgments.
• Informants provide data from speakers via questionnaires or interviews
• People may unconsciously alter their responses.
• Psycholinguistic Experiments include eye tracking or lexical decision tasks to test response times.
• Naturally Occurring Data includes corpus data, which are large collections of real-world language use
• Elicitation creates situations where people naturally produce certain speech forms.
• A good hypothesis must be falsifiable and predictive.

The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary

• Synonyms have the same meaning (e.g., car/automobile).
• Antonyms have opposite meanings (e.g., hot/cold).
• Hyponymy is a specific term within a larger category.
• Homonyms are two words with the same form but different meanings (e.g., light = "not heavy" vs. "illumination").
• Polysemy is one word with related meanings (e.g., diamond = geometric shape / baseball field).
• Paraphrases are sentences with the same meaning.
• Anomaly are sentences violating semantic rules.
• Lexical ambiguity involves ambiguity of a word (e.g., bank = river bank / financial bank).
• Structural ambiguity involves ambiguity in the structure of a sentence.
• Truth conditions are the circumstances under which a sentence is true.
• Truth tables analyze logical connectives (and, or, if-then).

The Domain of Pragmatics

• Sentence meaning is the fixed literal meaning.
• Speaker meaning is the intended meaning.
• Discourse model is a mental representation of what is being discussed.
• Mutual belief assumes that both speaker and listener share the same knowledge.
• Natural Meaning is the type of meaning that indicates a correlation between events or states that occurs naturally and independently of human intentions; also known as indicative meaning.
• Non-natural Meaning involves intentional communication where a speaker uses a sign or word to convey a specific message to the listener; also known as communicative meaning.

Overview of Gricean Implicature

• Gricean implicature describes how speakers imply meanings beyond what is explicitly stated.
• H.P. Grice developed this theory in Logic and Conversation (1975) to explain how listeners infer unstated meanings based on conversational norms.
• The truth-conditional meaning of a sentence differs from its pragmatic interpretation.
• Inferences drawn from conversation are called implicatures.
• The Cooperative Principle (CP) and four maxims guide conversational implicatures.

The Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims

• The Cooperative Principle (CP) involves making your conversational contribution as required.
• It should be at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange.
• The principle is realized through four maxims.
• Maxim of Quantity (Information): Make your contribution as informative as required, but not more informative than necessary.
• Maxim of Quality (Truthfulness): Do not say what you believe to be false or lack evidence for.
• Maxim of Relation (Relevance): Be relevant.
• Maxim of Manner (Clarity): Avoid obscurity of expression, ambiguity, and be brief and orderly.
• Observing a Maxim: Following the Cooperative Principle properly.
• Violating a Maxim: Breaking a maxim to mislead the hearer (lying).
• Flouting a Maxim: Blatantly breaking a maxim to create an implicature (sarcasm).

Conversational Implicature

• Conversational Implicature occurs when a speaker implies something beyond what is explicitly stated
• Listeners infer the meaning based on the Cooperative Principle.

Types of Conversational Implicatures

• Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs) occur by default in most contexts.
• Particularized Conversational Implicatures (PCIs) depend on specific contexts.
• Scalar Implicatures occur when a speaker selects a weaker term from a scale of informativeness, it implicates the stronger term does not apply.
• Common scales: (some → most → all), (cool → warm → hot), (might → must).
• Entailment: If p entails q, then if p is true, q must be true.
• Implicature: If p implicates q, q can be false while p is still true.

Applications and Examples

• Indirect Requests are a request, and not a literal question about ability.
• Sarcasm/Irony implicates the opposite if said sarcastically.
• In court, statements must follow Quality strictly, but avoiding Quantity can be used strategically.

Later Approaches to Implicature

• Neo-Gricean Theory condenses Grice's maxims into fewer principles.
• Horn's Two-Principle System includes Q- and R-Implicature.
• Q-Principle states to say as much as you can, given R;
• R-Principle states to say no more than you must, given Q.
• Q-Implicature is an inference based on the assumption the speaker has provided as much information as possible.
• R-Implicature is an inference based on the assumption the speaker has provided only as much as is necessary.
• Levinson's Three-Principle System includes Q-, I-, and M-Implicature.
• Q-Heuristic: What isn't said, isn't.
• I-Heuristic: What is simply described is stereotypically exemplified.
• M-Heuristic: A marked message indicates a marked situation.

Division of Pragmatic Labor

• Division of Pragmatic Labor unmarked expressions imply the typical meaning, while marked expressions imply a special meaning.
• Lexical Pragmatics studies how words change meaning due to pragmatic influences.
• Includes concepts like autohyponymy and the Avoid Synonymy Principle.

Relevance Theory

• The maxims are unnecessary because communication is a single Principle of Relevance.
• Cognitive Principle of Relevance: Human cognition is geared toward maximizing relevance.
• Communicative Principle of Relevance: Every act of communication carries an expectation of its own optimal relevance.
• Explicature: The enriched, truth-evaluable content of an utterance.
• Implicature: Additional inferences beyond the explicit meaning.
• This theory focuses on how humans naturally seek out the most relevant information with the least effort.
• Q-Principle: A principle stating that speakers should provide as much information as possible.
• R-Principle: A principle stating that speakers should avoid unnecessary verbosity.
• Q-Implicature: An inference that arises when a speaker chooses a weaker term, leading the hearer to assume the stronger term does not apply.
• R-Implicature: An inference that arises when a speaker provides minimal information, leading the hearer to infer additional details.
• I-Implicature: An inference that assumes what is simply stated refers to a stereotypical case.
• M-Implicature: An inference that assumes a marked (unusual or complex) expression conveys a marked meaning.
• Marked Expression: A less common, more complex, or unexpected way of phrasing something.
• Unmarked Expression: A default, simpler, or more common way of phrasing something.
• Division of Pragmatic Labor: The principle that an unmarked expression conveys a typical meaning, while a marked expression conveys an atypical or special meaning.
• Auto Hyponymy: A phenomenon where a word serves as its own hyponym.
• Avoid Synonymy Principle: The linguistic tendency to avoid having two words that mean exactly the same thing, leading to differentiation in meaning over time.
• Avoid Homonymy Principle: The linguistic tendency to avoid using the same word for different meanings to prevent confusion.
• Principle of Relevance: The idea that human cognition and communication are driven by the search for maximally relevant information.
• Explicature: The process of enriching an utterance with context to make it truth-evaluable.
• Implicature: Any additional meaning inferred beyond what is explicitly stated.
• Lexical Pragmatics studies how word meanings shift due to pragmatic influences, such as context and inference.
• Scalar Implicature is a type of Q-implicature where choosing a weaker term implies that a stronger one does not apply

Referring Expressions

• A referring expression is a linguistic term used by a speaker to identify an entity.
• The referent is the actual entity being referred to.
• Mentalist view theorizes that reference is to discourse entities (mental constructs) rather than real-world objects.
• Referentialist view theorizes that reference is to real-world entities.
• The same entity can be described in multiple ways.
• Reference can succeed even if the entity does not exist.

Deixis

• Deixis refers to words that require contextual information to be understood.
• Personal deixis refers to participants in a conversation.
• Spatial deixis refers to locations.
• Temporal deixis refers to time.
• Discourse deixis refers to elements within a discourse.
• Definite expressions imply that the referent is identifiable.
• Indefinite expressions introduce new or unknown referents.
• Familiarity theory states that definite expressions indicate information already known to the listener.
• Uniqueness theory theorizes that definite expressions indicate that the referent is the only one that fits the description.
• Anaphora is the process by which one expression refers back to another in discourse.
• Pronoun resolution determines which entity a pronoun refers to, influenced by syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
• Coreference exists when two expressions refer to the same entity.

Study Guide for Chapter 5: Presupposition

• Presupposition assumes background information assumed by the speaker.
• Entailment is a necessary logical consequence of a statement.
• Implicature infers the additional meaning from context.
• Some presuppositions persist in complex sentences, while others do not.
• Definite Descriptions presuppose existence.
• Factive Verbs presuppose truth.
• Change-of-State Verbs presuppose a prior state.
• Iteratives presuppose a previous instance.
• Cleft Sentences presuppose someone called.
• Presuppositions can be canceled in certain contexts.
• Cleft Sentence: A structure that presupposes part of its content.
• Defeasibility: The ability of a presupposition to be canceled.