Handout - Semantics and Pragmatics PDF

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS EN 201 HANDOUT AND REVIEWER Topic 1: SEMANTICS: THE MEANINGS OF WORDS, PHRASES, AND SENTENCES The term semantics, from the Greek word ‘seme’ which means ‘sign,’ was made up by Michel Bréal...

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS EN 201 HANDOUT AND REVIEWER Topic 1: SEMANTICS: THE MEANINGS OF WORDS, PHRASES, AND SENTENCES The term semantics, from the Greek word ‘seme’ which means ‘sign,’ was made up by Michel Bréal (1832-1915), a French linguist regarded as the founder of modern semantics. This branch of linguistics is concerned with the study of the meanings of words and sentences in a language. Semantics gives the basic or the literal meanings of words as considered principally as parts of the language system. Semantics deals with interpretation and meaning of the words, sentence structure, and symbols. It can address meaning at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, or larger units of discourse. One of the crucial questions which unites different approaches to linguistic semantics is that of the relationship between form and meaning. There are a number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics, which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical semantics, which studies word meanings and word relations, and conceptual semantics, which studies the cognitive structure of meaning. Based on the study of Saeed (Semantics, 2nd edition), he said that the original definition of semantics is a very broad field of inquiry in which he found scholars writing on very different methods, though sharing the general aim of describing semantic knowledge. As a result, semantics is the most diverse field within linguistics. TWO BASIC DIVISIONS We can recognize main divisions in the study of semantics based on the distinction between the meanings of words and the meanings of sentences. Lexical Semantics is the study of word meaning. It is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning of relationships among words. It examines the individual word meaning, defining words by connecting it to actual concept, objects, and other words and by considering personal experiences and understanding of words, role of syntax in word meaning, and the influence of physical and cultural contexts of words. Phrasal Semantics (a.k.a. Compositional Semantics) is the study of the principles which govern the construction of the meaning of phrases and of sentence meaning out of compositional combinations of individual. It is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word. It examines at how individual words and syntax make sentences with meaning. In everyday use, meaning goes beyond just learning the dictionary meaning. A strong understanding of words helps us know where to use words in a sentence, how and where to use in a social setting, what all the possible meanings are for a word, and what other words might be used in their place. How does meaning affect word associations in language? The purely linguistic side of meaning is equally evident when examining how words combine with one another to produce phrases. The set of restrictions on how a word may combine with other words of a single syntactic category is referred to as the word's collocability. Two words may have the same referent, and yet differ in their ability to combine with particular words. Example: In English, the word ‘flock’ collocates with ‘sheep’; and ‘school’ with ‘fish’, although both flock and school mean group. From the point of view of etymology (the history of a word or an explanation of where a word came from), set phrases are of two types. A. The collocation is defined as a set phrase which still makes sense. Example: “make noise, make haste.” One simply does not say to produce noise or make swiftness, even though such phrases would be perfectly understandable. Since collocations still may be taken literally, they can be paraphrased using regular syntactic transformations: “Haste was made by them.” “Noise was made by the children.” B. The idioms are phrases whose words no longer make sense when taken literally. The semantic relations between words in idiomatic set phrases may be illogical to varying degrees. Examples: “white elephant sale” “soap opera”, “to see red” “break a leg”, “small voice” “loud tie” “wee hours of the night” “boss around” “out of sorts” “a political football” True idioms cannot be paraphrased by regular means, because they do not participate in the regular syntactic relations of the language. Therefore, meaning involves real-world concepts and logic but it is at the same time a linguistic category. The semantic structure of a language is the language's special system of conveying extra linguistic relations by idiosyncratic linguistic means. When considering how we understand words, there are many different ways to approach word meaning, two of which include: ❖ Componential Analysis: Words are defined by the components that make up each word. Example: ✓ Dog [+mammal] [+ domesticated] [+carnivore] ❖ Lexical Fields: Word meaning is identified by how it is grouped into a web of related words and meaning.  Example: ✓ Household pets [dog, hamster, parakeet, cat, goldfish] SEMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WORDS ❖ Hyponym is a hierarchical semantic relationship, where a general term has numerous subordinate terms (hyponyms) that fall under it. Examples: ✓ dog → Pekingese, Beagle, Terrier, Dalmatian, Aspin ✓ color → blue, yellow, red, pink and white ❖ Meronym is a whole to part hierarchical relationship. Examples: ✓ dog → paws, snout, tail, ears ❖ Synonyms are words that have the same meaning. Examples: ✓ violet – purple ✓ cemetery – graveyard ❖ Antonyms are words that have opposite meanings. Examples: ✓ comfort – torment ✓ stingy – generous Complementary pairs: alive and dead Gradable pairs: big and small (no absolute scale) ❖ Homonyms are words that share the same spelling or pronunciation, but have different meanings. Examples: ✓ four – for (homophones: same pronunciation, different spelling) ✓ sink as in kitchen sink – sink as in fall into something (homographs: same spelling and pronunciation) ❖ Heteronyms are homographs that are pronounced differently. Homographs are different words that are spelled identically and possibly pronounced the same, if they are pronounced the same. Example: ✓ dove (the bird) – dove (the past tense of dive)  ❖ Metonym is a word used in place of another to convey the same meaning Examples: ✓ jock → used for athlete ✓ Washington → used for American government ✓ crown → used for monarchy ✓ Colgate → used for toothpaste ❖ Retronyms are expressions that are no longer redundant. Example: ✓ silent movie → used to be redundant because a long time ago, all movies were silent, but this is no longer true or redundant) ❖ Polysemous is a word that has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically Example: means to tolerate ✓ bear means to carry means to support SEMANTIC CHANGE It occurs when words change in their meaning through use over time and in different contexts. ❖ Generalization refers to when the meaning of a word becomes more general, to include more meaning/conceptual area that the original meaning of the word. ❖ Specialization is when the word meaning narrows, getting more specialized and specific. ❖ Metaphorical extension is when a word is connected metaphorically to another situation/context and the word meaning changes through the extended use of the word in conceptually similar contexts. ❖ A euphemism is when people use a certain word in place of a more literal, blunt word, to make something sound more pleasing (example, passed away, instead of died). ❖ A dysphemism is almost the opposite of euphemism and refers to when a word meaning is changed when used in certain contexts in order to make the word sound worse. ❖ Pejoration goes beyond dysphemism, where a word meaning takes on negative connotations more permanently, due to constant dysphemism or contextual factors (social, cultural, historical, etc.). ❖ Amelioration of a word endows the word with more positive or socially accepted meaning and use from a previously negative or neutral meaning. COMPOSITIONALITY At the sentence meaning level, one might simply look at the composition of sentences to understand meaning, even though the underlying context of sentence provides lots of meaning as well. looks at how sentences mean by examining the parts of the sentence and how they are put together to make meaning. However, when using sentences for functional and everyday purposes, we find meaning in context, not just in the abstract parts. One phrase can have many different meanings,different depending on thedepending meanings, context it on is used in. the context it is used in. Examine Examinethis thisexample: example: It can mean a literal fire if someone’s clothes catch fire. “You’re on fire.” It can mean that one is doing well on successive tasks. Idioms Idioms are exemplars are exemplars for theof the importance importance of context of context for meaning. for meaning. Idioms Idioms are sayings where the meaning of the statement does not come directly from the meaning of the words used, but instead meaning comes from metaphor to an original situation or setting or from use in literature or shared cultural experiences. This is one of the best examples based on original setting or shared cultural experiences. “Being saved by the bell” is an idiom whose roots lie in boxing, where the bell was rung just in time for a fighter to make it, and now the metaphor applies to anyone who is saved just in time. Compositionality is a fundamental principle in semantics, the study of meaning in language. It refers to the idea that the meaning of a complex expression (such as a sentence) is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions (such as words) and the rules used to combine them. This concept is also known as the "principle of compositionality." SENTENTIAL MEANING The meaning of sentences is built from the meaning of noun phrases and verbs. Sentences contain truth conditions if the circumstances in the sentence are true. Paraphrases are two sentences with the same truth conditions, despite subtle differences in structure and emphasis. Example: ✓ “The dog bit the child.” ✓ “The child was bitten by the dog.” X “The child bit the dog.” The first sentence is a paraphrase of the second sentence. Though the words of the sentences are of different positions, they have the same truth conditions. Sometimes the truth of one sentence entails or implies the truth of another sentence. This is called entailment and the opposite of this is called contradiction, where one sentence implies the falseness of another. THEORIES IN LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS ❖ Formal Semantics seeks to identify domain-specific mental operations which speakers perform when they compute a sentence’s meaning based on its syntactic structure. Theories of formal semantics are typically floated on top of theories of syntax such as generative syntax or Combinatory categorial grammar. The field's central ideas are rooted in early twentieth century philosophical logic as well as later ideas about linguistic syntax. It emerged as its own subfield in the 1970s after the pioneering work of Richard Montague and Barbara Partee and continues to be an active area of research. ❖ Conceptual Semantics is an effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them. With this theory, linguists can better deal with the fact that subtle differences in word meaning correlate with other differences in the syntactic structure that the word appears in. The way this is gone about is by looking at the internal structure of words. These small parts that make up the internal structure of words are termed semantic primitives. ❖ Cognitive Semantics approaches meaning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. In this framework, language is explained thru general human cognitive abilities rather than a domain- specific language module. The techniques native to cognitive semantics are typically used in lexical studies such as those put forth by Leonard Talmy, George Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts, and Bruce Wayne Hawkins. Some cognitive semantic frameworks, such as that developed by Talmy, consider syntactic structures as well. Semantics, through modern researchers can be linked to the Wernicke's area of the brain and can be measured using the event-related potential (ERP). ERP is the rapid electrical response recorded with small disc electrodes which are placed on a person's scalp. ❖ Lexical Semantics is a linguistic theory that investigates word meaning. This theory understands that the meaning of a word is fully reflected by its context. Here, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations. Thus, a distinction between degrees of participation as well as modes of participation are made. To accomplish this distinction any part of a sentence that bears a meaning and combines with the meanings of other constituents is labeled as a semantic constituent. Semantic constituents that cannot be broken down into more elementary constituents are labeled minimal semantic constituents. ❖ Cross-cultural Semantics, various fields or disciplines have long been contributing to cross- cultural semantics. Are words like love, truth, and hate universals? Is even the word sense–so central to semantics–a universal, or a concept entrenched in a long-standing but culture- specific tradition? These are the kind of crucial questions that are discussed in cross-cultural  semantics. Translation theory, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and cultural linguistics specialize in the field of comparing, contrasting, and translating words, terms, and meanings from one language to another (Herder, W. von Humboldt, Boas, Sapir, and Whorf). But philosophy, sociology, and anthropology have long established traditions in contrasting the different distinctions of the terms and concepts we use. And online encyclopedias such as the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, (https://plato.stanford.edu), and more and more Wikipedia itself have greatly facilitated the possibilities of comparing the background and usages of key cultural terms. In recent years the question of whether key terms are translatable or untranslatable has increasingly come to the fore of global discussions, especially since the publication of Barbara Cassin's ‘Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,’ in 2014. ❖ Computational Semantics is focused on the processing of linguistic meaning. To do this, concrete algorithms and architectures are described. Within this framework the procedures and constructions are also analyzed in terms of decidability, time/space complexity, data structures that they require and communication protocols. SEMANTICS IN LITERATURE Semantics deals with the reading comprehension of the readers, in how they understand others and their interpretations. In addition, semantics constructs a relation between adjoining words and clarifies the sense of a sentence, whether the meanings of words are literal or figurative. Types of Semantics: ❖ Connotative Semantic: When a word suggests a set of associations, or is an imaginative or emotional suggestion connected with the words, while readers can relate to such associations. Simply, it represents figurative meaning. Usually, poets use this type of meaning in their poetry. ❖ Denotative Semantic: It suggests the literal, explicit, or dictionary meanings of words, without using associated meanings. It uses symbols in writing that suggest expressions of writers such as exclamation mark, quotation mark, apostrophe, colon. TOPIC 2: PRAGMATICS: HOW SENTENCES ARE USED IN CONTEXT Pragmatics comes from the Latin word ‘pragmaticus’ which means ‘fit for the action.’ It is a branch of linguistics concerned with the use of language in social contexts and the ways in which people produce and comprehend meanings through language. In short, it is about the speaker’s meaning of what he wants to convey, and the contextual meaning. The term ‘pragmatics’ was coined by the philosopher C.W. Morris in the 1930s. It was developed as a subfield of Linguistics in the 1970s. Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker, the addressee, and other features of the context of utterance. It involves speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or coded in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. In that respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance. It looks beyond the literal meaning of an utterance and considers how meaning is constructed as well as focusing on implied meanings. It considers language as an instrument of interaction; what people mean when they use language and how we communicate and understand each other. In conversation, there is a pattern of conversation, starting with an opening dialogue, body of the conversation, and then closing words. Discourse markers are words used by a speaker to connect a phrase or sentence to the previous or following words and help a listener to understand the speech in relation to the relationship between themselves and the speaker. Some discourse markers include words such as so, however, then, say, look, and, but, etc. Style of talking varies greatly across social settings, when considering informal and formal speech. We can see style shifts from more to less formal depending on context and purpose of conversations. Also, in different social groups, there are changes in how people speak to distinguish certain social identities. Code switching is when people switch between or mix dialects or languages within one sentence or conversation, which is often seen in conversations among bilingual speakers. In written discourse, genres are types of texts that tend to occur or relate to certain contexts or occasions for certain purposes, such as nonfiction texts, persuasive essay, and personal stories. Registers are the varieties of the language that must be used in certain texts, such as “Business English.” Among different cultural groups and languages, there may be different conventions for genres, such as the argumentative essay—in the English essay, the format is to state the point and provide supporting facts, whereas in other cultures there may be a more indirect or ‘subtle revelation’ or circular reasoning to support the thesis.  Cohesion refers to the words in texts that help to connect sentences together, joining them into one ‘cohesive’ text. These features include reference items, conjunctions, ellipsis or substitution, or lexical cohesion through repetition, synonyms, or collocations. Text structures and features also vary depending on genre, and Western culture has set structures for narratives that describe personal experiences, explain how things are, or try to persuade how things should be. In texts, we can also examine the perspective of the speaker/writer, actions of the actors and who is acted upon, word choice, and poetic structures and techniques. “Pragmatists focus on what is not explicitly stated and on how we interpret utterances in situational contexts. They are concerned not so much with the sense of what is said as with its force, that is, with what is communicated by the manner and style of an utterance,” (Geoffrey Finch, Linguistic Terms and Concepts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). FOUR ASPECTS OF PRAGMATICS A. SPEECH ACTS People use language to accomplish certain kinds of acts, broadly known as speech acts, and distinct from physical acts like drinking a glass of water, or mental acts like thinking about drinking a glass of water. Speech acts include asking for a glass of water, promising to drink a glass of water, threatening to drink a glass of water, ordering someone to drink a glass of water, and so on. Speech act theory describes how language is used to accomplish things or acts, involving: ▪ Locutionary Acts – when the sounds and words are made in a statement and it is basic, surface meaning. ▪ Illocutionary Acts – the intended underlying meaning of one’s statement or the conventional force that one intends in their statement ▪ Perlocutionary Acts – the effect of the statement on the hearer TWO CATEGORIES OF SPEECH ACTS: 1. DIRECT SPEECH ACTS: There are three basic types of direct speech acts, and they correspond to three special syntactic types that seem to occur in most of the world's languages. Sentence Speech Act Function Examples Type conveys ▪ Jenny got 95% on the test. Assertion Declarative information; is true ▪ The girls took photos. or false ▪ Dan took the food.  ▪ Did Jenny get 95% on the test? Question Interrogative elicits information ▪ Did the girls take photos? ▪ Did Dan take the food? causes others to ▪ Get 95% on the test! Orders and Imperative behave in certain ▪ Take some photos! Requests ways ▪ Take the food! Although assertions, questions and orders are universal, and most of the world's languages have separate syntactic constructions that distinguish them, other speech acts do not have a syntactic construction that is specific to them. Study the given examples of sentences, and analysis are given for each sentence. Consider the English sentences: ✓ “If you cross that line, I'll shoot you!” (Most English speakers would have no trouble identifying such an utterance as a threat. However, English has no special sentence form for threats. The if-construction used in the example above is not specific to the speech act of threatening.) ✓ “If you get all 1.0, I'll buy you a car!” (Expresses a promise) ✓ “If you heat water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it will boil.” (Expresses a cause-and-effect relationship between physical events) A consideration of the syntactic means available for expressing the various speech acts leads us to see that even for the three basic speech acts laid out in the table above, speakers may choose means of expression other than the basic syntactic type associated with the speech act in question. To some extent, this just reflects the existence of a diversity of means of expression, but a more pervasive reason is that speakers may use indirect rather than direct speech acts. Performative Sentences One subtype of direct speech acts exists in English and in many other languages, and allows us to expand the kinds of direct speech acts we can make beyond the three basic types that have their own special syntax. These are the direct speech acts that use performative verbs to accomplish their ends. Performative verbs can also be used with the three basic speech act types, associated with making statements, requests, and commands respectively: Examples: ✓ I assert that Jenny got 95% on the test.  ✓ I ask you who took the photos. ✓ I order you to close the window. To these can be added performative verbs that allow us to directly convey promises, threats, warnings, etc. Examples: ✓ I advise you to keep up the payments on your car. ✓ I warn you not to step across this line. ✓ I promise you that I will pay the money back by the end of the month. ✓ I bet you a dollar that it will rain on the parade. In the last sentence, the utterance of the sentence actually accomplishes the act of betting (possibly along with setting aside the money for the bet), and as such, it belongs to the class of ceremonial utterances that accomplish other kinds of changes in the world: Examples: ✓ I now pronounce you husband and wife. ✓ I name this ship Sojourner. ✓ I dub thee Sir Galahad. It is clear that not all uses of verbs that can be performative are actually performative in particular utterances. For example, if we change the person or the tense in any of the last seven sentences, they are no longer performative. In these types of sentences, the speaker is the subject who, by uttering the sentence, is accomplishing some additional action, such as daring, resigning, or nominating. These sentences are all affirmative, declarative and in the present tense. An informal test to see whether a sentence is performative or not is to insert the words “I hereby” before the verb. The hereby test: A test of whether or not a particular sentence is a performative utterance is whether or not you can insert hereby before the verb. If the resulting sentence does not make sense, it is not a performative: Examples: ✓ I hereby challenge you to a match. ✓ I hereby fine you ₱ 500. but I hereby know that girl is not. ✓ I hereby name this ship Sojourner; but ✓ *I hereby named this ship Sojourner. 2. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS: Returning to the speech act of questioning, we can easily come up with several alternate ways to ask the same question by using sentence types other than interrogative. Let us look again at the interrogative sentence: ✓ “Did Jenny get 95% on the test?”  (A positive answer [“yes”] to that question would give the questioner the actual answer she wanted.) ✓ “Do you know if Jenny got 95% on the test?” (This is still in the form of a question, but it probably is not an inquiry about what you know. Most of the time, the answer “yes, I do” would be ostentatiously uncooperative. The normal answer we would expect in real life would be “Yes, she did”, or “No, she only got 85%”, or something of the sort.) Here the reply is directed to the speech act meaning, not the literal meaning. A simple "yes" answer that responds to the literal meaning would usually be taken for an uncooperative answer in actual social life (for example "Yes, I do") would be heard as "Yes, I do, but I'm not necessarily going to tell you". Other indirect ways of asking the same question, using the declarative form, are listed below: ✓ “I'd like to know if Jenny got 95% on the test.” ✓ “I wonder whether Jenny got 95% on the test.” In the case of the speech act of requesting or ordering, speakers can be even more indirect. As in the case of questions, conventional indirect requests may, taken literally, be questions about the addressee’s knowledge or ability. Here is a direct request: ✓ (Please) close the window. ✓ Could you close the window? (Indirect request) ✓ Would you mind closing the window? (Indirect request) ✓ I would like you to close the window. (Assertion) ✓ The window is still open! (Complain) ✓ I must have asked you a hundred times to keep that window closed! (Complain) B. CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE The work of H.P. Grice takes pragmatics farther than the study of speech acts. Grice's aim was to understand how speaker's meaning—what someone uses an utterance to mean—arises from sentence meaning—the literal (form and) meaning of an utterance. Grice proposed that many aspects of ‘speaker's meaning’ result from the assumption that the participants in a conversation are cooperating in an attempt to reach mutual goals—or at least are pretending to do so. He called this the Cooperative Principle. It has four sub-parts or maxims that cooperative conversationalist ought in principle to respect: The Cooperative Principle of speech states that speakers and listeners must cooperate to both contribute to conversation by using purposeful speech as well as listening with purpose of conversation in mind. In this conversational relationship, there are guidelines for speech, known  as conversational maxims (which will be discuss later in this Module). The Cooperative Principles has four sub-parts known as Grice’s maxims of conversation which are conventions of speech. MAXIMS OF CONVERSATION ❖ The Maxim of Quantity states a speaker should be as informative as is required and neither more nor less. ❖ The Maxim of Relevance essentially states a speaker should stay on the topic. ❖ The Maxim of Manner states the speaker should be brief and orderly, and avoid ambiguity. ❖ The Maxim of Quality states that a speaker should not lie or make any unsupported claims. Examples: ✓ “Make your contributions as informative as required.” ✓ “Do not say what you believe to be false.” (These guidelines are not hard and fast and are often not all followed, such as when people change how they speak to consider others' feelings (politeness) or use little “white lies” to spare feelings.) C. RHETORICAL STRUCTURE Some of this rhetorical structure involves the relationships of phrases inside sentences, and some of it involves relationships among sentences or groups of sentences. Like syntactic structures, these rhetorical structures usually seem to be "trees"—that is, successive subdivisions of larger units into smaller ones. One difference between syntax and rhetoric is scale—syntax typically operates on a smaller scale, among words or small groups of words inside sentences, while rhetoric works on a larger scale, typically relating clauses, sentences, and whole sections of a discourse. Another difference is function. Syntactic structure mainly expresses semantic relations like modification, predication, quantification and so on. These are key parts of a basic account of ‘sentence meaning’. Rhetorical structure typically expresses pragmatic relations like exemplification, concession, justification, summary and so on, things that are part of ‘speaker meaning’, the way that people use language to inform or entertain or persuade. For the past century or two, linguists have been much more interested in syntactic structure than in rhetorical structure. As a result, theories of syntax are much better developed and more widely known. However, there are some interesting accounts of rhetorical structure, including a body of work known as RST (for "rhetorical structure theory"). RST postulates a tree structure of rhetorical relationships, analogous to the tree structures of syntactic relationships. Some linguists are skeptical that rhetorical structure is even a well-defined kind of mental representation that is intrinsic to language, of the kind that syntax seems to be. Thus, rhetorical structures might simply be useful patterns that speakers and writers sometimes choose to create  or borrow, just as architects and painters may choose certain stereotypical ways of arranging their materials. On this view, it might not turn out to be possible to list all the possible rhetorical structures, or to classify every passage uniquely and accurately in terms of such structures, any more than we can list all possible hand tools, or necessarily classify all the tools that we find into a fixed taxonomy. After all, someone can always invent a new tool, or a tool that combines aspects of several old ones. However, it is still useful to have an inventory of the tools in common use at a given time, and (even if these skeptics are right) an inventory of common rhetorical structures has a similar sort of value. D. MANAGING THE FLOW OF REFERENCE IN DISCOURSE In conveying a message, we must consider more than just “who did what to whom.” We also must keep in mind what our listeners know, and how to lay the message out for them in an orderly and understandable way. We must be careful not to assume knowledge listeners do not have. If a stranger comes up to us on the street and says, out of nowhere, “What is the frequency?” we are likely to assume that he is crazy, or perhaps mistaking us for someone else. Young children make this sort of communicative mistake all the time, because their ability to model other people's knowledge and belief is not well developed. Similarly, we must be careful not to introduce familiar things as if they were new. Aside from being insulting, this can be confusing, since our listeners may try to find a new interpretation to match our implication of novelty. If your roommate says “There's a letter for you on the table,” and it is the same old letter that both of you know well has been there for several days, you may waste some time looking for another one. There are many aspects of language that help to indicate whether a particular piece of information is old or new, and to manage the amount of detail that we use in talking about it, and to make it more or less salient for our listeners or readers. For example, “old information” (part of the earlier content of a discourse, for instance) is referred to using a pronoun, and occurs early in a sentence. What is “new” typically occurs as a noun, and occurs later in the sentence: Example: ✓ “When John appeared at the party, he was introduced to Pearl. She had arrived with her friend Julie.” (In this text fragment, John turns into 'he' when John is "known", and this pronoun occurs at the beginning of the clause that introduces Pearl as new. When Pearl becomes known, she also gets converted to the pronoun 'she' in the next sentence, occupying a slot at the beginning of the next sentence, which in turn introduces the new character, Julie, in the typical sentence-final position.)  In other words, the manner of delivering the language contributes to its meaning. Moreover, we can determine the speaker’s motive and emotion in the way he/she says what he/she wants to say. One problem that we can encounter even we have what we call pragmatics is differences in culture. There are certain actions or movements that convey another or opposite meaning to what we know. We should be meticulous in observing others while they are talking for us to get not only the literal, but also the deeper meaning or the pragmatic meaning. Why is pragmatics important? ▪ Pragmatics functions as the basis for all language interactions and contact. It is a key feature to the understanding of language and the responses that follow this. Therefore, without it, there would be very little understanding of intention and meaning. ▪ Pragmatics gives us greater understanding of how the human mind works, how people communicate, how they manipulate one another, and in general, how they use language. It is needed if we want a fuller, deeper, and generally more reasonable account of human language behavior. Without pragmatics, there will be no understanding. Sometimes, a pragmatic interpretation is the only one that makes sense. Example: Speaker 1: “I just met the old Irishman and his son, coming out of the toilet.” Speaker 2: “I wouldn't have thought there was room for the two of them.” Speaker 1: “No silly, I mean I was coming out of the toilet. They were waiting.” David Lodge's Paradise News How do we know what the first speaker meant? The first sentence is ambiguous which means a word, phrase, or sentence that can mean either one or the other of two (or even several) things. Both pragmatics and semantics deal with meaning, so there is an intuitive sense that the two fields are closely related. There is also an intuitive sense in which the two are different. Semantics deals with literal meaning, while pragmatics deals with a deeper meaning based on how it is said by the speaker or the writer. Most people feel they have an understanding of the 'literal' meaning of a word or sentence as opposed to what it might be used to convey in a certain context. Examine the example below to prove the differences of the two.  Example: Speaker: “What time do you call this?” Literal Meaning: “What time is it?” Literal Response: A time (for example: “It’s nine o’clock.”) Pragmatic Meaning: An entirely different question (for example: “Why are you so late?”) Pragmatic Response: Explanation of the reason for being so late. ▪ Pragmatics studies how language is used by real people in real contexts, in spoken discourse and written contexts, and is highly influenced by cultural and social contexts. To avoid miscommunication caused by misinterpretation and cultural differences, being familiar with various cultures and pragmatics is important. Studies of Pragmatics emphasize the appropriateness in inter-cultural discourses. We should be aware of how people deliver their messages so that we can get its pragmatic meaning. Example in different context: Situation 1: Looking for a place to sit like in a movie house or theater An American would ask: “Is this seat taken?” A Filipino would ask: “Is there anyone sitting?” [“May nakaupo ba dito?”] Situation 2: Greeting someone you have come across An American would say: “Hi” or “Hello” or “How do you do?” A Filipino would say: “Where are you going?” [“Saan ang punta mo?] “Where have you been?” [“Saan ka nanggaling?”] Take Note: “Do not ask foreigners the questions we use for greeting because they find it rude and ill-mannered. This indicates that we have different context, and to avoid misunderstanding, we should know the functions of semantics and pragmatics.” PERFORMATIVE SENTENCES In these types of sentences, the speaker is the subject who, by uttering the sentence, is accomplishing some additional action, such as daring, resigning, or nominating. These sentences are all affirmative, declarative and in the present tense. An informal test to see whether a sentence is performative or not is to insert the words “I hereby” before the verb. Examples: ✓ I hereby challenge you to a match. ✓ I hereby fine you ₱ 500. but I hereby know that girl is not. Other performative verbs are bet, promise, pronounce, bequeath, swear, testify, and dismiss. PRESUPPOSITIONS These are implicit assumptions required to make a sentence meaningful. Sentences that contain presuppositions are not allowed in court because accepting the validity of the statement mean accepting the presuppositions as well. Examples: ✓ “Have you stopped stealing cars?” (This is not admissible in court because no matter how the defendant answers, the presupposition that he steals cars already will be acknowledged.) ✓ “Have you stopped smoking?” (This implies that you smoke already.) ✓ “Would you like another piece?” (This implies that you have already had one piece.) DEIXIS Deixis is reference to a person, object, or event which relies on the situational context. First and second person pronouns such as my, mine, you, your, yours, we, ours, and us are always deictic because their reference is entirely dependent on context. Demonstrative articles like this, that, these and those and expressions of time and place are always deictic as well. To understand what specific times or places such expressions refer to, we also need to know when or where the utterance was said. Example: ✓ “I'm over here!” (You need to know who "I" referred to, as well as where "here" is. Deixis marks one of the boundaries of semantics and pragmatics.) Learning Goals: To identify the deeper meaning of the sentences and to avoid ambiguity. Recitation: (This can be done orally.) Example: 1. “The professor said on Monday he would give an exam.” 2. “The chicken is ready to eat.” 3. “My brother and I are getting married this summer.” 4. “The kids have eaten already and surprisingly, they are hungry.” 5. Study the transcript of conversation about fashions that took place in 1991. Speaker A: [Sniffing] “One thing I've noticed is come back here are clogs.” Speaker B: “Really?” Speaker A: “Yeah. They're starting to make a comeback. You see them in the stores more and more and I said I didn't think I'd ever see those again.” [laughter]