SOME FUNNY EXAMPLES OF PRAGMATICS

POLITENESS

We can think of politeness in general terms as having to do with ideas like being tactiful, modest and nice to other people. In the study of linguistic politeness, the most relevant concept is "face". Your face, in pragmatics, is your public self-image. This is the emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone  else to recognize.
Politness can be defined as showing awareness and cosideration of another person´s face.

ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS

J.L. Austin says that an Illocutionary is an act performed in saying something, as contrasted with a Locutinary act, the act of saying something, and also contrasted with a perlocutionary act, an act performed by saying something.

Searle (1975) set up the following classification of illocutionary speech acts:

• assertives = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition.
• directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice
• commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths
• expressives = speech acts that express on the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks
• declarations = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife.

SPEECH ACT

We use the term speech act to describe  actions such "requesting", "comanding", "questioning" or "informing". 
We can define speech act as the action performed by a speaker with a utterance. If you say "I´ll be there at six", you´re not just speaking,  you seem to be performing the speech act of "promising".
 
J.L. Austin analyses speech acts on three levels:

• Locutionary act:      Wen we say something.  1.- Phonic act: To emit a sound.

                                                                                      2.- Phatic act: To emit words.     
                                                                                      
                                                                                      3.- Retic act: Use of sounds and words with                                                                                        meaning.

• Ilocutionary act: the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meanin.
• Perlocutionary act: its actual effect, such as persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise getting someone to do or realize something, whether intended or not (Austin 1962).

 

J.L Austin.

PRESUPPOSITION

What a speaker (or writter) assumes is true or know by a listener (or reader).

 In a more general way, we design our linguistic messages on the basis of larg-scale assumptions about what our listeners already know.

For example:

• If someone tells you your brother is waiting outside, there is an obvious presuppotion that you have a brother.
  

ANAPHORA

Anafora can be defined as subsequent reference to an already introduced entity. Mostly we use Anaphora in texts to maintain reference. The connection between an antecedent and an anaphoric expressions is created by use of a pronoun (it), or a phrase with the antecedent noun (the puppy).

Example: 

• We saw a funny home video about a boy  washing a puppy in the small bath. Wen he let go, it jumped out...

INFERENCE

Reference is a key process, is additional information used by the listener to create a connection between what is said and what must be meant.
For example, if we say "That Picasso is in the musseum", we mean that there is a Picasso´s picture inside that museum.

REFERENCE

We have to define reference as an act by wich speaker (or writter) uses language to enable a listener (o reader) to identify something. 
To perform an act of reference, we can use:

• Proper nouns: As Chomsky, Jennifer, Whiskas...
• Other nouns in phrases: A writter, my friend, the cat...
• Pronouns: He, she, it...

We sometimes assume that these words identify something or someone uniquely, but is more accurate to say that, for each word or phrase, there is a "range of reference".

DEIXIS

Some sentences of English are virtually impossible to understand if we don´t know who is speaking, about whom, where and when.
Expressions such as tomorrow and here are obvious examples of bits of language that we can only understand in terms of the speaker´s intended meaning. They are technically  know as deitic expressions, from the  Greek word DEIXIS, wich means pointing via language.

Kind of Deixis:

• Person Deixis: We use Deixis to point to things, (it, this, these) and people(him, them, those).
• Spatial Deixis: Words and phrases used to point to a location (her, there, near that).
• Temporal Deixis: Those used to point to a time(now, then, last week).

All these Deictic expressions have to be interpreted in terms of wich person, place or time the speaker has in mind.

People can actually use Deixis to have some fun. The bar owner who put up a big sign that reads "Free Beer Tomorrow" can always claim that you are just one day early for the free drink.

CONTEXT

There are different kinds of context:

• Linguistic context: Also know as co-text. The co-text of a word is the set of other words used in the same phrase or sentence. The surrounding co-text has a stronger effect on what we think the word probably means.
• Physical context: "If we see the word bank on the wall of a building in a city, the physical location will influence our interpretation.

ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW OF PRAGMATICS: Roman Jakobson

•  Pragmatics: How utterances are used, (liteally, figuratively), in speech acts.
• Language Elements:

1. Contact: Between Adresser and Adresee, (Hearing words, printed pages).
2. Code: Connections of meanings along with an organization pattern of the discourse as a whole.
3. Context: Is the general subject that the message is about and what the speaker is referring to.

DEFINITION OF PRAGMATICS

A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how

people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a

concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation (hence *conversation

analysis). 

It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the

sentence meaning, (Recognize the meaning of words), and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning,(Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986).

The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper,1997) which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social

status between the speakers involved, the cultural  knowledge such as

politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.