Language in Use

Chapter 6 covered what words and sentences mean on their own. But people rarely say exactly what they mean. "Can you pass the salt?" is not a question about your ability, and "It's cold in here" is often a request to close the window. Pragmatics is the study of how meaning depends on context: who is speaking, to whom, where and why. Semantics asks what a sentence means; pragmatics asks what a speaker means by saying it.

Context and Deixis

Some words cannot be understood without knowing the situation in which they are said. Deixis (from the Greek for "pointing") covers words that point at the speaker, the place or the time.

A note left on a door saying Back in ten minutes is useless without knowing when it was written. Esperanto's hodiaŭ (today), morgaŭ (tomorrow) and hieraŭ (yesterday), which you met in Esperanto Basic Conversation 1, are deictic in exactly this way: the same word points to a different day each day. Words like Edinburgh or 1066 have the same reference whenever and wherever they are said, which is why they are not deictic.

Speech Acts

The philosopher J. L. Austin pointed out that saying something is often doing something. Saying I promise to call you tomorrow is a promise, not a report about promising. Austin and John Searle called these actions speech acts and classified them by what the speaker is trying to do:

A performative sentence is one where saying it performs the act: I apologise, I promise, I name this ship …. Performatives work only under the right conditions (called felicity conditions): saying I now pronounce you married does nothing unless you are the right person in the right setting.

Indirect Speech Acts

A speaker often performs one act by way of another. Can you pass the salt? has the form of a question (is it possible for you to pass it?) but works as a polite request. Answering "Yes" and doing nothing would be a joke, because the hearer is expected to understand the act, not just the form. English requests range from direct to very indirect:

Implicature: Meaning Beyond the Words

The philosopher H. P. Grice explained how hearers work out what is meant. His idea is that conversation is cooperative: speakers follow an unspoken cooperative principle and four maxims:

When a speaker seems to break a maxim, the hearer assumes they are still cooperating and looks for a hidden message: an implicature.

Implicatures can be cancelled without contradiction, which is how you tell them from entailments (Chapter 6). Some of the students passed, in fact all of them did is fine: "not all" was only an implicature. Compare Anna killed the spider, but it didn't die, which is a contradiction because "killed" entails "died".

Presupposition

A presupposition is something a sentence takes for granted. Philip has stopped smoking presupposes that Philip used to smoke. The test is that the presupposition survives negation and questioning: Philip has not stopped smoking and Has Philip stopped smoking? both still take for granted that he smoked. Words that trigger presuppositions include stop, again, too, know and the: The king of Sweden is visiting presupposes that there is a king of Sweden. A famous trick question uses this: Have you stopped beating your dog? forces an answer that accepts the presupposition either way.

Politeness and Address

Much of language in use is about managing relationships. The sociologists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson built on Erving Goffman's idea of face, a person's public self-image, to explain politeness. Speakers protect two kinds of face: the wish to be liked and approved of (positive face) and the wish not to be imposed on (negative face). Asking someone to do something threatens the second, so we cushion requests with please, could you and apologies.

Languages build politeness into the grammar in different ways. The most visible is the choice of "you":

English no longer has the old thou/you distinction in standard use, so it expresses politeness through wording, not grammar (Could you …, I wonder if …). Esperanto, designed for use between strangers from many cultures, deliberately has a single vi, as you saw in Esperanto Basic Conversation 1. A language with a formal/informal pair makes the speaker choose a relationship in every sentence; one without it makes the choice through tone and wording.

Conversation as Structure

Conversation is organised in adjacency pairs: a greeting expects a greeting, a question expects an answer, an offer expects an acceptance or refusal. Ritual greetings are the clearest example. English How are you? is usually a greeting, not a real question: the expected reply is Fine, thanks, and you?, whatever the true answer. Learners who answer in detail can seem odd. The same words can be a real question in another setting, such as a doctor's surgery. Whether something is a question depends on the situation, as pragmatics predicts.

Hands-On Exercises