Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the area of language study associated with exploring how contextual factors influence meaning. One way of looking at this is to explore how the act of interpretation itself relies on all kinds of background knowledge about the world that text producers and receivers hold. 

Your schematic knowledge

You can test your own schematic knowledge by looking at the following list of countries. What do you think of when you read the name of each? What differences are there between the kinds of knowledge you hold for each? For which countries do you have a rich schema, and for which a relatively poor one? What might have influenced this? Think about those you might have visited, read about, seen on television and so on.

• France
• Spain
• Algeria
• Australia
• Japan
• Honduras.

Conversational maxims

One of the things we can assume when someone speaks to us is that they intend to convey some kind of meaning, and therefore that communication is essentially a cooperative enterprise between speaker and listener.

One of the ways that language study has explained this cooperative principle is through the use of what the linguist and philosopher Paul Grice (1975) called conversational maxims:

The maxim of quantity: do not say too little or too much.

The maxim of quality: speak the truth.

The maxim of relevance: keep what is being discussed relevant to the topic in hand.

The maxim of manner: be clear and avoid ambiguity.

Grice didn't claim that these maxims acted as rigid rules but rather that when they were broken (as often happens when we speak to each other) they gave rise to what he called implicatures, implied meanings that listeners were intended to infer from speakers’ comments. 

Politeness

Another way that speakers support communication with each other is through what might be called a ‘super-maxim’: being polite by being mindful of others’ personal or face needs.

In face theory, first developed by the sociologist Erving Goffman (1955), an individual has both positive and negative face needs. Positive face needs are those associated with feeling appreciated and valued, while negative face needs are the desire to feel independent and not be imposed upon. Interactions between people therefore have the potential to be face-threatening acts (FTAs), and consequently speakers can choose from a range of politeness strategies to minimise this loss of face.

Deixis

A final important area of study in pragmatics is deixis. Deictic words are words that are context-bound in so far as their meaning depends on who is using them, where they are using them, and when they are using them.

Deictic terms belong to one of a number of deictic categories, the three main ones being:

• Person deixis (names and personal pronouns)
• Spatial deixis (adverbs of place such as ‘here’, ‘there’, demonstratives showing location such as ‘this’ and ‘that’, orientational words such as ‘left’ and ‘right’, and deictic verbs such as ‘come’ and ‘go’)
• Temporal deixis (adverbs of time such as ‘today’, ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’). Each of these both locates a speaker in and points from a particular deictic centre.

Deictic expressions are commonly used when speakers share the same time and space since they can point to objects and refer to events that can commonly be understood.

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