Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

pragmatics LANG n. study of the interpretation of utterances and more specifically how the context of situation influences their meaning. Traditionally the study of meaning in linguistics has focused upon the meaning of words or sentences as if meaning inhered within the linguistic expression itself and was ultimately determined by the linguistic system. Pragmatics, however, emphasises the role of context in determining meaning. In fact, of course, it has long been recognized that linguistic items such as deictics and other indexical expressions depend for their meaning on the context of situation. In particular, deictics such as the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘You’ and indexical expressions such as ‘tomorrow’ all depend for their meaning on the circumstances in which they are uttered. Thus, the precise meaning of ‘I’ll visit you tomorrow’ will vary depending upon who actually is speaking to whom, and on when the utterance takes place. But in any case, even apart from deixis, many words have multiple senses. Even a simple item such as ‘coach’ has several senses, including ‘a mode of transport’ and ‘someone who trains people in a particular sport’. Its use, therefore, in an utterance such as ‘Look out for the coach’ is potentially ambiguous, and we rely upon context to select the relevant sense. Pragmatic issues, however, go far beyond issues of word meaning to include consideration of complicated kinds of contextual effect where the meaning of an utterance is much more than what is literally said. If in a review of an opera we read that ‘Mr Jones sang a series of notes which corresponded to those of an aria from Rigoletto’ we infer that he sang badly, even though the utterance does not actually say so. Similarly, if while driving in a strange town we ask someone, ‘Is there anywhere we can get petrol round here?’ and they reply ‘There’s a garage just round the corner’, we assume that it is the type of garage that sells petrol (not that it is one for parking your car) and that it is open. These kinds of inferences that go beyond the literal meaning of what is said are known as implicatures.
A further kind of contextual effect relates to the notion of speech act. Directives, for instance, are a commonly occurring type of speech act designed to get someone to do something. An utterance such as ‘Play the piano, Elton’ is likely to be a directive whatever the circumstances of its occurrence. But utterances such as ‘Would you mind playing the piano, Elton?’, ‘Can you play the piano, Elton?’, ‘The piano, Elton’, etc., may or may not prove to be directives depending on the context of situation. If a teacher in a music lesson says to a pupil, ‘Can you play the piano, Elton?’, with the piano waiting for someone to play it, then it is most likely to be heard as a directive. If, on the other hand, a group of acquaintances are discussing what instruments they can play and one asks of another ‘Can you play the piano, Elton?’ then s/he would most likely be heard as requesting information rather than making a directive. In this way, what an utterance is heard as doing (in other words, what speech act it is performing) can vary according to its context of situation. The aim of pragmatics is in the first place to describe these various kinds of contextual effect; but more significantly it aims to explain how language users actually make sense of each other’s utterances in the face of the various kinds of indeterminacy and ambiguity outlined above. The contribution of pragmatics to communication studies is potentially considerable, although not always realised, since it goes to the heart of some of the most troubling issues surrounding text and interpretation (e.g., ‘Where is meaning – in the text; or in the context?’). At the same time, however, pragmatics has become closely associated more recently with the interests of cognitive science and the study of artificial intelligence. Such links tend to produce a strong emphasis on the supposed rationality of communicators, and on the universality of the interpretative procedures that they adopt, so that much work remains to be done on the socially structured distribution and organisation of pragmatic knowledge and procedures. mmo