Our own individual internalised
system of language that has a
great deal in common with he
idiolects of other speakers in our
community but almost certainly
is not identical to any of them
Performance
What we actually do (including
comprehension)
Garden-path sentence
A sentence that is grammatically
correct but lures the interpreter
towards a dead end
interpretation, who will then
have to retrace the interpretive
steps to interpret correctly
Birner (2013) Chapter 1
Research Methods
Discourse Analysis
The study of a string of sentences
Pragmatics asks the question "What happens in discourse?",
whereas discourse analysis asks "What is happening in this
discourse?". Pragmatics draws on natural language data to
develop generalisations, whereas discourse analysis draws on
these generalisations in order to more closely investigate
natural language data.
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Pragmatics research is Descriptive
Native speaker intuitions
introspection
The researcher's own intuitions
Informants
Someone else's intuitions
Through questionnaires or interviews
Components of Language
Semantics
Literal meaning
The shift of the status of a
metaphor from pragmatic
meaning to semantic meaning is
a continuum
Lexical Semantics
Semantics of individual words
Sentential Semantics
Certain structures are associated with certain meanings
When two true sentences are joined by 'and' as in [I like pizza and I eat it
frequently] we take the resulting conjunction to be true as well
Syntax
How words have been
strung together into a
sentence
Pragmatics
Study of language use in
context including 'additional
meaning' according to context
Pragmatics appears to be a matter of performance but it is
rule-governed. It is part of our implicit knowledge of how
to use language appropriately.
The study of Pragmatics tries to make the implicit knowledge
explicit.
Meaning that is:
Non-literal
Context-dependent
Inferential
Non-truth-conditional
The conditions under which the statement
is true don't depend on its pragmatic
meaning
The truth of the statement [There's one piece of
pizza left] does not depend on the intention of
the statement but only on how many pieces are
left
Linguists disagree which of these are defining properties of pragmatics
"The same utterance will mean different things in
different contexts, and even mean different things
to different people"
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Lexical Pragmatics
Pragmatics at word level
Above the sentence level
there is pragmatics
including meaning that is
inferred based on
contextual factors rather
than conventional semantic
associations