Analysis of Semantics and Pragmatics in Two Texts
Linguistics is the science of a language. Linguists depend on the use of certain aspects in order to analyse, describe and explain a human language; these aspects include semantics and pragmatics.
Semantics can be defined as the study of "meaning" of lexical words and expressions independently of context. Where pragmatics is the process of recognising the "invisible meaning" of lexical items and expressions; taking into account the speaker's/ addressee's intention, the status of hearer/ receiver and the actual situation.
This paper will explain the process we, as humans usually follow to understand a certain text or utterance. This explanation would be achieved through the analysis of two journal articles from semantics and pragmatics perspective, taking into account a range of techniques associated with each of the two concepts including:
Semantics Aspects: Synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, prototypes, homophones and homonyms, polysemy and ambiguity.
Pragmatics Aspects: Deixis and Distance, reference and inference, conversational implicature, anaphoric and cataphoric reference, presupposition, entailment, direct and indirect speech acts and speech events, cultural context and cross cultural pragmatics, conversational analysis and background knowledge, denotation and connotation meaning, the four maxims and hedges.
Analysing Article One
We will begin by observing the semantic and pragmatic features in article 1 being "Men are sulks say surveys" .This article is taken from the hot topics section of the popular msn website. The main topic of this article is a medical concept being flu/cold, where the unspecified writer of this article discusses the reaction of men, compared to women when it comes to having flu. The article also lists a number of readers' comments on the subject topic.
As a whole, article one is rich with lexical items that belong to the medical lexical field, such as cold, flu, Panadol, tablets, sick, suffer, diseases, chicken pox, depression, doctor, coughs, headache etc. The extensive use of these terms throughout the article was a necessity since the main topic is about a medical condition.
Another lexical field was elaborated in this article being the family relationships such as mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children etc.
Antonymy or the use of two lexical items that represent the opposite meaning appear in this article such as men and women, males and females, wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, vent and defend etc. The use of these terms in this article is more likely for the purpose of comparison. Most of these antonyms are relational opposites; these opposites indicate two ends of a relationship between persons.
First, a brief background in the three dimensions of language discussed throughout this paper. The functional, semantic, or thematic dimensions of language as previously mentioned are often used in parallel with each other. Due, to this fact it is important to be able to identify them as they take place and differentiate between these dimensions i...
Rhetoric may refer to the practice of argumentation that aims to influence or modify the perspectives of the target audience (Herrick, 2005, p. 3). Critically analysing the rhetoric context of an article could help us better apprehend the writer’s rhetoric moves as analytical readers, and attain useful techniques to improve as proficient writers. This essay will be evaluating and comparing the following sentences, which both successfully delivered powerful messages within the gender equality arena yet vary in terms of their rhetorical situation, rhetorical appeals, tone, structure and style.
Amy Tan is somewhat a genius. She understands that communication is relative and not solely dependent on predefined syntax. Obviously she does not want to jeopardize her credibility as a professional, thus dew to the somewhat unconventional position of the paper, Amy presents the information as an opinion based on personal experience. Upon completing the introduction of this passage, the reader has concluded the following passage will most likely be the author's opinion on the English language; and is not to be analyzed with the same scrutiny as a research paper.
How different are families compared to the past? Lately there has been some major changes in relationships, weather female dominance, or even just having no relationships at all. We also see that relationships are based only on a basis of reproduction and sometimes the child of the relationship is rather irrelevant. In a Temporary matter by Jhumpa Lahiri, the reader can see how relationships have developed with the rest of the world into failing, no relationship, and feminist relationships.
Pragmatics is basically a way of saying what the sentence that someone is trying to say is meant to say. This is helpful to both fields because it helps everyone understand how much language they know is being used during a conversation. There are two things that should be understood when it comes to help children and adults about pragmatics. The first things would be to make sure that “ it should be should be understood most fundamentally in terms of the pragmatics success of the individual utterances” (John Collier, 2014). Speech Language Pathology helps kids with utterances one they know what the other person is meaning to say. Some children have a hard time picking out what someone is saying to them because their pragmatic skills are going to be slower than normal is they have a speech delay or if they have a speech problem. The second thing “linguistics conventions need to be understood as on a par with he non-linguistic regularities that that competent language users rely upon to refer” (John Collier, 2014). Speech Language Pathologist and Linguistics need to remember that whenever they are coming up with a invention to help other people talk, they need to think about what people that don 't have this skill down need to do first. Not having pragmatics down is hard for
...ple: An Introduction For Learners Of English: Revised And Updated. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
He argues that one may be able to note the intentionality but he/she may not be able to know the intention, and this makes it important to differentiate between text and discourse. Discourse is responsible for finding the intention of the text by relating its content to the extralinguistic reality. The process of relating the text to the extralinguistic reality, which is the discourse, results in the text. Widdowson thus defines discourse as “the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation” and the text as “its product” (p.8). Other scholars who distinguish between text and discourse in terms of product and process are Brown and Yule (1983). They state that “the discourse analyst treats his data as the record (text) of a dynamic process in which language was used as an instrument of communication in a context by a speaker/ writer to express meanings and achieve intentions (discourse)’ (Brown and Yule, 1983:26). It can be noted that Brown and Yule’s description of text and discourse is similar to that of
The Pragmatic Theory. Searle proposed an account of metaphor that takes Davidson’s theory even further than the Naïve theory and rejects the idea of linguistic ambiguity idea (Lycan 184). Metaphorical utterance is taken to be a linguistic communication and it posits a cognitive mechanism that computes something that could be called metaphorical meaning. This theory of metaphor is the most compelling because metaphor is seen as simply of species of Gricean communication. The problem of explaining how we understand metaphor is a case of explaining how speaker meaning and sentence meaning can be divergent. Gricean logic can provide an instructive way to break down the problem of metaphorical meaning. This theory is the most plausible and overcomes Davidson’s leading objections to metaphorical meaning.
Wodak, R. (2006). Critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis in Verschueren, J. and Östman, J. (eds) Handbook of Pragmatics John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
Pragmatics, the language of conversation, is a large component of language that unfortunately, many individuals have difficulties with. Beginning at a young age, teachers and other adults can generally sense a problem with a child’s socialization s...
Content in language includes the main component of semantics. Semantics is the set of rules that provide meaning to words or content to word combinations. Semantics can be mutually exclusive or they can overlap. The symbols and words that are used represent our concepts or ideas about reality instead of reality itself. The meaning of words encompasses two
Meaning can be studied in two ways: semantically and pragmatically. Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences of what the speaker says. The focus is on what the words and sentences conventionally mean. For example, semantic studies are concerned with topics such as metonymy, prototypes and synonyms. However, pragmatics deals with what the writer or speaker of certain words or sentences intends to convey. Leech (1983) defines pragmatics as the study of meanings according to speech situations. Yule (1996) states that pragmatics is the study of what a speaker means of uttering a sentence .In uttering...
... to define a pragmatic language that can capture the true meaning of our thoughts and sentences in a formal language. This is significant because as often as we do stick to the Cooperative Principle and the maxims that Grice specifies, there are times where we stray from these cooperations to purposefully create implications. Because we do not normally ignore this Cooperative Principle without good reason, implicature is a strong way to get a point across. While Grice’s theory of implicature seems to fall short of setting up a complete evaluation process with which to decipher these points, there are some good things within his argument. Although Grice’s theory does not give a full solution to the formalist and infomalist problems or supply a flawless technique to evaluate implicature all the time, it is worth thinking about and applying to our everyday language.
Pragmatics focuses on language use within a given social environment, analysing how people interpret the various meanings language conveys. Yet, miscommunication arises due to situational contexts and thus, pragmatists “focus on what is not explicitly stated”, instead emphasising “what is communicated by the manner and style of utterance” (Finch, 2000). Consider a sign saying “Garage sale.” Naturally, without further information, we understand that there is a sale within an individual’s garage, rather than actual garages being sold. The example highlights how pragmatics furthers the understanding of an interpretation that is found past the words. This deep-seated meaning is transparent not by the reason of the semantics of the words themselves, but due to the contextual knowledge that is widely known. Ultimately pragmatics is the study of the ambiguity of language, as it examines the multiple meanings each sentence may have, which may lead to confusion, conflict and ambiguity. Therefore a sound understanding of pragmatics, may lead to a reduction in conflicts betw...