SEMANTICS–PRAGMATICS INTERACTION
It seems unlikely that there will ever be consensus about the extent to which we can reliably distinguish semantic phenomena from pragmatic phenomena. But there is now broad agreement that a sentence's meaning can be given in full only when it is studied in its natural habitat: as part of an utterance by an agent who intends it to communicate a message. Here, we document some of the interactions that such study has uncovered. In every case, to achieve even a basic description, it is necessary to pool semantic information, contextual information, speaker intentions, and general pragmatic pressures.
Space limitations preclude discussion of PRESUPPOSITIONS and SPEECH-ACTS, two important classes of phenomena for which semantics and pragmatics are so thoroughly intertwined that analyses of them invariably draw information from both domains.
In a broad range of cases, pragmatic information is required just to obtain complete and accurate meanings for the words and phrases involved. Indexical expressions (see INDEXICALS) are clear examples (Kaplan 1971). In order to determine what proposition is expressed by an utterance of (1), we must look to the context to fix the speaker.
(1) I am here.
We must also appeal to the context to obtain the intended meaning of here (in this room, in this city, ...). Which meaning we select will be shaped by considerations of informativity and relevance (see PRAGMATICS). (For example, (1) is likely to be trivially true if here is construed as picking out planet earth, and speakers will therefore avoid that interpretation until interplanetary travel becomes routine.)
Similar factors influence anaphora resolution. If a speaker utters (2), his addressees will ...
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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.
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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...
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In her analysis, Mona Baker investigates all text equivalences: apart the object of this paper, she studies the grammatical equivalence, the textual equivalence and the pragmatic equivalence. However this paper will be centered only on the micro level.
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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...
Grice’s theory of implicature centers on what he has named the “Cooperative Principle,” and how it relates directly to conversational implications that occur in our daily speech. In the implicature section of his essay “Logic and Conversation,” Grice explains that there are common goals of conversation that we try to achieve within our discussions. For example, some of these common goals are that there is a shared aim of the conversation, each person’s contributions to the conversation should be dependent upon each other, and the conversation continues until it is mutually agreed that it is over. In order to preserve these goals, we find it easiest, as cooperative human beings, to stick to the Cooperative Principle, and along with it, the maxims that Grice lays out. Based on an assumption that we do not generally deviate from this Cooperative Principle without good reason, we can find out things that are implicitly stated. Implicature is the part of our spoken language when these maxims are broken purposefully, and it involves the implicitly understood form of communication: things that are implied or suggested. While Grice’s theory of implicature is a very careful assessment of implied statements, there are some faults that are found within his argument. Because of these issues, Grice’s theory neither offers a solution to the formalist and infomalist problems, nor provides an infallible method of evaluating implicature in everyday conversation.