1. PRAGMATICS

2. Language functions

3. „the pragmatic uses that speakers put language to in communication”
Language as a tool
FORM
phonological
semantic
syntactic
Language as an act
FUNCTION
„the pragmatic uses that speakers put language to in communication”

4. Language functions social bonding and maintenance
(„phatic communication”)
expression of identity

5. ‘informative’ communication
collective memory

6. Language functions by Halliday (1973)
instrumental
I pronounce you husband and wife.
regulatory
You’ll be the doctor and I’ll be the patient, right?
heuristic
When was Shakespeare born?
imaginative
The little pony shook and suddenly turned into a beautiful princess.

7. representational
We all long to be loved.
interactional (‘phatic function’)
How are you today?
personal
I hate being bullied.

8. Speech Act Theory by Austin (1962)and Searle (1972)
Locution
Illocution
Perlocution
Felicity conditions
Oh, what a lovely bike!
I’ll lend it to you if you give me a
chewing gum, all right?

9. direct
(Stop teasing the dog!)
and indirect speech acts
(You’ll stop teasing the dog.
Would you stop teasing the dog?
I wish you would stop teasing the dog.)

10. Illocutionary act= the basic unit of communication (Searle, 1969, 1972)
representatives
We’re going to the cinema tonight.
directives
Please, come and help me lay the table!
commissives
I promise to help you next time.
expressives
I say, it was a nasty job!
declaratives
I hereby name this ship ‘Liberty’.

11. Grice’s Communication Theory
Communicative situations are rather limited:
rely on shared knowledge, common goals and mutual interests,
do not convey a large amount of new info,
do not attempt to bring about a complete change of view or behaviour,
based on agreed processes of adjustment and accommodation.

12. Grice’s Interaction Theory (1975)
Maxims of
Quality
Quantity
Relevance
Manner

13. Other elements of cooperative communicative acts
conversational implicature (implied but unstated meanings)
Questioner: Where is your husband?
Speaker: He is in the living room or in the kitchen.
Implication: The speaker does not know which room he is in.

14. presupposition (what is assumed or taken for granted that is why unstated)
Sam has stopped beating his wife.
Sam hasn’t stopped beating his wife.
Presupposition: Sam was beating his wife.

15. Daily Grill – In Palm Desert at El Paso “I never read The Economist”
Food – 3 miles
Good Food – 30 miles
Daily Grill – In Palm Desert at El Paso
“I never read The Economist”
Management Trainee, Age 42

16. shared assumptions and agreement on how specific encounters are to be regulated in terms of
turn-taking (taking the floor)
exchange
silence

17. Pragmatic differences across cultures
Deborah Tannen
level of indirectness tolerated
paralinguistic signals of different speech acts
different cultural expectations - stereotypes (the pushy New Yorker, the stony American Indian, the inscrutable Chinese)

18. Example 1:
TAKING THE FLOOR
Indian English (by raising volume)
British English (by repeating the introductory phrase)

19. Example 2: ‘Thanksgiving dinner’ situation
A: In fact one of my students told me for the first time, I taught her for over a year, that she was adopted. And then I thought – uh – THAT explains SO many things.
B: What. That she was –
A: Cause she’s so different from her mother
B: smarter than she
should have been? Or stupider
than she should’ve been.
A: It wasn’t smart or stupid,
Actually, it was just she was so different. Just different.
B: [hm]

20. Ethnocentric view of speech acts
Anna Wierzbicka
Ethnocentric view of speech acts
Cross-cultural differences in directness
Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Sit!
Will/Won’t/Would you sit down?
Please, have a little more! You must!
Would you like to have some more? How about a beer?
What’s the time?
You wouldn’t happen to have the correct time, would you?

21. Indirectness and politeness
You are to get off. Not to show oneself to me here!
Why don’t you bloody get off? Get off, will you.
Underlying beliefs
individualism
collectivism
„compromise”

22. Michael Clyne
Should you not make your utterance more informative than required? (How are you?)
Should you always be truthful? (I’m fine thanks)
Should you always be relevant and straightforward? (Arab business, collectivism)

23. Goals of a pragmatic theory produce a classification of speech acts,
analyse and define speech acts,
specify the various uses of expressions,
relate literary and direct language use to
linguistic structure,
the structure of the communicative situation,
the social institutions,
speaker-meaning,
implication, presupposition and understanding.

24. Communicative competence
„An aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meaning interpersonally within specific contexts” (Dell Hymes , 1967)
CALP and BICS

25. Canale & Swain (1980) Grammatical competence Discourse competence
Sociolinguistic competence
Strategic competence

26. Bachman, 1990 Language competence Organisational Pragmatic
Grammatical Textual llocutionary Sociolinguistic
Vocab - Cohesion - Ideational - Dialect
Morphology - Rhetoric - Manipulative - Register
Syntax - Heuristic - Naturalness
Phonology - Imaginative - Cultural
/Graphology references & figures of speech

27. Communicative language ability (Bachman, 1990)
Knowledge structures Language competence
Strategic competence
Psychophysiological
mechanisms
Context of situation