Pragmatics

09级7班李梦琦2009237

Pragmatics

Pragmatics written by Y an Huang is published in 2007 by Oxford University, and it brings us a panorama of pragmatic researches. It is authoritative, up to date, and comprehensive, which covers the latest research developments. It relates work in linguistics and philosophy of language, as well as examples from English and a wide range of languages.

Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter. The remainder of the book is then divided into two parts. Part Ⅰcovers those topics that are usually included in a pragmatic textbook. Chapter 2 is concerned with classical and neo-Gricean pragmatic theories of implicature. The author points out that the conversational implicature has defeasibility/cancellability, non-detachability, calculability, non-conventionality, reinforceability and universality. The focus of Chapter 3 is on presupposition. There are mainly three categories of researches concerning presupposition. They are filtering-satisfaction analysis raised by Karttunen and Stalnaker, cancellation analysis raised by Gazdar and accommodation analysis raised by Heim. Chapter 4 is devoted to speech act theory, concentrating on the classic work by Austin and Searle. Austin divides sentences into performatives and constatives, and divides performatives further into explicit performatives and implicit performatives. Searle raises felicity conditions, i.e. propositional content condition, preparatory condition, sincerity condition and essential condition. Speech acts are divided into 5 parts, i.e. representatives/assertives, directives, commissives, expressive and

declarations/declaratives. Searle proposes indirect speech act theory, and the author introduces inferential model and idiom model. About politeness, there are four major theoretical models, i.e. social norm, conversational maxim, face-saving and conversational contract. Chapter 5 provides an in-depth descriptive analysis of various types of deixis. Deixis are generally divided into personal deixis, time deixis, space deixis, social deixis and discourse deixis.

PartⅡ deals with topics which represent new ground in pragmatics, but which are under-represented in any of the existing pragmatics textbooks. In particular, it focuses on various interfaces between pragmatics and other core areas of inquiry. Chapter 6 discusses the pragmatics-cognition interface, concentrating on relevance theory. The interface between pragmatics and semantics is the topic of Chapter 7. There are two major views about their relationship. One is reductionism and another is complementarism. Finally, Chapter 8 examines the interaction and the division of labor between pragmatics and syntax, focusing on anaphora and binding.

After reading this book, I have also found some points which I am quite interested in. First is the study of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. There has been a long controversy over the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, but there is a shift of focus in study from this concern to the semantics-pragmatics interface in post-Gricean pragmatics. The semantic minimalism claims that a sentence expresses a proposition independent of context, and meanwhile maintains that there are context-sensitive elements in language, while contextualism holds that the utterance meaning of a sentence, including explicit and implicit

meaning claimed as implicature, must be determined through pragmatic processes in context. The rising of semantics-pragmatics interface study provides us with a new perspective from which linguistic meaning and language use can be explained in relation to human cognition.

Secondly, so far as speech act theory is concerned, its application in education arouses my interest. We all know teachers’ roles in education are decisive, what they say can even decide the future development of students. Their utterances will have strong effect on students. Therefore it is important to pay much attention to remarks and grasp the skills of being eloquent. In our life, Speech Act Theory can be and should be app lied greatly and it can be useful if we use it probably and carefully. The purpose of learning any kind of theory is to use it in daily life and relate the theory with the practices. That is to say, there are many applications of this theory in life, and we need to think as many applications as we could, so as to use this theory as freely as possible, such as to teach the stuff of the company the skills of being eloquent in dealing with different clients, to treat the patients with deadly disease skillfully and so on. In a word, we need to give enough attention to this issue, it has many good results if we attach enough importance to it, such as that it can enhance our personal relationship with others in work and in life, it can build up a good environment in education and so on and so forth.

Thirdly, it is deixis. As a pragmatic phenomenon, it is traditionally studied within the pragmatic framework with respect to their functions and other parameters. In this way, some problems arise, some of which are regarded as linguistic

phenomena and are not given satisfactory explanations. Cognitive approach can solve some of these problems if there is a cognitive structure for deixis, I believe.

Fourthly, it is anaphora. Anaphora has been one of the hot topics in linguistic studies for its special linguistic features. Given the standard formulation of Chomsky’s binding conditions A and B, it is predicted that anaphors and pronominals should be in strict complementary distribution. That is, anaphors can occur only where pronominals cannot, and vice versa. This is because the two binding conditions are precise mirror-images of each other. However, from the author’s derivation, we could conclude that the strict distributional complementarity between anaphors and pronominals dictated by Chomsky’s binding conditions A and B cannot be maintained. The author presents a revised neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora. The central idea underlying is that the interpretation of certain patterns of anaphora can be made utilizing pragmatic inference, dependent on the language user’s knowledge of the range of opinions available in the grammar, and of the systematic use or avoidance of particular anaphoric expressions or structures on particular occasions. Anaphoricity is a property not of specific lexical items, but of the systematic use or avoidance of lexical items.

Pragmatics written by Y an Huang is based on a rich collection of cross-linguistic data. It is authoritative and provides us with a brand new perspective of meditating over the theories or language phenomena that we have met before. I have been inspired a lot from it.