Friday, August 23, 2013
Introduction to Pragmatics
At is most fundamental level, Pragmatics is the study of utterances. Where Semantics is the study of sentences (special kinds of utterances) that are ordered by truth relationships, Pragmatics studies communication - those utterances that do things, are context based, and discourse dependent.
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There are lots of sentences that aren't utterances, but their truth cannot be assessed. For example, I went to buy a cup of coffee yesterday. I know the barista (B), so we chatted for a minute. Here's the reconstructed transcript:
ReplyDeleteB: (1)Hi, Wanda!
W: (2)Hi, Betty!
B: (3)How are you?
W: (4)Good - just working on my qualifying paper.
B: (5)Oh, hows it going?
W: (6)Meh - I'm having some data collection problems... Anyhow...
In this while dialogue, only sentences (4) and (6) have any kind of truth-valuable sentence, the rest are just utterances. If truth means "we know what the world would have to look like for it to be true", then "Hi, Wanda" means nothing - it tells us nothing about the world. But, this is still a valid part of linguistics that needs to be analyzed, and that is what Pragmatics can do - analyze sentences like this. "How are you?" is still serving some kind of pragmatic function - a theory we will have to develop.