ENG508 — Final Term Summary (Lectures 23–43)

📘 Lecture 23 — Implicature – I

📖 Overview: This lecture introduces the concept of implicature, a foundational idea in pragmatics developed by Paul Grice. It explains how speakers can convey meanings beyond their literal words, and why understanding implicature is essential for analyzing real-world communication. The lecture distinguishes between different types of conversational implicature, including generalized, scalar, and particularized forms.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers the definition of implicature as meaning conveyed indirectly or through hints, the distinction between what is said and what is implied. It then explains conversational implicature, focusing on how context shapes implied meaning. The topics of generalized conversational implicature (which requires no special context), scalar implicature (based on informational scales like “some” implying “not all”), and particularized conversational implicature (which relies heavily on specific context) are each defined and illustrated with examples.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 114 What Is Implicature?

The term implicature accounts for what a speaker can imply, suggest, or mean, as distinct from what the speaker literally says (Grice, 1975). Implicature is “any meaning conveyed indirectly or through hints, and understood implicitly without ever being explicitly stated” (Grundy, 2000). It covers verbs such as imply, suggest, mean, which refer to the meaning of an utterance as understood in a given context.

Implicature is a neology by Paul Grice (1913–1988), a British language philosopher who made remarkable contributions to pragmatics. His most influential work relates to his analysis of speaker meaning and his account of conversational implicature. The fact that “what we literally say and what we clearly mean often differ is intuitively obvious but difficult to describe or explain systematically” was the driving force behind Grice’s work. He was interested in developing a systematic explanation of how and why literal and intended meaning differ. Implicatures are context-dependent.

🔑 Definition — Implicature: “any meaning conveyed indirectly or through hints, and understood implicitly without ever being explicitly stated” (Grundy, 2000). 📌 Example: The difference between literal saying and implied meaning is the core focus of the concept.

Topic – 115 Conversational Implicature

Conversational Implicature is implied by the speaker in making an utterance; it is part of the content of the utterance; it does not contribute to direct (or explicit) utterance content, and it is not encoded by the linguistic meaning of what has been uttered. For example, Sara: Will you eat some of this chocolate cake? Amna: I’m on a diet. Here, Amna asserts that she is on a diet, and implicates that she will not eat the cake. Conversational Implicature is a subset of the implications of an utterance: namely those that are part of utterance content.

🔑 Definition — Conversational Implicature: Implied by the speaker in making an utterance; part of utterance content; not direct or explicit; not encoded by linguistic meaning alone. 📌 Example: Sara: “Will you eat some of this chocolate cake?” Amna: “I’m on a diet.” → Amna’s utterance implies she will not eat cake, even though she did not say that explicitly.

Topic – 116 Generalized Conversational Implicature

In Generalized Conversational Implicature, “no special background knowledge of the context of utterance is required in order to make the necessary inferences” (Yule, 1996). It is a conversational implicature that is inferable without reference to a special context. One common example in English involves expressions with the form an X, usually implying that X is not closely related to the speaker or subject, as in the following expression: John walked into a house yesterday and saw a tortoise. This expression implies that the house is not John’s house.

🔑 Definition — Generalized Conversational Implicature: A conversational implicature that is inferable without reference to a special context, requiring no special background knowledge. 📌 Example: “John walked into a house yesterday and saw a tortoise.” → Implies that the house is not John’s house, without needing additional context.

Topic – 117 Scalar Implicature

A Scalar Implicature is a quantity implicature based on the use of an informationally weak term in an implicational scale. Scalar implicatures arise in examples e.g., Some professors are famous where the speaker’s use of some typically indicates that s/he had reasons not to use a more informative term, e.g., all. Some professors are famous gives rise to the implicature that not all professors are famous. Similarly, in the utterance Some of the boys went to the party, the word some implicates “not all of the boys went to the party.”

Classic examples of scales include numerals (< ... three, two, one>), modals (<necessarily, possibly>, <must, should, may>), connectives (<and, or>), adverbs (<always, often, sometimes>), degree adjectives (<hot, warm>) and verbs of ranking (<know, believe>, <love, like>) or completion (<start, finish>).

🔑 Definition — Scalar Implicature: A quantity implicature based on the use of an informationally weak term in an implicational scale; the weaker term implies the stronger term does not apply. 📐 Formula: Weak term (e.g., some) → Implicature: not the strong term (e.g., not all). 📌 Example: “Some of the boys went to the party” → implicates that not all of the boys went to the party.

💡 Why this matters: Scalar implicature explains how we interpret vague quantifiers and gradable terms in everyday speech, ensuring we understand the speaker’s intended limit.

Topic – 118 Particularized Conversational Implicature

Particularized Conversational Implicatures (PCIs) are the inferences which are worked out while drawing totally on the specific context of the utterance. Most of the time, our conversations take place in a very specific context in which locally recognized inferences are assumed (Yule, 2002). Consider an example:

• A: “I’m going to the prison tomorrow.”
• B: “Will 200 Dollars do?”
• [context: A is visiting a prison and proposing to B to help in funding the shopping for that prison].

🔑 Definition — Particularized Conversational Implicature (PCI): Inferences which are worked out while drawing totally on the specific context of the utterance; they require locally recognized assumptions. 📌 Example: A: “I’m going to the prison tomorrow.” B: “Will 200 Dollars do?” → In the specific context (A is visiting a prison and proposes funding), B’s utterance implies B understands A’s request for funding and offers 200 dollars.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Implicature is a critical concept in pragmatics that explains how speakers communicate meanings beyond their literal words. Conversational implicature is implied by the speaker and does not rely on the literal linguistic meaning alone. Generalized conversational implicature requires no special background context for its inference, while scalar implicature uses informational scales (e.g., “some” implying “not all”) to convey meaning. Particularized conversational implicature, in contrast, depends entirely on the specific context of the utterance for correct interpretation. Understanding these distinctions is essential for analyzing real-world communication, where intended meaning often differs from literal content.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the core difference between what is “said” and what is “implicated”?
2. In the example “Sara: Will you eat some of this chocolate cake? Amna: I’m on a diet,” what is Amna’s conversational implicature?
3. How does a generalized conversational implicature differ from a particularized conversational implicature?
4. Why does the utterance “Some professors are famous” give rise to a scalar implicature? What is that implicature?
5. Identify the specific contextual assumption required to understand B’s reply in the prison funding example.

📘 Lecture 24 — Implicature – II

📖 Overview: This lecture continues the discussion of implicature by exploring its key properties, including cancellability, non-detachability, reinforceability, non-conventionality, and calculability. It then introduces conventional implicature, which differs from conversational implicature in its reliance on specific words rather than the Cooperative Principle. Finally, the lecture distinguishes between strong and weak implicature based on their communicative centrality.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers the five properties of conversational implicature (cancellability, non-detachability, reinforceability, non-conventionality, calculability), followed by a detailed examination of conventional implicature and its properties (non-truth-conditionality, detachability, non-cancellability). The lecture concludes by explaining the distinction between strong implicature, which carries the main communicative point, and weak implicature, where multiple possible interpretations exist.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 119 Properties of Conversational Implicature

Cancellability, also known as defeasibility, is a key property. The presence of a conversational implicature relies on factors such as the conventional meaning of words used, the linguistic context, and the situational context. If any of these factors changes, the implicature will also change or disappear.

Non-detachability means a conversational implicature is attached to the semantic content of what is said, not to the linguistic form. It is possible to use a synonym and keep the implicature intact. The implicature will not be detached from the utterance as a whole, even though the specific words may be changed.

Reinforceability means implicatures can be reinforced without redundancy. For example: John answered most of the questions. But he wasn't able to answer the last question. (this is not redundant).

Non-conventionality means implicature is not carried by what is said, but only by the saying of what is said, or by "putting it that way."

Calculability — the fact that speakers try to convey conversational implicatures and hearers are able to understand them suggests that implicatures are calculable.

🔑 Definition — Cancellability (Defeasibility): A property of conversational implicature where the implicature can be removed if any of the factors it depends on (conventional meaning, linguistic or situational context) changes.

🔑 Definition — Non-detachability: A property of conversational implicature where the implicature remains attached to the semantic content even when synonyms replace the original words.

🔑 Definition — Reinforceability: A property of conversational implicature where the implicature can be explicitly stated alongside the utterance without being redundant.

🔑 Definition — Non-conventionality: A property of conversational implicature where the implicature comes from the act of saying something in a particular way, not from the conventional meaning of the words.

🔑 Definition — Calculability: A property of conversational implicature where the implicature can be logically worked out by the hearer based on what was said and the cooperative principle.

Topic – 120 Conventional Implicature

Conventional implicature is not based on the Cooperative Principle or the maxims. Conventional implicatures do not have to occur in a conversation and do not depend on special contexts for their interpretation. However, they are associated with specific words that result in additional conveyed meanings when used.

The English conjunction 'but' is one of these words. The interpretation of any utterance of the type 'p but q' will be based on the conjunction 'p & q' plus an implicature of 'contrast' between the information in 'p' and the information in 'q'. Other English words such as 'even' and 'yet' also have conventional implicatures.

🔑 Definition — Conventional Implicature: An implicature that is not based on the Cooperative Principle or maxims, but is associated with specific words (e.g., but, even, yet) that conventionally trigger additional meanings.

💡 Why this matters: Unlike conversational implicature, which depends on context and can be calculated, conventional implicature is fixed by the words themselves—learn it as a vocabulary item.

Topic – 121 Properties of Conventional Implicature

Non-truth-conditionality — conventional implicatures do not make any contribution to truth conditions. For example: a) We want peace and they want war. b) We want peace but they want war. Both 'a' and 'b' share the same truth conditions.

Conventional implicature is associated with speaker or utterance rather than a sentence. Conventional implicatures are not derived from Grice's Cooperative Principle and its component maxims but are attached by convention to a particular lexical item or linguistic construction. They are, therefore, an arbitrary part of the meaning, and must be learned 'ad hoc'.

Conventional implicatures are not calculable via any natural procedure but are rather given by convention—thus they must be stipulated. They are not cancelable (i.e., they cannot be defeated). They are (arguably) detachable because they depend on the particular linguistic items used.

🔑 Definition — Non-truth-conditionality: A property of conventional implicature where the implicature does not affect the truth or falsity of the proposition expressed.

🔑 Definition — Detachability: A property of conventional implicature where changing the specific words used can remove the implicature (unlike conversational implicature).

📌 Example:

• We want peace and they want war. (Truth condition: both statements are true)
• We want peace but they want war. (Truth condition: same—both true, but but adds a contrast implicature) This shows the contrast implicature of but does not change truth conditions.

Topic – 122 Strong Implicature

Strong implicature is a communicated implication of an utterance which is the main communicative point of the utterance. The idea is that sometimes a speaker intends that her hearer grasp a particular implication without which the utterance would not be relevant.

Bill's utterance has a strong implicature:

• Albert: Can you give me a hand with this work?
• Bill: I've a huge amount of my own work to do, and I promised the boss I'd give it priority.

If Albert does not understand that Bill is implicating that he can't help him, then he has missed the main point of Bill's utterance. Strong implicature is implicature that is related directly by the spoken utterances or is that premises and conclusions which the hearer is strongly encouraged but not actually forced to supply.

🔑 Definition — Strong Implicature: A communicated implication that carries the main communicative point of the utterance; without understanding it, the hearer misses the speaker's primary message.

Topic – 123 Weak Implicature

Weak implicature is a communicated implication of an utterance which is not by itself the main communicative point of the utterance. The idea is that for some utterances, a hearer can understand what a speaker is trying to communicate even if he fails to get one or more implicatures.

Weak implicature involves weaker encouragement and a wider range of possibilities among which the hearer can choose. For example:

• John: What are you planning to do today?
• Mary: I'm tired.

There is no single implicature which the hearer must take Mary to be communicating in order to understand her utterance. Instead, there are several assumptions that he might supply as an implicated premise, each of which would lead to a different implicature—e.g., If Mary is tired, she doesn't want to go out.

The weaker the implicature, the less responsibility the speaker takes for its truth—the more it becomes the responsibility of the hearer.

🔑 Definition — Weak Implicature: A communicated implication that is not the main communicative point; multiple possible interpretations exist, and the speaker takes less responsibility for their truth.

📌 Example: Mary: I'm tired (said in response to "What are you planning to do today?") Possible weak implicatures include: Mary doesn't want to go out; Mary wants to rest; Mary doesn't want to do any work. No single one is essential to understanding her utterance.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Conversational implicature has five key properties: cancellability (can be defeated if context changes), non-detachability (attached to semantic content, not specific words), reinforceability (can be explicitly added without redundancy), non-conventionality (from how something is said, not word meanings), and calculability (can be worked out logically). In contrast, conventional implicature is triggered by specific words like but, even, and yet, is non-truth-conditional, non-calculable, non-cancelable, and detachable—making it an arbitrary, learnable aspect of meaning. Strong implicature carries the main communicative point of an utterance (e.g., Bill's refusal to help Albert), while weak implicature offers multiple possible interpretations where the speaker takes less responsibility (e.g., Mary's tiredness). Students must remember that conventional and conversational implicature differ fundamentally in their dependence on context, the Cooperative Principle, and cancelability.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between cancellability and non-detachability as properties of conversational implicature?

2. Why is the English word but considered to carry a conventional implicature rather than a conversational one?

3. How does a strong implicature differ from a weak implicature in terms of the hearer's understanding?

4. What does non-truth-conditionality mean for conventional implicature, and how does the and/but example illustrate this?

5. Why are conventional implicatures described as "not calculable" and "detachable," while conversational implicatures are "calculable" and "non-detachable"?

📘 Lecture 25 — Deixis- I

📖 Overview: This lecture introduces the concept of deixis, or "pointing out" in language, and explains how certain linguistic forms depend entirely on context for their interpretation. It covers the major types of deixis—spatial, person, social, and temporal—showing how these indexical expressions anchor language to specific speakers, places, times, and social relationships.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers five main topics: the definition and function of deixis (indexical expressions that point to person, place, or time), spatial deixis (location markers like here/there and this/that), person deixis (pronouns for speaker, addressee, and others), social deixis (expressions encoding social status and relationships), and temporal deixis (time markers like now/then and yesterday/tomorrow).

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 124 What Is Deixis?

Any linguistic form used to accomplish the task of 'pointing out' is called a deixis expression. When you notice a strange object and ask, "What is that?", you are using a deictic expression (that) to indicate something in the immediate context. Deixis is also called indexical expressions. The function of indexical expressions is to tell us where to look for a reference. This reference is mostly related to a particular person, place, or time.

Deixis is also known as the 'Indexicality of language' as it operates as indexes of specific meaning in a context. These are common words in our language that cannot be interpreted at all if we don't know the context, especially the physical context. Examples include spatial deixis (here, there, this, that), temporal deixis (now, then), and person deixis (you, me, she, him).

Some modifiers with deictic reference are used alongside referring expressions such as demonstrative pronouns, as in 'this dog', 'that woman', 'these tables', 'those helicopters', in order to help interlocutors identify the particular referents of referring expressions.

🔑 Definition — Deixis: The function of linguistic forms that "point to" persons, places, times, or other elements in the immediate context, making interpretation dependent on knowing that context.

Topic – 125 Spatial Deixis

Spatial deixis (also known as 'place deixis') are used to indicate the relative location of people and things. Some pure place deictic words are: here and there (adverbs); this and that (demonstrative pronouns).

A deictic projection is accomplished via dramatic performance when we use direct speech to represent the person, location, and feelings of someone or something else. For example, while visiting a pet store, someone says: "I was looking at this little puppy in a cage with such a sad look on its face. It was like, 'oh, I am so unhappy here, will you set me free?'" The 'here' of the cage is not the actual physical location of the person uttering the words, but the location of that person performing in the role of the puppy.

The pragmatic basis of spatial deixis is actually psychological distance. Physically close objects will tend to be treated by the speaker as psychologically close. Sometimes, a speaker marks a physically distant thing as psychologically distant, e.g., "that man over there." However, a speaker may also mark something physically close as psychologically distant, e.g., (a perfume being sniffed by the speaker) "I don't like that."

💡 Why this matters: Spatial deixis reveals that language reflects not just physical reality but also the speaker's psychological orientation toward objects and people.

🔑 Definition — Deictic Projection: The use of deixis from the perspective of someone or something else, not the actual speaker, often accomplished through dramatic performance or direct speech.

Topic – 126 Person Deixis

Person deixis is an expression used to point to a person (me, you, him, them). Person deixis operates on a basic three-part division, exemplified by the pronouns for first person ("I, me, mine"), second person ("you, your, yours"), and third person ("he, she, it"). A speech event includes at least two persons: First person = speaker and Second person = addressee.

Usually, the third person is not grammatically marked because the only two persons of importance are the first person and the second person. It is possible to have deictic pronouns for the third person.

There is, in English, a potential ambiguity in uses of 'we' which allows two different interpretations: an exclusive 'we' (speaker plus other(s), excluding addressee) and an inclusive 'we' (speaker and addressee included). For instance, the inclusive-exclusive distinction may be noted in the difference between saying "Let's go" (to some friends) and "Let us go" (to someone who has captured the speaker and friends). The action of going is inclusive in the first, but exclusive in the second.

📌 Example: "Let's go" (said to friends) uses inclusive 'we' (speaker + addressee included in the action). "Let us go" (said to a captor) uses exclusive 'we' (speaker + others, but excluding the addressee/captor).

Topic – 127 Social Deixis

Social deixis is concerned with the codification of the social status of the speaker, addressee, or a third person or entity referred to, as well as the social relationships holding between them (Levinson 1983; Fillmore 1997; Manning 2001). It may include social class, kin relationship, age, sex, profession, and ethnic group.

"The pronoun systems of some languages also grammaticalize the information about the social identities or relationships of the participants in the conversation," Levinson (1983) calls this phenomenon social deixis. Social deixis refers to expressions which clearly encode social meaning. "Address terms" (i.e., social status is indexicalized through the linguistic terms), for example, 'Madam', 'Sir', 'Professor', 'Doctor'.

Social relations concern the relation between the speaker and the addressee. Social deixis can be accomplished by a wide range of linguistic devices including personal pronouns (marking of respect and marking of kinship relations), forms of address (Ali, Sir, Madam, etc.), affixes, clitics and particles (verb forms attached to intimacy, formality, etc.), and the choice of vocabulary.

🔑 Definition — Social Deixis: Expressions that encode social meaning about the status, relationships, or identities of participants in a conversation, such as address terms (Sir, Madam, Doctor) and pronoun choices.

Topic – 128 Temporal Deixis

Temporal deixis (also known as 'time deixis') is concerned with the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at which an utterance is produced in a speech act (Huang, 2014). It includes time adverbs such as now, then, soon, last week, today, tonight, yesterday, tomorrow, etc. 'Now' indicates both the time coinciding with the speaker's utterance and the time of the speaker's voice being heard.

However, 'then' applies to both past and future time relative to the speaker's present time. For example: (a) "November 22nd, 1963? I was in Scotland then." (b) "Dinner at 8:30 on Saturday? Ok, I'll see you then." Temporal deictic expressions such as yesterday, next week, last week, etc., depend for their interpretation on knowing the relevant utterance time.

📌 Example: "November 22nd, 1963? I was in Scotland then" — 'then' refers to a past time relative to the speaker's present. "Dinner at 8:30 on Saturday? Ok, I'll see you then" — 'then' refers to a future time relative to the speaker's present.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Deixis is the "pointing out" function of language, where words like here, there, now, then, I, you, this, and that depend entirely on context for their meaning. There are four main types: spatial deixis (location, using psychological as well as physical distance), person deixis (first, second, and third person, including the inclusive vs. exclusive 'we' distinction), social deixis (encoding social status through address terms and pronouns), and temporal deixis (time relative to utterance moment, using words like now, then, yesterday, tomorrow). Deictic projection allows speakers to adopt another's perspective through direct speech. All deictic expressions are indexical—they require knowledge of the physical, social, or temporal context of the utterance to be interpreted.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between inclusive 'we' and exclusive 'we', and what example illustrates this distinction?
2. How does psychological distance affect the use of spatial deixis, even when objects are physically close?
3. What is deictic projection, and how does it operate in dramatic performance or direct speech?
4. What linguistic devices can be used to encode social deixis, and what social information do they convey?
5. Why does the interpretation of temporal deictic expressions like 'yesterday' and 'next week' depend on knowing the utterance time?

📘 Lecture 26 — Deixis- II

📖 Overview: This lecture continues the exploration of deixis by examining discourse deixis, deictic reference, the deictic center, and the limits of indexicality. It also provides practical activities for raising pragmatic awareness about deictic phenomena in language use, helping students understand how context shapes meaning in communication.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers discourse deixis (also called text deixis) and how words reference portions of discourse, deictic reference and the role of gestures in specifying ambiguous utterances, the concept of deictic center and assumptions about speaker/hearer location, the limits of indexicality including problems with fixed deictic centers in reported speech, and practical activities for raising pragmatic awareness about deixis across languages and contexts.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 129 Discourse Deixis

Discourse deixis, also called text deixis, involves words that make reference to some statement or utterance to point to the current, preceding or following utterances in the same spoken or written discourse. Examples include phrases like 'the next chapter' and 'in the last paragraph' (Haung, 2014). Many English words and phrases indicate the relationship between an utterance and prior discourse, such as but, therefore, in conclusion, to the contrary, still, however, anyway, well, besides, actually, all in all, so, after all, etc.

Some languages have morphemes that mark such discourse notions. According to Levinson (1983), a major function of utterance-initial usage of these words is to indicate a relation between the utterance containing them and some portion of the prior discourse. According to Lyons (1977), Fillmore (1997), and Diessel (1999), discourse deixis can be said to refer to propositions. The use of discourse deictics can be found in most, if not all, languages in the world.

🔑 Definition — Discourse Deixis: Words that make reference to some statement or utterance to point to the current, preceding or following utterances in the same spoken or written discourse. 📌 Example: Using "in the last paragraph" or "but" to link an utterance to prior discourse.

Topic – 130 Deictic Reference

Deictic Reference is the use of gestures or other means of pointing to specify an ambiguous utterance, for instance, pointing at a place in a map and saying "here." This property of language is called indexicality, and the lexical items that encode context in this way are called deictics. Indexical refers to the role of context in helping to determine reference.

For instance, if in a lecture someone delivers (2) "Why don't you want to come to the park with me?" the three stressed 'yous' in the second part would be accompanied by gestures and/or eye contact. Each would pick out a different referent whose identity would be known only by those present at the time of utterance. But in (3) "'You' are not allowed to smoke here," 'you' has a much more general reference. Being present when the sentence was uttered would not help to identify a referent. Thus, this generalized use of 'you' is sometimes said to be non-deictic.

🔑 Definition — Deictic Reference: The use of gestures or other means of pointing to specify an ambiguous utterance. 🔑 Definition — Indexicality: The property of language where context helps determine reference. 🔑 Definition — Non-deictic: A generalized use of a word (like 'you') that does not depend on context for identifying a specific referent.

Topic – 131 Deictic Center

Deictic Center refers to the assumptions we make about context when hearing a deictic. For instance, when hearing "The postbox is on the left," we must decide whether the postbox is on the left in relation to the speaker or the hearer. The default deictic center is the speaker's location at the time of utterance.

Sometimes, the context itself is sufficient to prompt the addressee to draw the inference that 'their location' rather than 'the speaker's location' is the deictic center. For example, if Ali is the hider in a game of hide-and-seek and gives a clue to the seeker by calling out "behind the tree," it is hoped that an inference will be made that the deictic center is the hearer's location. It is very common for the speaker to update the deictic center in more extended discourse.

🔑 Definition — Deictic Center: The default perspective (usually the speaker's location at the time of utterance) from which deictic references are interpreted. 🔑 Definition — Default Deictic Center: The speaker's location at the time of utterance.

Topic – 132 The Limits of Indexicality

The fixedness of deictic center poses a particular problem when quoting what others have said. Imagine a son says to a daughter: (1) "Why don't you want to come to the park with me?" When she reports his utterance to me, she has choices to represent this deictic property as: (2) Eddie said, "why don't you want to come to the park with me?"
(3) Eddie asked why I didn't want to come to the park with him.
(4) Eddie complained that I didn't want to go to the park with him.

In (3), the deictic center is partly projected from Eddie's original perspective – she encodes this projection in her use of 'I' and 'him' and 'didn't' while her retention of 'come' is still faithful to the deictic center of Eddie's utterance. Reported speech, like in (4), is important evidence of the existence of an unmarked deictic center, which is that of the speaker's perspective even when the speaker is representing the speech of another person.

The identification of this fixed center reveals an important pragmatic principle: we are able to assume shared knowledge and to foreground what is new in each particular utterance so that what is new appears as a kind of figure in relation to the ground. Because of the role of assumed knowledge in determining reference, deictic referents are typically denotations with limited descriptive power. Thus, the pronouns 'you' and 'me' and 'us' are semantically empty tokens in the sense that they lack descriptive power that the names of the people they refer to have.

💡 Why this matters: Understanding the limits of indexicality explains why we must shift deictic references when reporting speech and reveals how language relies on shared knowledge for interpretation.

🔑 Definition — Fixedness of Deictic Center: The challenge that arises when quoting others because the deictic center is normally the speaker's perspective, but the original utterance had a different speaker. 🔑 Definition — Unmarked Deictic Center: The speaker's perspective, which remains the default even when representing another person's speech. 🔑 Definition — Semantically Empty Tokens: Pronouns like 'you', 'me', and 'us' that lack descriptive power compared to names.

Topic – 133 Raising Pragmatic Awareness

To understand the relation of language to its point of origin, several practical activities are suggested:

1. Form a small group including at least one person with good knowledge of a language other than English. Ask this person to translate utterances containing a range of deictic phenomena into their other language and explain any problems or differences.

2. Ask each member of the group to bring two consecutive sentences from any book whose 'indexical properties' may be discussed.

3. If traveling, watch out for uses of deictics that surprise you. If unable to travel, try to mix with unfamiliar groups and see how they use 'we' to show membership, or listen for uses of 'this' and 'that' to encode psychological distance. Note down exactly what was heard or read and report it to the tutorial group.

4. Identify occasions where you might expect to hear a variety of deictic ways of communicating what appears to be the same message – in Britain, train announcements are interesting as each company, even individual announcers, tries to encode their own notion of the common ground you and they share. Note down what you hear and present an analysis to the tutorial group.

⭐ Key Takeaways

The lecture establishes that discourse deixis involves words that reference portions of discourse, while deictic reference often requires gestures to specify ambiguous utterances. The default deictic center is the speaker's location at the time of utterance, though context can shift this to the hearer's perspective. The limits of indexicality become apparent in reported speech, where the fixed deictic center requires careful adjustment of pronouns and verbs. Students must understand that pronouns like 'you', 'me', and 'us' are semantically empty tokens lacking descriptive power, and that deictic referents rely on assumed shared knowledge. Practical awareness of deixis can be raised through cross-linguistic comparison, observation of natural language use, and analysis of how different speakers encode common ground.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is discourse deixis and what types of words typically function as discourse deictics?
2. How does deictic reference differ from non-deictic reference, using 'you' as an example?
3. What is the default deictic center, and how can context shift it to the hearer's perspective?
4. Why does reported speech pose a problem for the fixedness of the deictic center, and how do speakers resolve it?
5. What does it mean that pronouns like 'you', 'me', and 'us' are semantically empty tokens?

📘 Lecture 27 — Presupposition and Entailment in Pragmatics

📖 Overview: This lecture explores two key logical-pragmatic concepts: presupposition (what speakers assume before an utterance) and entailment (what logically follows from an utterance's asserted content). Understanding these distinctions is crucial for analyzing how meaning is constructed beyond literal sentence semantics, especially in real-world communication and language acquisition.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture begins with an introduction differentiating presupposition (speaker-based assumptions) and entailment (sentence-based logical consequences). It then covers types of presupposition, including existential, factive, non-factive, lexical, structural, and counterfactual. The projection problem examines why presuppositions sometimes fail in complex sentences. Ordered entailments are introduced as a logical relationship where speakers prioritize certain entailments. Finally, real-world applications show how presupposition is used in hospitality and negative polarity items.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 134 Introduction

A presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. Crucially, speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions. An entailment is something that logically follows from what is asserted in the utterance. Sentences, not speakers, have entailments.

For example, in "Mary’s brother bought three horses," the speaker presupposes that Mary exists, she has a brother, that brother has money, etc. These presuppositions are speaker-based and can be wrong. In contrast, the sentence entails that Mary’s brother bought something, bought three animals, bought three horses, etc. These follow logically regardless of the speaker's beliefs.

Topic – 135 Types of Presupposition

Existential Presupposition is the assumption of the existence of the entities named by the speaker. It can be found in two constructions:

• (i) Noun phrase: "The car was broken" presupposes the existence of a specific car.
• (ii) Possessive constructions: "Tom's car is new" presupposes Tom exists and has a car.

Factive Presupposition is the assumption that something is true due to the presence of verbs like "know," "realize," and "glad."

Non-Factive Presupposition refers to something that is not true.

Lexical Presupposition is an assumption that, in using one word, the speaker can act as another meaning (word).

Structural Presupposition is associated with the use of certain structures, e.g., Wh-question constructions. The listener perceives that the presented information is necessarily true, or intended to be true by the speaker.

Counterfactual Presupposition is an assumption that what is presupposed is not only untrue but is the opposite of what is true, or contrary to facts.

Topic – 136 The Projection Problem

There is a basic expectation that the presupposition of a simple sentence will continue to be true when that simple sentence becomes part of a more complex sentence. However, when the meaning of some presuppositions (as parts) doesn't survive to become the meaning of complex sentences (as wholes), this is known as the projection problem.

Consider: "I imagined that Kelly was ill and nobody realized that she was ill." Represented as r & p >> Not q, after combining r & p, the presupposition q can no longer be assumed true. This demonstrates the projection problem.

💡 Why this matters: The projection problem shows that presuppositions are not simply additive; they can be "canceled" or "blocked" by certain linguistic contexts, which is essential for understanding meaning in complex discourse.

Topic – 137 Ordered Entailments

Crystal (1998: 136) defines entailment as "a term refers to a relation between a pair of sentences such that the truth of the second sentence necessarily follows from the truth of the first." For example: "I can see a dog" entails "I can see an animal." Entailment is not a pragmatic concept because it has nothing to do with the speaker's intended meaning; it is a purely logical concept, symbolized by II-.

Examples of entailment for "Rover chased three squirrels" (=p) include:

• a. Something chased three squirrels. (= q)
• b. Rover did something to three squirrels. (= r)
• c. Rover chased three of something. (= s)
• d. Something happened. (= t)

The relationship is represented as p II- q, symbolizing a logical sequence. In uttering sentence [1], the speaker is necessarily committed to many background entailments. On any occasion of utterance, however, the speaker communicates, typically by stress, which entailment is assumed to be in the foreground, or more important for interpreting intended meaning.

Topic – 138 Presupposition in the Real World

Small children and L2 learners often produce utterances like "I have locked the door so someone does not get in" instead of "so no one gets in." In restaurants, waiters ask "Would you like something to drink?" rather than "anything to drink."

The use of "someone" and "something" triggers an existential presupposition in a way that "anything" doesn't. "Something" is more inviting. Therefore, hosts ask guests if they would like "some more x" rather than "any more x."

"Anything" is less inviting because it is a negative polarity item that can only occur in negative or hypothetical constructions (conditionals, interrogatives, etc.). Because of this hypothetical context, we expect road signs reading "Sorry for any delay" rather than the anomalous "sorry for some delay."

💡 Why this matters: This illustrates how presupposition operates in everyday language use, influencing politeness, invitation, and even road signage. Choosing between "some" and "any" is not just grammatical but also pragmatic.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Presupposition is speaker-based and concerns assumptions made before an utterance, while entailment is sentence-based and involves logical consequences that follow from asserted content. The six types of presupposition are existential, factive, non-factive, lexical, structural, and counterfactual. The projection problem explains why presuppositions can fail in complex sentences, such as when a verb like "imagined" blocks a presupposition. Ordered entailments show that speakers prioritize certain logical consequences through stress, even though entailments themselves are purely logical. Real-world examples demonstrate that word choice (e.g., "some" vs. "any") carries existential presuppositions and affects politeness, hospitality, and even the grammaticality of negative polarity items.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the fundamental difference between a presupposition and an entailment in terms of who or what "holds" them?
2. List and briefly define the six types of presupposition discussed in the lecture.
3. Explain the "projection problem" using the example sentence "I imagined that Kelly was ill and nobody realized that she was ill."
4. Using the sentence "Rover chased three squirrels," identify at least three ordered entailments and explain how a speaker might use stress to foreground one.
5. Why is "Would you like some coffee?" more pragmatically inviting than "Would you like any coffee?" Support your answer with reference to existential presupposition and negative polarity items.

📘 Lecture 28 — Speech Acts Theory

📖 Overview: This lecture introduces Speech Act Theory, which examines how people perform actions through language—such as making requests, promises, or apologies—rather than simply describing states of affairs. It explores the foundational contributions of Austin and Searle, the conditions required for speech acts to be successful, and the distinction between direct and indirect speech acts, which is crucial for understanding everyday communication and politeness strategies.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers an introduction to speech acts, including explicit and implicit performatives and constatives; Austin's Speech Act Theory with its three facets of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts; Searle's five-part classification of speech acts (representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations); felicity conditions that govern the success of speech acts like promises and warnings; and finally, direct versus indirect speech acts based on the relationship between sentence structure and communicative function.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 139 Introduction to Speech Acts

Speech act theory treats utterances as actions similar to physical acts. People perform acts using language—to give orders, make requests, give warnings, or give advice. The theory answers the question: "What do we do when using language?" Speech acts are acts of communication such as an apology, complaint, or compliment. For example, 'It's hot here' may function as a request rather than mere information about weather. Every time a speaker utters a sentence, they attempt to accomplish something with words, intending to have an effect on the listener and wanting the listener to recognize this intention. The context, called speech events, helps determine the interpretation of an utterance as performing a particular speech act.

🔑 Definition — Explicit performatives: performative utterances that contain a performative verb that makes explicit what kind of act is being performed, and they tend to begin with a first person singular 'I' (e.g., "I promise to come").

🔑 Definition — Implicit performatives: performative utterances in which there is no such performative verb (e.g., "I'll be there" as a promise).

🔑 Definition — Constatives: statements that attempt to describe reality and can be judged true or false.

💡 Why this matters: This distinction shows that language does not merely describe the world but can also change it—a key insight in pragmatics.

Topic – 140 Austin's Speech Act Theory

The work of J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words led philosophers to pay more attention to non-declarative uses of language. Austin introduced the notions of "locutionary act", "illocutionary act", and "perlocutionary act", which became central to the study of speech acts. For instance:

• (1) I bet you six pence it will rain tomorrow.
• (2) I apologize.
• (3) I sentence you to ten years of hard labor.
• (4) I give my word.

These sentences are not used to describe states of affairs but to perform actions: to bet, to apologize, to pass sentence, and to promise, respectively. The two key facets of a speech act are Locutionary Act and Perlocutionary Act.

🔑 Definition — Locutionary act: the act of producing a meaningful linguistic expression (the literal meaning of the utterance).

🔑 Definition — Illocutionary act: the intended social action performed by the utterance (e.g., promising, ordering, apologizing).

🔑 Definition — Perlocutionary act: the actual effect the utterance has on the listener (e.g., convincing, frightening, persuading).

📌 Example: Saying "I apologize" — the locutionary act is uttering those words; the illocutionary act is performing an apology; the perlocutionary act is the hearer feeling appeased.

Topic – 141 Searle's Speech Act Theory

Searle (1976) proposed that all speech acts fall into five main types:

1. Representatives: commit the speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition—they state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. Examples: asserting, concluding, statements of fact. E.g., 'The earth is flat' (statement of fact).

2. Directives: attempts by the speaker to get the addressee to do something—they express what the speaker wants. Examples: requesting, questioning.

3. Commissives: commit the speaker to some future course of action—they express what the speaker intends. Examples: promising, threatening, offering, refusing.

4. Expressives: express a psychological state or what a speaker feels. Examples: thanking, apologizing, welcoming, congratulating.

5. Declarations: effect immediate changes in the institutional state of affairs and tend to rely on elaborate extra-linguistic institutions. Examples: marrying, declaring war, firing from employment. These speech acts change the world via their utterance.

💡 Why this matters: Searle's classification helps analyze the different intentions and effects behind utterances, showing that language serves multiple distinct social functions.

Topic – 142 Felicity Conditions

In everyday contexts, there are general conditions on the participants—for example, that they can understand the language being used and are not being nonsensical. Then there are content conditions: for both a promise and a warning, the content of the utterance must be about a future event.

For a promise, the preparatory conditions are:

• First, the event will not happen by itself.
• Second, the event will have a beneficial effect.

For a warning, the preparatory conditions are:

• It is not clear that the hearer knows the event will occur.
• The speaker does think the event will occur.
• The event will not have a beneficial effect.

🔑 Definition — Felicity conditions: the conditions that must be satisfied for a speech act to be performed successfully and appropriately.

💡 Why this matters: These conditions explain why some utterances "work" while others fail—e.g., you cannot successfully promise something that will happen anyway or that is harmful.

Topic – 143 Direct and Indirect Speech Acts

In everyday situations, speakers often do not directly express what they intend but instead formulate utterances in ways that appear more polite to hearers. Utterances can be direct speech acts or indirect speech acts.

Examples:

• Direct: Pass me the salt! (imperative used as a command)
• Indirect: Can you pass me the salt? (interrogative used as a polite request)

The distinction is based on structure vs. function:

• Whenever there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function, we have a direct speech act.
• Whenever there is an indirect relationship between a structure and a function, we have an indirect speech act.

For example:

• A declarative used to make a statement is a direct speech act, but a declarative used to make a request is an indirect speech act.
• One of the most common types of indirect speech acts in English has the form of an interrogative.

📌 Examples of Direct Speech Act (when a specific sentence structure performs its direct function):

• 'Did you eat the pizza?' — Interrogative → Question
• 'Eat the pizza (please)!' — Imperative → Command (Request)
• 'You ate the pizza.' — Declarative → Statement

⭐ Key Takeaways

The most critical points from this lecture are that speech acts turn utterances into actions, with Austin's three-part distinction (locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary) providing the foundational framework. Searle's five categories (representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, declarations) offer a systematic way to classify speech acts based on speaker intention and effect. Felicity conditions—including preparatory conditions—determine whether a speech act is successfully performed; for instance, a promise requires that the event be beneficial and not happen by itself. Direct speech acts have a straightforward match between sentence structure and function, while indirect speech acts (like using a question to make a request) are a common politeness strategy. For exams, students must be able to identify and analyze examples of each type of speech act and explain why certain utterances succeed or fail under felicity conditions.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What are the three facets of a speech act according to Austin, and how does each differ?
2. Name and define the five types of speech acts proposed by Searle, giving one example of each.
3. What are the preparatory conditions for a promise versus a warning, and why do they differ?
4. How does a direct speech act differ from an indirect speech act? Provide an original example of each.
5. What is the difference between an explicit performative and an implicit performative? Give an example of each.

📘 Lecture 29 — Speech Acts and Society

📖 Overview: This lecture explores the social and cultural dimensions of speech acts, examining how indirectness relates to politeness and how speech act realizations vary across cultures. It also discusses the limitations of speech act theory, introduces macro-functions of language (transactional vs. interactional), and provides a practical example of analyzing speech acts in text.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers social dimensions of indirect speech acts and politeness, cultural variations in speech act realizations with cross-cultural examples, limitations of speech act theory including overlap and incomplete utterances, Brown and Yule's transactional and interactional macro-functions of language, and a practical text analysis activity exploring direct/indirect speech acts and illocutionary/perlocutionary acts.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 144 Social Dimensions

Indirect speech acts constitute one of many forms of politeness. Indirectness is so associated with politeness that directives are more often expressed as interrogatives than imperatives, especially with people one is not familiar with. For example, in many British restaurants, book shops, and petrol stations, a sign says "thank you for not smoking" — the expressive thanking speech act is used because it sounds more polite and friendly to strangers than the impersonal directive prohibiting "No smoking."

💡 Why this matters: The choice between direct and indirect speech acts is not arbitrary but reflects social relationships and politeness strategies.

The factors that can make a speaker use indirect directives include lack of familiarity, the reasonableness of the task, the formality of the context, and social distance (difference of status, roles, age, gender, education, class, occupation, and ethnicity). Social distances can give speakers power and authority, and it is generally those of the less dominant role who tend to use indirectness.

Topic – 145 Cultural Dimensions

Speech acts and their linguistic realizations are culturally bound. The ways of expressing speech acts vary from country to country and from culture to culture. In India, for example, the expressive speech act of praising and congratulating a person on their appearance can be realized by the words: "How fat you are!" because weight is an indicator of personality and health in a country where there is malnutrition. In Britain, these words express 'deploring' or 'criticizing', since fashion, diet foods industries, and health education have conditioned many into thinking that "slim is beautiful."

🔑 Definition — Cultural Dimensions of Speech Acts: Speech acts and their linguistic realizations vary across cultures; the same utterance can perform different speech acts in different cultural contexts.

Differences in speech acts can cause difficulties cross-culturally.

Topic – 146 Limitations of Speech Act Theory

When we try to categorize utterances in terms of speech acts, we often find that there is 'overlap' — one utterance can fall into more than one macro-class. Utterances such as 'so there you go' and 'you know' amount to filters that say very little; this lack of semantic content makes it difficult to classify them as either expressive or representative speech acts.

Another similar example is "Backchannel" and "feedback" — responses that show the hearer is listening and encouraging a speaker to continue talking, such as 'was it?' and 'oh really' — these do not fit neatly into the speech act model either.

Similarly, incomplete sentences such as 'But she didn't do the – er – no' do not fit neatly into any category. A lot of what we say in everyday speech is left unfinished either because we have no need to complete the sentence or because we are interrupted.

Topic – 147 Macro-Functions

Brown and Yule (1983) describe the 'transactional' functions and the 'interactional' function of language.

🔑 Definition — Transactional Function: The function which language serves in the expression of content and the transmission of factual information.

🔑 Definition — Interactional Function: The function involved in expressing social relations and personal attitudes, showing solidarity and maintaining social cohesion.

At the extreme end of the interactional is 'phatic communion' — language with no information content used purely to keep channels of communication open.

Brown and Yule pointed out that much of everyday human interaction is characterized by the primarily interpersonal rather than the primarily transactional use of language.

Topic – 148 Exploring Speech Acts

This section presents an activity: analyzing text using concepts of direct and indirect speech acts, and facets/types of speech acts (Austin and Searle). The text is from Fox Hunting Under Cover, an excerpt from a BBC thriller series:

Boss: Under cover? This isn't your private army. Is she OK? Dalziel: She is good (0.5) in fact she spent half her childhood on a horse. Boss: How do you're lying to me, Andy? Dalziel: Look, we've even given her a full story; set up a liaison point. Visitors often go on a ride with another hunt. They come for a few days, stay a local club, borrow a horse. And since hunting is about drinking as it is riding, it shouldn't be long before someone becomes indiscreet. (0.5) Boss: All right. But don't upset the locals.

Picking out examples of illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts, direct and indirect speech acts, declaratives, representatives, etc., and inexplicit or vague language used by the author can help students in the exploration of the text.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Students must remember that indirect speech acts are closely tied to politeness and are influenced by social distance, formality, and power dynamics. Speech acts are culturally bound — the same linguistic expression (e.g., "How fat you are!") can serve completely different speech acts (praising vs. criticizing) across cultures. Speech act theory has limitations: many utterances overlap categories, lack semantic content (filters like "you know"), are backchannel responses, or are incomplete, making classification difficult. Brown and Yule's distinction between transactional (information-focused) and interactional (social relationship-focused) functions is crucial, with phatic communion at the extreme interactional end. Most everyday interaction is primarily interpersonal rather than transactional.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. Why is "thank you for not smoking" considered more polite than "No smoking" in terms of speech act theory?
2. How does the cultural example of praising someone's weight in India versus Britain demonstrate that speech acts are culturally bound?
3. What are the four factors, besides lack of familiarity, that can make a speaker use indirect directives?
4. Why do backchannel responses like "oh really" and incomplete sentences pose a problem for speech act theory?
5. What is the difference between the transactional function and the interactional function of language as described by Brown and Yule?

📘 Lecture 30 — POLITENESS THEORY

📖 Overview: This lecture introduces Politeness Theory in pragmatics, explaining how speakers manage social relationships through language. It covers the foundational concept of 'face', face-threatening and face-saving acts, positive and negative face, and the various politeness strategies speakers use to maintain social harmony. Understanding these concepts is crucial for analyzing real-world interactions and the subtle social meanings encoded in linguistic choices.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture begins by defining politeness theory and the concept of 'face' as public self-image. It then explains face wants, differentiating between face-threatening acts (FTAs) and face-saving acts. Next, it details the two types of face: positive face (desire for approval) and negative face (desire for freedom). The lecture then explores different levels of directness ('off record' vs. 'bald on record') and the corresponding politeness strategies (positive and negative politeness). Finally, it concludes with specific strategies like solidarity, deference, and pre-sequences.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 149 What is Politeness Theory?

Politeness in everyday terms refers to being tactful, modest, and nice. In pragmatics, it is defined as showing awareness and consideration of another person's face. According to Yule (2010), politeness can be seen as a fixed concept like etiquette, but within interaction, it relies on the concept of Face—the public self-image, the emotional and social sense of self that everyone expects others to recognize. For example, saying "I'm sorry to bother you but..." is a polite way to avoid imposition. Politeness is not just about words but also about how they are said.

💡 Why this matters: Politeness theory provides a framework for understanding why we don't always say exactly what we mean. It explains the social function of indirectness and careful phrasing in everyday conversation.

🔑 Definition — Face: The public self-image of a person; the emotional and social sense of self that one expects everyone else to recognize.

Topic – 150 Face Wants

People generally behave in everyday interactions as if their face wants (expectations about their public self-image) will be respected. A Face-threatening Act (FTA) is something said that represents a threat to another person's self-image, e.g., "Give me that paper." A Face-saving Act is an utterance that lessens a possible threat to another's face, e.g., "Could you pass me that paper?" The politeness strategy used when an FTA could arise depends largely on the speaker-listener relationship.

FTAs can be positive or negative and can damage either the speaker or the hearer. Positive face-threatening acts (e.g., threats, insults) directly challenge the listener's self-image by showing indifference to it. Negative face-threatening acts impinge on the listener's negative face by requiring a verbal response or action.

🔑 Definition — Face-threatening Act (FTA): An utterance that represents a threat to another person's self-image.
🔑 Definition — Face-saving Act: An utterance that lessens a possible threat to another person's face.

Topic – 151 Negative and Positive Face

Under politeness theory, there are two types of face. Positive face reflects the desire to have one's self-image approved of by others—the need to be connected, belong, and be a member of the group. Negative face (where 'negative' simply means the opposite of 'positive,' not 'bad') is the need to be independent and free from imposition. Independence refers to a person's right not to be dominated and to act with autonomy (e.g., by giving options). Involvement refers to the need to be involved with others (e.g., by agreeing). Politeness strategies differ depending on whether a speaker is dealing with another's positive or negative face. Face and politeness also vary across cultures.

🔑 Definition — Positive Face: The desire to have one's self-image approved of by others; the need to be connected and belong.
🔑 Definition — Negative Face: The need to be independent and free from imposition.
📌 Example: Independence (negative face) is shown by saying "You don't have to come if you're busy." Involvement (positive face) is shown by saying "We'd love to have you join us."

Topic – 152 Say Something: Off and On Record

When deciding to say something, a speaker can choose between two levels of directness. Off record refers to indirect statements (or 'hints') that are not directly addressed to the other person, e.g., "Uh, I forgot my pen." The listener can act as if they haven't heard. This places the burden on the speaker. Bald on-record is the most direct approach, using imperative forms, e.g., "Give me a pen." Speakers using this form assume they have power over the other person (e.g., in military contexts). Expressions like 'please' can be added as mitigating devices to soften the demand.

🔑 Definition — Off Record: An indirect statement where the speaker's intent is not directly expressed, allowing the listener to ignore it.
🔑 Definition — Bald On-Record: A direct statement, often an imperative, where the speaker's intent is clearly and unambiguously expressed.
📌 Example: Off Record: "Hmm, I wonder where I put my pen." Bald On-Record: "Lend me your pen."

Topic – 153 Positive and Negative Politeness

These are two specific strategies for performing face-threatening acts. A positive politeness strategy appeals to a common goal or friendship, e.g., "Hey, buddy, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me use your pen." It may be preceded by 'getting to know you' talk to establish common ground. This strategy is used when the speaker is at least familiar with the listener. A negative politeness strategy is used when speakers know they are impinging on a person's time and want to show respect, e.g., stopping a person on the street to ask for directions.

🔑 Definition — Positive Politeness Strategy: A strategy that appeals to a common goal or friendship to minimize a face threat.
🔑 Definition — Negative Politeness Strategy: A strategy used to show respect and acknowledge that one is imposing on another's time or freedom.
📌 Example: Positive Politeness: "We're all going to the movies. Want to come with us?" Negative Politeness: "I'm sorry to bother you, but could you please tell me the time?"

Topic – 154 Politeness Strategies

This topic outlines three broader strategies. A Solidarity strategy tends to use positive politeness, emphasizing closeness between speaker and hearer. It includes personal information, nicknames, and inclusive terms like 'we', e.g., "Come on, let's go to the party. We'll have fun." A Deference strategy tends to use negative politeness, emphasizing the hearer's right to freedom and formal politeness. It is impersonal and marked by an absence of personal claims, e.g., "There's going to be a party if you can make it." Finally, Pre-sequences are a way to avoid the risk inherent in a face-threatening act. A pre-request can test the waters to see if a request is possible, eliciting either a 'go-ahead' or a 'stop' response, e.g., "Are you busy?" (pre-request) → "Oh, sorry." (stop).

🔑 Definition — Solidarity Strategy: A politeness strategy emphasizing closeness and shared identity, often using positive politeness.
🔑 Definition — Deference Strategy: A politeness strategy emphasizing the hearer's independence and right to freedom, often using negative politeness.
🔑 Definition — Pre-sequence: An utterance that precedes a face-threatening act (like a request or announcement) to check if it can be made without risk.
📌 Example: A Pre-request – Child: "Mom, guess what?" (pre-announcement) Parent: "Not now, I'm busy." (stop)

⭐ Key Takeaways

Politeness in pragmatics is fundamentally about managing 'face', which is a person's public self-image comprising a positive face (desire for approval and connection) and a negative face (desire for freedom and independence). Any utterance that threatens these face wants is a face-threatening act (FTA), and speakers use various strategies to mitigate this threat. These strategies exist on a spectrum from direct (bald on-record) to indirect (off record), and from emphasizing closeness (positive politeness/solidarity) to emphasizing freedom (negative politeness/deference). The choice of strategy depends on social distance, power relations, and the degree of imposition involved in the interaction.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the key difference between 'positive face' and 'negative face'?
2. Explain the difference between a 'face-threatening act' and a 'face-saving act'.
3. What is the main strategic difference between using an 'off record' utterance and a 'bald on-record' utterance when making a request?
4. Give one example of a 'positive politeness strategy' and one example of a 'negative politeness strategy'.
5. What is the function of a 'pre-sequence' (e.g., a pre-request) in conversation?

📘 Lecture 31 — POLITENESS AND CONTEXT

📖 Overview: This lecture explores politeness as a pragmatic phenomenon where meaning is determined not by linguistic form but by social function and context. It examines how situational, social, and cultural factors influence the choice of politeness strategies, and applies these concepts to real-world examples of requesting and conversational interaction.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers five main topics: Form and Function (distinguishing politeness from deference and polite forms from polite intentions); Situational Context (size of imposition and formality as factors); Social Context (social distance, power relations, and demographic variables); Cultural Context (cross-cultural variation in politeness norms); and Applying Politeness (practical analysis of requesting strategies and dialogue using politeness theory).

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 155 Form and Function

Politeness is a pragmatic phenomenon; it lies not in the form and the words themselves, but in their function and the intended social meaning. Consider the example: "If you'd be as kind as to shut up, I'd appreciate it" (Elmore: Hombre, 1989). Here the form is polite but the intention is not. If a speaker uses more polite forms than the context requires, the hearer might suspect there is an intention other than redressing a face-threatening act (FTA).

Another example of inappropriate use of polite forms is a man's request to his pet: "Cat, I wonder if you could possibly let me have my seat back?" — meant to entertain whoever hears it. Politeness is not the same as deference, which is a polite form expressing distance from and respect for people of a higher status. Deference is rare to find grammatically signaled in English, although it is present in honorifics such as 'Sir' and 'Madam'.

🔑 Definition — Face-Threatening Act (FTA): An utterance that potentially threatens the positive or negative face of the hearer (or speaker). 🔑 Definition — Deference: A polite form expressing distance from and respect for people of a higher status (e.g., 'Sir', 'Madam').

Topic – 156 Situational Context

Politeness is influenced by the elements of the context. There are two situational context factors that influence the way we make a request. One is the size of imposition — the routines and the reasonableness of the task. The rule is: 'the greater the imposition, the more indirect the language is'. For example, to borrow a large amount of money (Rs.50,000), one might employ a series of hedges and other negative politeness phenomena: "I couldn't borrow Rs.50,000/-, could I, if you don't need it right now?" On the other hand, to borrow a small sum (Rs.10), a request could be bald on record: "Give me 10 rupees."

The second factor is the formality of the context. The tendency is: 'the greater the formality, the more indirect language is'. A student sitting informally in the common room over coffee might stop a colleague from interrupting her with a direct directive bald on record: "Hang on – I haven't finished!" However, in a formal context, more indirect language would be expected.

According to Heritage (1984), a speaker's action is context-shaped in that its contribution to an ongoing sequence of actions cannot be understood except by reference to the context. This contextualization of utterances is a major and unavoidable procedure which hearers use to interpret conversational contributions.

🔑 Definition — Context-shaped: A speaker's action whose contribution to an ongoing sequence of actions cannot be understood except by reference to the context. 📐 Rule: The greater the imposition, the more indirect the language is. 📐 Rule: The greater the formality, the more indirect language is. 📌 Example: Large imposition (borrowing Rs.50,000) → "I couldn't borrow Rs.50,000/-, could I, if you don't need it right now?" (indirect, negative politeness). Small imposition (borrowing Rs.10) → "Give me 10 rupees" (bald on record).

Topic – 157 Social Context

The choice of politeness formulation depends on the social distance and the power relation between speakers. When there is social distance, politeness is encoded and there is more indirectness. When there is less social distance, there is less negative politeness and indirectness. Variables that determine social distance include: degree of familiarity and differences of status, roles, age, gender, education, class, occupation, and ethnicity.

The degree of familiarity means that if speakers know each other, they do not need to use politeness strategies; if they use them, it can imply the opposite of politeness. It is those of the lower status, the less dominant role, and so on who use more indirectness and more negative politeness features (such as hedges and mitigation) than those with higher status. Expressions with bald on record are used by people who assume they have power.

🔑 Definition — Social distance: The degree of familiarity between speakers, determined by variables such as status, roles, age, gender, education, class, occupation, and ethnicity. 🔑 Definition — Hedges: Linguistic devices used to soften or mitigate the force of an utterance (e.g., 'could', 'possibly', 'if you don't mind'). 📌 Rule: Less social distance → less negative politeness and indirectness. Higher status → more bald on record expressions.

Topic – 158 Cultural Context

According to Tannen (1994), "the use of indirectness can hardly be understood without the cross-cultural perspective." For example, in Cuba, friends should not show any distance at all, and to say 'thank you' for a cup of coffee — "maximizing praise of other" — can cause offense as it appears to put up barriers.

Thomas (1995) mentions that Chinese hosts will choose a guest's menu for them and put the 'choicest pieces' on their plate, to show positive politeness. Similarly, in some Western cultures, refusal demands a specific excuse if speakers are to avoid threatening positive face and "minimize dispraise of other," whereas in other cultures this is not necessary.

💡 Why this matters: Politeness strategies are not universal; what is polite in one culture may be offensive in another. Understanding cross-cultural variation is essential for effective intercultural communication.

Topic – 159 Applying Politeness

Here is an activity for students. You are supposed to find requesting strategies ranging from the more direct to the more indirect ones: [Can you...?], [Do you think you could...?], [I wonder if you could...?], [Could you...?], [I wonder if you could...?], [Would you...?], [Would it be possible for you to...?]

If the strategies presented do not appear appropriately contextualized, it may be difficult to know how to use them. If a context is provided, the learner has a better idea of how and when to use them. For example, to find out different pragmatic parameters involved behind all these pragmatic choices, answer these questions: (1) Where are the people? (2) What is the relationship between them?

Moreover, meanings emerge from the discoursal context where politeness strategies are used. For example, take the following dialogue:

[FATHER: What sort of time do you call this?] [Boy: I'm sorry.] [FATHER: So you should be! It's 2 a.m.!] [Boy: Oh Dad, do stop nagging. I'm over seventeen. It's up to me what time I come in.] [FATHER: Not while you are living here, it isn't. Anyway, what on earth were you doing until 2 in the morning?] [Boy: We weren't doing anything. We were just talking.] [FATHER: I was worried about you.] [Boy: Honestly, Dad, I really am sorry, but you don't have to wait up for me, you know...]

Students should find what type of politeness strategies are used in this dialogue, and highlight the bald on-record, off record, and positive/negative politeness techniques.

⭐ Key Takeaways

The most critical point is that politeness is a pragmatic phenomenon where meaning depends on function, context, and intention — not just linguistic form. The size of imposition and formality of context determine the level of indirectness in requests. Social variables like status, familiarity, age, and gender influence the choice between bald on-record, positive politeness, and negative politeness strategies. Cultural context is essential because politeness norms vary significantly across cultures, as demonstrated by Cuban and Chinese examples. When analyzing politeness, learners must always consider discoursal context — including participants, setting, and relationship — to correctly identify politeness strategies.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between politeness and deference? Provide an example of an honorific that signals deference in English.
2. According to the lecture, what two situational context factors influence how we make a request, and what is the general rule for each?
3. List at least five social variables that determine social distance between speakers.
4. Why might saying "thank you" for a cup of coffee cause offense in Cuba, according to Tannen (1994)?
5. In the father-son dialogue provided, identify one example of bald on-record language and one example that might involve negative politeness or a face-threatening act.

📘 Lecture 32 — Conversational Analysis

📖 Overview: This lecture introduces Conversational Analysis, the study of how people manage ordinary everyday spoken interactions. It examines the structural features of conversation, including turn-taking, pauses, overlaps, backchannels, adjacency pairs, preference structures, and sequences. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for analyzing how meaning is co-constructed in real-time social interaction.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers seven main topics: what conversational analysis is and its key features; turn-taking as a locally managed system with cultural variations; pauses, overlaps, and backchannels as conversational signals; adjacency pairs as two-part sequences; preference structure distinguishing preferred and dispreferred responses; and sequences including pre-sequences, insertion sequences, and opening/closing sequences.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 160 What Is Conversational Analysis?

Conversational analysis examines ordinary everyday spoken discourse to understand how people manage their interactions. It is the study of social interaction embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct in everyday life. It involves a rigorous investigation of features of a conversation: how it is generated and constructed, how it operates, what its distinguishing features are, and how participants construct their own meanings in the conversational situation.

Conversations are described as multi-layered/multi-leveled, meaning they contain different levels of meaning within a single text. This analysis examines the contents, sequence, evolution, and forms of conversation. We study how speakers decide when to speak during a conversation, how utterances of two speakers are related, and the different functions that conversation serves. Key features of conversational analysis include turn-taking, pauses, overlaps and backchannels, adjacency pairs, preference structures, and sequences expansion.

💡 Why this matters: Conversational analysis reveals the hidden structure beneath seemingly casual talk, showing that everyday conversation follows systematic rules that participants unconsciously know and follow.

Topic – 161 Turn-Taking

Turn-taking operates in accordance with a local management system that is conventionally known by the members of a social group. This system is essentially a set of conventions for getting turns, keeping them, or giving them away. It is needed most at those points where there is a possible change in who has the turn. Turn-taking can be applied to conversations where speakers cooperate and share the floor equally, as well as to conversations where there is competition, with speakers fighting to keep the floor and preventing others from getting it.

Different cultures have their own preferences regarding how long a speaker should hold the floor and how they indicate they have finished so another speaker can take the floor. For example, Latin Americans have pauses of a fraction of a second and find it socially acceptable to overlap and interrupt, whereas North American Indians expect a two-second pause between turns, and Japanese culture considers it unacceptable to interrupt.

Topic – 162 Pauses, Overlaps and Backchannels

When two people attempt to have a conversation and discover there is no 'flow' or smooth rhythm to their transition, much more is being communicated than is said; there is a sense of distance, an absence of familiarity or ease. Very short pauses (marked with a dash) are simply hesitations, but longer pauses become silence. These silences are not attributable to either speaker because each has completed a turn.

Overlaps are conventionally marked by a double slash (//) at the beginning of the overlapping talk. Typically, the first overlap occurs as both speakers attempt to initiate the talk. In accordance with the local management system, one speaker will stop to allow the other to have the floor. Backchannels are head nods, smiles, and other facial expressions and gestures that indicate the hearer is listening. These types of signals (uh-uh, yeah, mmm) provide feedback to the current speaker that the message is being received; they are known as backchannel signals or simply backchannels.

Topic – 163 Adjacency Pairs

A sequence of two related utterances by two different speakers is known as adjacency pairs. The second utterance is always a response to the first. For instance: [A: You left the light on.], [B: It wasn't me!] — the sequence of complaint-denial forms an adjacency pair.

Types of adjacency pairs include: question-answer, greeting-greeting, invitation or offer-acceptance/non-acceptance, complaint-apology/denial, summons-response, request-acceptance, promise or thanks-acknowledgement, and goodbye-goodbye.

An insertion sequence is one adjacency pair within another. A number of insertion sequences can be infinite, but the limit of human memory does not allow that. Delay in response marks potential unavailability of the immediate expected answer; it represents the distance between what is expected and what is provided.

Topic – 164 Preference Structure

Adjacency pairs represent social actions, and not all social actions are equal when they occur as second parts of some pairs. For example, in response to [a question], possible responses include [a partial answer], [a statement of ignorance], [a denial of the relevance of the question], or [a denial of its presupposition]. For instance: [What does Joe do for a living?] could receive responses like [Do you need to know?], [Oh, this and that.], [I've no idea.], [What's that got to do with it?], or [He does not do anything.]

A first part that contains a request or an offer has an expectation that the second part will be an acceptance; structurally, acceptance is more likely than refusal. This structural likelihood is called preference. Technically, preference is an observed pattern in talk and not a personal wish. The preference structure divides second parts into preferred (structurally expected next act) and dis-preferred (structurally unexpected next act) social acts.

Topic – 165 Sequences

Conversation analysts claim that as speakers are mutually constructing and negotiating their conversation in time, certain sequences emerge — these are stretches of utterances or turns. These can be pre-sequences, insertion sequences, and opening and closing sequences.

Pre-sequences are the opening sequences used to set up some specific potential actions. Conversations are opened in socially recognized ways. In the beginning of a conversation, speakers normally greet each other, e.g., when two office workers meet in the morning: Ali: [Morning, Salman!], Salman: [Hi. How's it going?], Ali: [Oh, can't complain, I guess. Ready for the meeting this afternoon?], Salman: [Well, I don't have much choice!]

Greetings exemplify opening sequences — utterances that ease people into a conversation. They convey the message "I want to talk to you." There are pre-invitations (I've got two tickets for the football match), pre-requests (Are you busy right now?), and pre-announcements (You'll never guess!).

Finally, there are opening structures and closing structures. For example, Iqra, a 34-year-old housewife, greets Laiba, a 15-year-old student, with a formulaic health enquiry: Iqra: [Hi. Laiba.], Laiba: [Hi, Hi, Iqra.], Iqra: [Hi, hi, how are you?], Laiba: [Not bad. I'll be in, in a minute.]

The British and North Americans have a pre-closing sequence rather than just ending with a farewell, e.g., A: [Anyway, I'm gonna have to go.], B: [Yeah, see you.], A: [See you tomorrow.], C: [What time is it?], D: [Oh. I've my lights on.], E: [Half three.], C: [Three.]

⭐ Key Takeaways

Conversational analysis is the systematic study of how people manage ordinary spoken interaction, examining turn-taking, pauses, overlaps, backchannels, adjacency pairs, preference structures, and sequences. Turn-taking operates through a culturally-variable local management system with conventions for getting, keeping, and giving turns. Adjacency pairs are two-part sequences where the second utterance responds to the first, with preference structure distinguishing structurally expected (preferred) from unexpected (dispreferred) responses. Sequences include pre-sequences (which set up future actions), insertion sequences (embedded within other pairs), and opening/closing sequences (which socially ease participants into and out of conversation). Understanding these structures reveals that conversation is not random but follows systematic, analyzable patterns that participants mutually construct and negotiate.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What are the six main features of conversational analysis listed in this lecture?
2. How does turn-taking differ across Latin American, North American Indian, and Japanese cultures?
3. What is the difference between an overlap and a backchannel signal in conversation?
4. What is an adjacency pair? Provide three examples of different types of adjacency pairs.
5. What does "preference" mean in preference structure, and how does it differ from a personal wish?

📘 Lecture 33 — CULTURE AND LANGUAGE LEARNING

📖 Overview: This lecture explores the intersection of culture and pragmatics in language learning, examining how cultural background influences communication across languages. It introduces cross-cultural, intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics as distinct but related fields that help explain how speakers from different cultural backgrounds interpret and produce meaning in interaction.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers cross-cultural pragmatics as the study of linguistic acts across cultural backgrounds, intercultural pragmatics based on socio-cognitive approaches to communication, interlanguage pragmatics focusing on second language learners' pragmatic development, listener behavior in cross-cultural pragmatics including back channel cues, and referential communication as an interactive process for conveying given and new information effectively.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 166 Cross-cultural Pragmatics

Cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP) is a subfield of pragmatics. Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993) defined CCP as the study of linguistic acts by language users from different cultural backgrounds. CCP aims at understanding the extent to which non-shared knowledge or, in simple terms, our schemas affect or modify the retrieval of intended meaning.

CCP looks at issues outside classrooms and concentrates on environments where participants are not explicitly learners, but rather full members of the target language community. In pragmatics, "culture" is not Culture with a capital C — that is, the literature, music, and art. Rather, it is culture as a reflection of the values and beliefs about the world, held by the members of a community which forms the substratum of their everyday life.

CCP investigates how human behavior is translated into instances of language in use. Research has shown that a speaker's intended meaning, mediated by linguistic symbols, may be interpreted or misinterpreted in cross-cultural contexts due to each interactant's own norms of interpretation. CCP examines behaviors that are manifest or overt and others that are latent or covert. The values and beliefs are embedded in talk both at the micro and the macro level. Micro features include prosodic cues, turn taking, indirectness, nonverbal cues, etc.

🔑 Definition — Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The study of linguistic acts by language users from different cultural backgrounds, examining how non-shared knowledge and schemas affect the retrieval of intended meaning.

💡 Why this matters: Cross-cultural misunderstandings often arise not from grammar errors but from differences in cultural assumptions about appropriate communication.

Topic – 167 Intercultural Pragmatics

Intercultural pragmatics is based on the socio-cognitive approach according to which, our mind exists simultaneously both in the head and in the world. Cross-cultural comparative studies of discourse have shown that rules of appropriateness vary across cultures. Thus, for learners to become truly effective communicators in a second language, they need to acquire these rules of appropriateness in addition to linguistic competence.

Modern language courses include elements of 'communicative competence' (Hymes, 1964), providing learners with knowledge about and experience in using the sociocultural rules of the new language. Intercultural pragmatics studies speech acts across various cultures to study how language is manifested in a society and is a medium of differentiation between different cultures. The difference in culture causes a number of intercultural failures such as socio-pragmatic failure and pragma-linguistic failure.

🔑 Definition — Socio-pragmatic failure: Miscommunication arising from different cultural assumptions about social appropriateness. 🔑 Definition — Pragma-linguistic failure: Miscommunication arising from inappropriate transfer of linguistic features from one language to another.

📌 Example: A learner who directly translates a polite request form from their native language into English may produce a phrase that sounds rude or overly formal to native English speakers — this is pragma-linguistic failure.

Topic – 168 Inter-language Pragmatics

Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) focuses on the pragmatic development of second/foreign language learners as they seek to become proficient, successful users of the target language. ILP may be considered a sub-area of second language acquisition (SLA) and thus is inherently anchored in acquisition contexts. Learners and teachers need to understand interlanguage pragmatics to facilitate our understanding of how people comprehend and communicate meaning beyond what is said in the target language.

The interlanguage is a reduced system at the early stages of development. Interlanguage refers to intermediate, dynamic, and transient linguistic systems that, according to the theory, continue to develop over time as learners move closer to attaining native-like proficiency. Learners progress along a trajectory towards their desired goal, sometimes regressing and sometimes making rapid progress. For instance, in academic speaking skills, the learners may struggle with conversational chat unless they live with a native speaker.

Learner language use is informed by underlying systems that overlap and are constantly being revised by learners, usually out of awareness, as long as there are regular exposure and tutoring. ILP is essentially interested in how L2 learners use their developing abilities in L2 to communicate successfully despite gaps in their knowledge and socio-pragmatics of the L2.

🔑 Definition — Interlanguage: Intermediate, dynamic, and transient linguistic systems that continue to develop over time as learners move toward native-like proficiency.

Topic – 169 Listener Behavior in CCP

One aspect of interactional talk is the relative lack of attention given to the role of the listener in the co-construction of meaning in conversation. Yet it is important not only cross-culturally, but also within a pluricultural society.

Erickson and Schultz (1982) found that African-American students displayed attention and listenership in less overt ways than those expected by white counselors, even when there were no gender differences. Listener cues are also called "back channel cues". Cues are believed to be given by the listener while the speaker, often in the context of telling a story or narrating recent events (Yngve 1970).

Cultural values are attached to cues more explicitly in one culture than another. For example, Japanese culture does transparently discuss the need for the listener to "chime in" in a patterned manner. The cross-cultural mismatches between interlocutors of different languages may arise regarding the location and frequency of listener responses.

🔑 Definition — Back channel cues: Verbal and nonverbal signals given by listeners to indicate attention and understanding while a speaker is talking.

📌 Example: In Japanese conversation, listeners are expected to produce frequent back-channel responses like "hai" or "un" in a patterned rhythmic way, whereas in some Western contexts, such frequent responses might be interpreted as interrupting.

Topic – 170 Referential Communication

Tarone and Swierzbin (2009: 68) chose to study how learners used language resources to signal given and new information to achieve effective referential communication. They stated: "Effective referential communication is inherently interactive. Speakers must take into account any information the listener already has, and any information the listener needs to know in order to identify the entity being referred to." It is also an aspect of language use that depends on careful decisions by speakers regarding linguistic forms, for example, in Academic Speech Events.

Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1990, 1993) focused their analysis on status-preserving strategies in the interactions between the advisors and advisees (international students), particularly in an educational setting where the pragmatic competence of native and non-native speakers of the L2 are tested. They are of the view that highly proficient nonnative speakers may lack the ability to negotiate an advisement interview that is dependent on appropriate speech acts and communication strategies. At issue in the study is impression management, important to graduate students who seek to be well regarded by their advisors.

🔑 Definition — Referential communication: The interactive process by which speakers signal given and new information to enable listeners to identify the entity being referred to.

💡 Why this matters: Even highly proficient second language speakers may fail to manage institutional interactions (like advisor meetings) because they lack the pragmatic knowledge of appropriate status-preserving strategies.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Cross-cultural, intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics each examine different aspects of how culture affects language use and learning across cultural boundaries. The key distinction is that cross-cultural pragmatics compares language use across cultures, intercultural pragmatics studies actual interactions between speakers of different cultures, and interlanguage pragmatics focuses on learners' developing pragmatic competence. Listener behavior, particularly back channel cues, varies significantly across cultures and can cause miscommunication even without gender differences. Referential communication requires speakers to carefully manage given and new information while considering the listener's knowledge state. Pragmatic failures can occur at both the socio-pragmatic level (cultural appropriateness) and pragma-linguistic level (linguistic form appropriateness), and even advanced learners may struggle with these aspects.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between cross-cultural pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics according to this lecture?

2. What are back channel cues, and why can they cause cross-cultural misunderstandings?

3. What is interlanguage, and how does interlanguage pragmatics relate to second language acquisition?

4. What two types of intercultural failures are identified in the lecture, and how do they differ?

5. According to Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, why might highly proficient nonnative speakers struggle in advisement interviews?

📘 Lecture 34 — Computer Semantics and Pragmatics

📖 Overview: This lecture explores the intersection of computers with semantics and pragmatics, focusing on how computational tools are used to analyze and process language. It covers computer-assisted language learning, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, machine translation, and the challenges of modeling pragmatics computationally, highlighting both achievements and limitations in the field.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture begins with Computers and Linguistics, discussing CALL and computational linguistics, then moves to Computers, Corpora, and Semantics to explain how corpora reveal patterns of language use. It covers Computers and the Study of Translation, comparing transfer and interlingual models, then examines Computers and Pragmatics, addressing why pragmatics is less explored computationally. Finally, it discusses Computers, Speech Acts, and Conversation, focusing on spoken corpora and their challenges.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 171 Computers and Linguistics

Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is defined as the search for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning. CALL covers a broad range of activities, making it difficult to describe as a single idea or simple research agenda; it encompasses issues of materials design, technologies, pedagogical theories, and modes of instruction.

Computational Linguistics (CL), on the other hand, is the study of language from a computational perspective, concerned with computer systems for understanding and generating natural language. The process of dictionary making today is undergoing dramatic change largely owing to advances in computers and the availability of machine-readable collections of texts known as corpora.

Corpus linguistics is the term used for compiling collections of texts and using them to probe language use. A corpus is a representative body of texts (Latin for 'body'), with more recent corpora containing over 100 million words. Corpora are essential for twenty-first-century dictionary making, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence.

Topic – 172 Computers Corpora and Semantics

Computerized corpora are useful to dictionary makers and others in establishing patterns of language that are not apparent from mere introspection. For example, patterns of collocation — which words go together — are much more readily understood with the help of a computerized corpus of natural-language texts. Such patterns help highlight meanings, parts of speech, and words that co-occur with frequency.

🔑 Definition — Collocation: patterns of words that frequently go together in a language, revealed through corpus analysis.

Furthermore, while it may appear that synonymous words can be used in place of one another, corpora can show that it is not common for words to be readily substitutable. For example, little and small, big and large, and fast and quick are generally considered synonyms. But a cursory examination of key word in context (KWIC) concordances for these pairs shows that they are not straightforwardly substitutable. 📌 Example: The synonyms little and small — a KWIC concordance would show they are used in different contexts and are not interchangeable, even though they share similar meanings. Corpora thus help understand meaning and use of words.

Topic – 173 Computers and the Study of Translation

For more than half a century, researchers have been trying to craft devices that can translate between languages, but except in limited ways, that goal has eluded the best attempts. Word-for-word translation does not work because languages differ in their word orders, and metaphors of one language may not translate into the relevant metaphor of another language.

If a machine translation (MT) device were established for even six languages, then 6 × 5 = 30 sets of procedures would be needed to translate each language into all of the other five (the transfer translation model). An alternative system is an interlingual translation model, in which the basic semantic elements of each language can be represented abstractly and then encoded into other languages. This would require twelve procedures — one decoding procedure and one encoding procedure for each language. This model is simpler than the transfer translation model.

📐 Formula: Transfer translation model for n languages → n × (n-1) procedures; Interlingual model → 2n procedures. 📌 Example: For 6 languages, transfer model = 30 procedures; interlingual model = 12 procedures.

Unfortunately, we don't know the extent to which sentences can be decomposed into the kinds of abstract semantic representations needed for an interlingual model, especially making a language-neutral intermediate representation. Difficulties concern what one language encodes that another may not encode.

🔑 Definition — Interlingual translation model: a machine translation approach where basic semantic elements are represented abstractly and then encoded into other languages, requiring fewer procedures than the transfer model.

Topic – 174 Computers and Pragmatics

Compared to morphological, lexical, phonological, grammatical, and semantic features of texts, the features of pragmatics have been less well explored in computational linguistics. One reason for this relative neglect is that modeling the world knowledge and discourse knowledge that speakers rely on when producing and understanding texts is even more challenging than creating models of structural aspects of language.

Another reason is that the kinds of linguistic features by which some pragmatic categories are realized are not always expressed in ways that computers can readily track. Speakers base some aspects of expression on their beliefs about what addressees know and are thought to have in the forefront of their minds. 💡 Why this matters: This highlights the fundamental challenge of making computers understand implied meaning, context, and speaker intentions — central to pragmatics.

Topic – 175 Computers, Speech Acts and Conversation

It is necessary to create models of politeness, turn taking, and other conversational phenomena before many applications of computer technology to speech will be mastered. The building of corpora of written language has proceeded more quickly than the compilation of spoken corpora. Machine-readable texts from books, magazines, and newspapers have been widely available, as is the Web. Scanners can effectively transform many older printed materials into machine-readable text.

However, creating electronic representations of transcribed spoken language is quite different. First, it must be captured on audio or video, then transcribed — a challenging and expensive task, partly dependent on recording quality and ambient noise. Still, a substantial part of the British National Corpus is based on speech, where about one hundred volunteers throughout Britain carried recorders.

⭐ Key Takeaways

The lecture fundamentally shows that while computers have transformed linguistic analysis through corpora and computational methods, the handling of meaning and especially pragmatics remains profoundly challenging. Corpora are indispensable for revealing patterns like collocation and synonym use that introspection cannot detect. Machine translation is constrained by language-specific structures and metaphors, with the interlingual model being more efficient but theoretically problematic. Pragmatics is neglected computationally because world knowledge, discourse knowledge, and speaker intent are extremely difficult to model. Finally, spoken corpora are harder to compile than written ones, yet essential for modeling speech acts, politeness, and conversation in computational linguistics.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Computational Linguistics (CL)?
2. How do computerized corpora help reveal that synonyms like little and small are not always substitutable?
3. Why is the interlingual translation model more efficient than the transfer model for six languages, and what is its main challenge?
4. What are two reasons pragmatics has been less explored in computational linguistics compared to other language features?
5. Why is compiling a spoken corpus more difficult than compiling a written corpus, and what example of a spoken corpus is mentioned?

📘 Lecture 35 — Information Structure and Pragmatics

📖 Overview: This lecture explores how speakers and writers organize information in discourse through foregrounding and backgrounding, examining the concepts of given and new information, topics and contrast, and the distinctions between definite/indefinite and generic/specific expressions. Understanding information structure is crucial for analyzing how meaning is conveyed beyond individual sentences in real communication.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture begins with an introduction to information structure as a discourse-level phenomenon involving highlighting and deemphasizing elements in texts. It then examines the distinction between given information (already in the addressee's mind) and new information (just being introduced). The concepts of topic (what a sentence is about) and comment (what is said about the topic) are explained alongside contrastive noun phrases. Finally, the lecture covers definite and referential expressions, then concludes with the distinction between generic and specific noun phrases.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 176 Introduction to Information Structure

Speakers and writers are responsible for foregrounding certain elements and backgrounding others in texts, similar to how a painter uses contrasts to highlight some details. In language, this process of highlighting and deemphasizing is called information structure. Unlike syntax and semantics, which focus on individual sentences, information structure requires consideration of discourse—coherent sequences of sentences rather than isolated ones.

💡 Why this matters: Understanding information structure helps explain why some sentences feel natural in context while others seem to emphasize the wrong elements at the wrong time.

Topic – 177 Given and New Information

Given information is information currently in the forefront of an addressee's mind. New information is information just being introduced into the discourse.

🔑 Definition — Given Information: Information that can be presumed to be already in the mind of the addressee based on prior discourse or context.

🔑 Definition — New Information: Information being introduced into the discourse for the first time.

📌 Example: Alina: [Who ate the biscuits?], [Maria: Hassan ate the biscuits.]

• In Maria's answer, "Hassan" represents new information because it is being introduced.
• "the biscuits" is given information because Alina introduced it in the previous turn.

Given information can be realized in condensed form—instead of "Hassan ate the biscuits," the speaker could say "Hassan did," "Hassan did it," or simply "Hassan."

A piece of information need not be explicitly mentioned to be considered given. Information is sometimes taken as given because of its close association with something introduced into the discourse. When a noun phrase is introduced, all the subparts of the referent can be treated as given information.

📌 Example: "When Kent returned my car last night, the gas tank was nearly empty and the glove compartment was stuffed with candy wrappers."

• Once "my car" is introduced, its parts (gas tank, glove compartment) become given information.

Topic – 178 Topics and Contrast

The topic of a sentence is its center of attention—what it is about and its point of departure. The comment is the element of a sentence that says something about the topic.

🔑 Definition — Topic: The given information in a sentence about which something is said.

🔑 Definition — Comment: The new information that shows what we say about the topic.

📌 Example: Question: "What did Hassan do?" Answer: "Hassan ate the biscuits."

• Topic: "Hassan" (given information)
• Comment: "ate the biscuits" (new information)

A noun phrase is said to be contrastive when it occurs in opposition to another noun phrase in the discourse.

📌 Example: Alan: "Did Matt see the accident?" Beth: "No, Sara did."

• "Sara" in Beth's answer is contrasted with "Matt" in Alan's question.

Contrast is also marked in sentences that express narrowing down a choice from several candidates to one. The noun phrase referring to the chosen candidate is marked contrastively.

Topic – 179 Definite and Referential Expressions

Speakers mark a noun phrase as definite when they assume the addressee can identify its referent. Otherwise, the noun phrase is marked as indefinite.

🔑 Definition — Definite: A noun phrase marked when the speaker assumes the addressee can identify the referent.

🔑 Definition — Indefinite: A noun phrase marked when the speaker cannot assume the addressee can identify the referent.

📌 Example: Andrea: "Who's at the door?" Bundy: "It's the neighbor."

• "the neighbor" is definite, presupposing Andrea can determine which neighbor.
• If they have several neighbors and Bundy cannot assume identification, the answer would be indefinite: "It's a neighbor."

Proper nouns and pronouns are generally definite. Pronouns like "you" and "we" usually refer to individuals identifiable in the discourse context. Definiteness in English is marked by:

• Choice of articles (definite "the" versus indefinite "a")
• Demonstratives ("this" and "that," both definite)

Indefinite noun phrases are marked by "a" or "an" ("a furnace," "an apartment building") or by the absence of any article ("oil," "fire," "apartment buildings").

Topic – 180 Generic and Specific Expressions

Generic sentences express generalizations about kinds and are important tools for transmitting knowledge.

📌 Example: Compare the following pairs: 1a. Tigers are striped. (generic — saying something general about all tigers) 1b. Tigers are on the front lawn. (specific — referring to particular tigers)

2a. A tiger is striped. (generic) 2b. A tiger is on the front lawn. (specific — referring to some individual tiger)

3a. The tiger is striped. (generic) 3b. The tiger is on the front lawn. (specific — referring to some unique, salient, or familiar tiger)

A noun phrase may be generic or specific depending on whether it refers to a category or to particular members of a category.

📌 Example 1: "[It describes the bombardier beetle, which squirts a lethal mixture into the face of its enemy.]"

• "the bombardier beetle" is generic (refers to the set of all bombardier beetles) and definite
• "a lethal mixture" is generic and indefinite

📌 Example 2: "[The giraffe bent slowly forward and gingerly took a carrot from my palm.]"

• "the giraffe" is specific (refers to a particular animal) and definite
• "a carrot" is specific and indefinite

Thus, the generic/specific contrast differs from the definite/indefinite contrast.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Information structure operates at the discourse level, requiring analysis of coherent sentence sequences rather than isolated sentences. The distinction between given and new information is fundamental—given information is what the addressee already has in mind, while new information is being introduced, and given information can be realized in condensed forms or inferred through association. The topic-comment structure pairs given information (topic) with what is said about it (comment), and noun phrases can be contrastive when opposed to other noun phrases in discourse. Definiteness depends on whether the speaker assumes the addressee can identify the referent, marked by articles and demonstratives, while the generic/specific distinction is about whether a noun phrase refers to a whole category or particular members, operating independently of the definite/indefinite distinction.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is information structure and why does it require consideration of discourse rather than just individual sentences?

2. In the exchange "Who ate the biscuits?" / "Hassan ate the biscuits," which element is new information and which is given information, and why?

3. What is the difference between a topic and a comment in a sentence, and how do they relate to given and new information?

4. When would a speaker use a definite noun phrase like "the neighbor" versus an indefinite noun phrase like "a neighbor"?

5. Explain the difference between generic and specific noun phrases using "The tiger is striped" versus "The tiger is on the front lawn."

📘 Lecture 36 — Research in Pragmatics

📖 Overview: This lecture explores how pragmatic hypotheses are formulated, tested, and investigated through empirical research. It covers the complete research process from data collection and transcription to identifying investigable topics and practical approaches for conducting pragmatic analysis. The lecture emphasizes the importance of rigorous methodology in studying real-world language use.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers the nature of pragmatic investigation including hypothesis formation and testing, methods for collecting data for pragmatic analysis with attention to experimental design and ethical considerations, transcription conventions for conversation analysis, a range of investigable topics such as conversational strategies and intercultural pragmatics, and practical guidance for learning pragmatics through hands-on data-driven analysis.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 181 The Nature of Pragmatic Investigation

In linguistic investigation, a favored method is to frame and test hypotheses. For example, when someone says to a two-year-old "Why don't you use your spoon?" and the child obligingly picks up the spoon, it can be hypothesized that two-year-olds can understand indirect speech acts. This demonstrates how observable behavior can lead to testable hypotheses.

The research method involves following specific procedures: (1) framing a testable hypothesis suggested by observation, (2) designing an experiment to collect data testing this hypothesis, (3) collecting the data under experimental conditions, (4) quantifying the data to determine whether the hypothesis is proved, and (5) considering implications and whether follow-up experiments would be useful.

Very often, empirical research tries to determine whether there is a significant association, as opposed to a chance association, between two variables. For example, researchers may investigate whether there is a significant association between age and understanding of indirect speech acts as demonstrated by compliance with indirect requests.

💡 Why this matters: Understanding how to move from observation to testable hypothesis is fundamental to conducting credible pragmatic research.

Topic – 182 Collecting Data for Pragmatic Analysis

Data collection typically involves elicited data through carefully designed experiments. All non-relevant variables must be eliminated to ensure you measure what you intend to measure. For instance, if a linguist measured two-year-olds' responses to indirect requests only to realize afterwards that the results reflected how palatable the requests were, the experiment would be invalid.

Several important considerations arise when collecting data. Recording natural conversations with friends who know they are being taped often yields anything but natural conversation. There is also an ethical issue — researchers must not use data provided by informants without their consent.

Other important points include conducting a pilot study to determine whether the data is (a) audible and transcribable, and (b) useful for the intended purpose. One solution is to record data on video, though this is usually impractical. Another option is noting the opening words of each speaker, which can be a foolproof method.

🔑 Definition — Elicited data: Data collected through carefully designed experiments that control for non-relevant variables to measure specific phenomena.

Topic – 183 Transcription of Conversation

Conventional transcriptions of conversations use standard orthographic script rather than phonemic transcription. They show how items like 'and' and 'your' are actually spoken since their realization may vary. You might expect to indicate hesitations (e.g., 'er' and 'umm'), fillers and uptake signals (e.g., 'uh-uh' and 'yeah'), and audible breathing ((hh) for out-breath and (hh) for indrawn breath).

A more difficult issue is representing intonation and pitch. The easiest solution for distinctive pitch prominence is marking it by capitalizing the appropriate segment (e.g., you WHAT). More important in many ways is marking features of conversational sequences. For instance, you will always need to mark pauses in the talk.

The widely used convention uses parentheses, with the length of pause indicated in tenths of seconds. For example, '(2.5)' represents a pause of two-and-a-half seconds. Short pauses can be marked with parentheses and points: '(.)' equals a one-syllable length pause, and '(..)' equals a two-syllable length pause. Another sequencing phenomenon that needs to be marked is the overlap of two speakers.

📐 Formula for pause notation: (2.5) = 2.5 second pause; (.) = one-syllable pause; (..) = two-syllable pause

Topic – 184 Investigable Topics

Many areas can be investigated in pragmatics. Conversational strategies examine how turn-taking works — according to what principles and by what means does the speaker select the next speaker? Who self-selects at TRPs (Transition Relevance Places) and with what effects? What are the mechanics of interruption? Is topic a viable unit of analysis? Units of conversation include insertion sequences, adjacency pairs, and pre-sequences.

Activity types and the institutional use of language involve examining the structure and pragmatic properties of seminars, interviews, and talk types like telephone conversations, ordering sequences in restaurants, and contributions to radio phone-ins. Researchers investigate to what extent these speech events are goal-oriented and how talk is constrained by allowable contributions.

Focusing on power and distance involves studying relation indicating devices (Matsumoto, 1988) — how speakers encode these relationships and how speakers get their own way. Face work examines how speakers use politeness strategies to acknowledge the face wants of others.

Intercultural pragmatics investigates how members of different cultural groups accommodate and react to socio-pragmatic differences. Context research asks whether external social structure determines talk organization or whether context is created by the talk itself. Folk views of talk investigate the extent to which people's beliefs about pragmatic uses of language (politeness, interruption, etc.) are oriented to in actual talk.

🔑 Definition — Adjacency pairs: Paired utterances in conversation where the first part requires a specific second part (e.g., question-answer, greeting-greeting).

Topic – 185 Learning by Doing

Grundy made comments about ways of learning pragmatics by doing data-driven pragmatic analysis. Students' work consists of recording naturally occurring data such as conversations, meetings talk, institutional talk, media talk, an instruct sequence, classroom talk, or an interview — whatever interests them.

Students may select two minutes of this recording and describe both the distal context and the immediate talk context in which it occurs. If the data are transcribable and analyzable, students move to the next stage — actually transcribing it. They bring their data to class to try out suggestions from classmates and get feedback. When their approach is decided, they write about the analytic parameters they intend to use.

📌 Example: A student recorded a mother/small child exchange in which the child was complaining vigorously about having to leave a place she was visiting earlier than she had expected in order to go back home.

💡 Why this matters: Hands-on analysis of authentic data is the most effective way to understand how pragmatic principles operate in real communication.

⭐ Key Takeaways

The lecture emphasizes that pragmatic research requires moving from observation to testable hypothesis through careful experimental design. Data collection must control for non-relevant variables and adhere to ethical standards of informed consent. Transcription conventions are essential for representing conversational features including pauses, hesitations, overlaps, and intonation. A wide range of investigable topics exist including turn-taking, institutional language, power relations, face work, intercultural differences, and the relationship between context and talk. Most importantly, the most effective way to learn pragmatics is through hands-on analysis of naturally occurring data, following a systematic process from recording to transcription to analysis.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What are the four steps involved in investigating a pragmatic hypothesis according to the lecture?

2. Why is it important to eliminate non-relevant variables when collecting data for pragmatic analysis?

3. How are pauses of different lengths represented in conversation transcription conventions?

4. What is the difference between investigating conversational strategies and investigating activity types in institutional language use?

5. According to Grundy's approach, what should students do after recording naturally occurring data and before writing their analysis?

📘 Lecture 37 — KEY TERMS IN PRAGMATICS

📖 Overview: This lecture introduces key concepts in pragmatics, focusing on how meaning is determined beyond grammar and literal interpretation. It covers ambiguity, disambiguation, vagueness, referential vs. attributive uses, argumentation theory, the code model, communicative competence, demonstratives, and ellipsis. Understanding these terms is essential for analyzing how context, speaker intention, and shared knowledge shape communication.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers ten main topics: Ambiguity, Disambiguation, and Vagueness (Topic 186); Attributive Concept and Argumentation Theory/Referential/Attributive Distinction (Topic 187); Code Model (Topic 188); Communicative Competence (Topic 189); Demonstrative (Topic 190); and Ellipsis (Topic 191). Each topic defines a key pragmatic term and provides examples to illustrate how meaning is conveyed beyond literal word meaning.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 186 Ambiguity, Disambiguation and Vagueness

Ambiguity is a sequence of linguistic signs (written, spoken, or signed) that is assigned more than one meaning by the grammar. Ambiguous expressions have more than one meaning in the language. There are two main types: Structural ambiguity is due to the syntactic structure of the utterance, as in "They are fighting fish" (Nicholas Allott, 1988), which could mean either fish that are fighting or fish that are meant for fighting. Lexical ambiguity occurs when one form corresponds to more than one word with different meanings, like the word bank in "I pass the bank on the way to work" (financial institution or river bank).

Disambiguation is the process of selecting the intended sense of an ambiguous word, phrase, or sentence from among the senses allowed by the grammar. This process is largely unconscious and automatic, which is why most ambiguity goes unnoticed by the speaker or hearer.

Vagueness refers to a meaning that is not clearly defined. Much attention has focused on vague predicates. For example, it has been argued that the predicate bald is vague. If someone says 'John is bald', we may not know whether the proposition expressed by the utterance is true or false, even though we know all the relevant facts.

🔑 Definition — Structural ambiguity: ambiguity arising from the syntactic structure of an utterance rather than individual word meanings. 📌 Example: "They are fighting fish" — could mean (a) they are fish that are currently fighting, or (b) they are fish bred for fighting.

🔑 Definition — Lexical ambiguity: ambiguity arising when a single word form corresponds to multiple distinct meanings. 📌 Example: "I pass the bank on the way to work" — bank could mean a financial institution or the side of a river.

🔑 Definition — Vagueness: a meaning that is not clearly defined or precisely bounded. 📌 Example: "John is bald" — Even knowing all facts, we may not agree on whether the statement is true because bald has no clear cutoff point.

Topic – 187 Attributive Concept and Argumentation Theory/Referential/Attributive Distinction

In relevance theory, attributive use of a concept is where a word or phrase is used to express a concept that a speaker attributes to someone else and which she need not endorse herself. A concept used in this way is sometimes called an attributive concept. Attributive use is a type of interpretive use: specifically, it is interpretive use in which there is attribution of a thought or utterance to another. For example, 'An amazing thought entered into my brain' — Amazing is an attribute of thought.

Argumentation Theory is the systematic study of discourse that is intended to persuade rationally, including the study of logical arguments and fallacies and their uses. Argumentation theory is a sub-field of pragmatics since persuading by the use of arguments is one use of language, e.g., Media communication. Argumentation theorists also investigate normative as well as descriptive aspects of language use.

Referential/Attributive Distinction is a distinction between two apparently different ways of using definite descriptions, made by the philosopher Keith Donnellan (Allott, 1988). One way of using a definite description is to talk about whichever individual (or individuals, for plural definite descriptions) satisfies the material in the nominal restrictor. This is the attributive use. Another way of using a definite description is to pick out and talk about a certain individual (or individuals, for plural definite descriptions). This is the referential use.

🔑 Definition — Attributive concept: a concept used to express a thought attributed to someone else, which the speaker may not endorse. 📌 Example: "An amazing thought entered into my brain" — Amazing expresses the attribute the speaker attributes to the thought, possibly quoting someone else's evaluation.

🔑 Definition — Argumentation Theory: the systematic study of discourse intended to persuade rationally, including logical arguments and fallacies.

🔑 Definition — Referential/Attributive Distinction: a distinction between using a definite description to talk about whoever fits the description (attributive) versus using it to pick out a specific individual (referential). 💡 Why this matters: This distinction helps analyze how definite descriptions function differently in different contexts, e.g., "Smith's murderer is insane" — attributive (whoever murdered Smith) vs. referential (a specific person we know is Smith's murderer).

Topic – 188 Code Model

Code Model is a model of communication according to which communication involves the transmission of meaning — the message — by encoding it in language or some other codes. The transmitter encodes and transmits the message as a linguistic signal, which the receiver then decodes.

According to the model, a coding/decoding process will lead to perfect transmission of the message if the code is shared, encoding and decoding are carried out successfully, and the signal is not degraded by noise or interrupted (Allott, 1988). The terms message, signal, transmitter, and receiver are from information theory. For example, a speaker says 'Tree'. The hearer would encode it into 'Stem, branches, leaves and other parts of a tree'. Encoding can also be on the sentence level.

🔑 Definition — Code Model: a model where communication is the encoding and decoding of a message via a shared code. 📐 Formula: Transmitter → Encodes Message → Linguistic Signal → Receiver Decodes → Original Message (if code is shared, no noise) 📌 Example: Speaker says "Tree" → Hearer decodes to "Stem, branches, leaves" — Successful only if both share the same code for tree.

Topic – 189 Communicative Competence

Communicative Competence is the ability to communicate in a language. It includes competence with the grammatical forms of the language and the ability to put forms of the language to use in communication (Allott, 1988). This term was invented by the anthropologist and sociolinguist Dell Hymes.

Now a popular notion in applied linguistics and language teaching, where the aim is to teach not just grammar and speech sounds, but also strategies for communicating in that language. This teaching tends not so much to be concerned with pragmatics in a narrow sense (implicatures, reference assignment, etc.) as with teaching social conventions about how the language is used (Allott, 1988).

A speaker should have the competence to talk to a lady, old man, or a professional differently. This is communicative competence — how perfectly you answer after analyzing the situation!

🔑 Definition — Communicative Competence: the ability to communicate effectively, combining grammatical knowledge with knowledge of social conventions for language use. 💡 Why this matters: Knowing grammar alone is not enough; one must also know when, how, and to whom to say things — crucial for real-world communication and language teaching.

Topic – 190 Demonstrative

A group of indexical words or phrases that are used to refer include this, that, these, and those (in English). These words are used to make demonstrative phrases, for example, this pen, that car, these keys, those penguins (Allott, 1988). Demonstratives are often accompanied by a gesture that demonstrates the object referred to, pointing, or gazing at the object, e.g., 'that boy'.

As with other indexicals, the referent of a demonstrative must be worked out to know what proposition the speaker is expressing. The particular demonstrative used restricts the search for referents in subtle ways. If there is one book on a table, the speaker may refer to it with 'this book' or 'that book'. But if it is the nearer of two, then 'this book' is preferred, except if both books are nearer the hearer, when again 'that book' is acceptable.

In English and other languages, the demonstratives encode a two-way proximal/distal distinction, but other languages have a three-way or four-way distinction. For space deixis, demonstratives are frequently used for discourse deixis, as in: "I am glad you told me that" and "This is what I'll be talking about today".

🔑 Definition — Demonstrative: indexical words (this, that, these, those) used to refer, often with a gesture. 📌 Example: "That boy" — requires context (pointing or shared visual field) to identify which boy is meant.

🔑 Definition — Proximal/Distal Distinction: the encoding of nearness (proximal: this) vs. distance (distal: that) in demonstratives. 📌 Example: Two books on a table — the nearer book is called this book; the farther is that book.

Topic – 191 Ellipsis

When linguistic material is missing from the pronounced form of a phrase or sentence, that phrase/sentence is said to be (syntactically) elliptical. For example, Mary kicked John, and Jane, Bill. Here the verb 'kicked' has been ellipted. In the next two examples the ellipted material is in brackets: 'Jane fought because Mary did (fight)'; 'She has stopped now but I don't know why (she stopped).'

Recovery of elided elements is necessary to work out what proposition is being expressed by an utterance of a sentence (Allott, 1988). The missing material is recovered from the linguistic antecedent. This is usually regarded as a task for parsing and thus in a sense pre-pragmatic.

There may be more than one possible reconstruction, as in the following example: John noticed that Mary left and Jane did too. Selection of the speaker's intended sense in such examples is a pragmatic task: a form of disambiguation. There is also 'semantic' or 'pragmatic' ellipsis. The questions in brackets illustrate in what way the meaning seems unspecific: [Marvellous! (what is marvellous?)], [The door is open. (which door?)], [He finished his book. (finished doing what with it?)], [On the top shelf. (what is on the top shelf?)]

🔑 Definition — Ellipsis: the omission of linguistic material from the pronounced form, recoverable from context or antecedent. 📌 Example: "Mary kicked John, and Jane, Bill" — kicked is ellipted in the second clause; full form: "Mary kicked John, and Jane kicked Bill."

📌 Example: "John noticed that Mary left and Jane did too" — ambiguous: did Jane notice, or did Jane leave? Pragmatic disambiguation is needed.

⭐ Key Takeaways

The most critical concepts for exam preparation from this lecture are: understanding the three related but distinct phenomena of ambiguity (multiple grammatical meanings), disambiguation (selecting the intended meaning), and vagueness (indeterminate meaning boundaries). The referential/attributive distinction is a key analytical tool for definite descriptions, while the code model presents a foundational but simplified view of communication. Communicative competence combines grammatical knowledge with social conventions for appropriate language use. Finally, demonstratives and ellipsis both require context-dependent recovery of referents or missing material, demonstrating the central pragmatic principle that meaning often goes beyond what is explicitly said.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between structural ambiguity and lexical ambiguity? Provide one example of each.
2. Explain the referential/attributive distinction for definite descriptions as proposed by Keith Donnellan.
3. What are the four conditions required for perfect communication according to the Code Model?
4. How does communicative competence differ from mere grammatical competence, and who coined this term?
5. In the sentence "John noticed that Mary left and Jane did too," what makes ellipsis a pragmatic (rather than purely syntactic) task?

📘 Lecture 39 — KEY TERMS IN PRAGMATICS-II

📖 Overview: This lecture explores advanced pragmatic terminology and concepts, including folk pragmatics, formal and experimental approaches, cognitive pragmatics, and various figures of speech. It also covers neo-Gricean principles and key theoretical notions like linguistic underdeterminacy, manifestness, and misfire. Understanding these terms is essential for analyzing how meaning is constructed, conveyed, and interpreted in real communication.

🗂️ Topics Covered

This lecture covers twenty key terms in pragmatics organized into distinct topics: folk pragmatics, formal and experimental pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, fragments, metaphor and synecdoche, hyperbole and irony, the I-Principle and M-Principle, the Q-Principle and R-Principle, the linguistic underdeterminacy thesis, manifestness and markedness, misfire, and prosody and tautology. Each term is defined and explained with examples from pragmatic theory.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 192 Folk Pragmatics

Folk pragmatics is modeled on folk physics and folk psychology—pre-theoretical expectations about how things work. Folk psychology involves pre-theoretical expectations about how behavior relates to thoughts and aims. One important source of evidence about folk beliefs is how we talk about communication in ordinary language. Everyday vocabulary is rich with words like topic, interruption, say, and means, as in "Did you mean that?"

The vocabulary for talking about communication varies across languages. For example, positive feedback through short words or encouraging noises is important in conversation across all languages and cultures. Systematic investigation in pragmatics often begins with folk words and transforms them into technical terms.

Topic – 193 "Formal" and "Experimental Pragmatics"

Formal Pragmatics is the study of pragmatic phenomena using techniques and notations from logic and mathematics. It is largely an extension of formal, model-theoretic semantics into the domain of more context-sensitive elements of speaker meaning. Formal pragmatics and dynamic approaches to semantics like Discourse Representation Theory are closely related. So far, work in formal pragmatics has only been concerned with a subset of pragmatic topics, particularly those at the semantic-pragmatics interface, including definiteness and indefiniteness, presupposition, scalar implicature, conventional implicature, and focus.

Formal pragmatics serves two important functions in Habermas's philosophy. First, it is the theoretical underpinning of the theory of communicative action, a crucial element of his theory of society. Second, it contributes to ongoing philosophical discussions regarding truth, meaning, rationality, and action.

Experimental Pragmatics involves the application of experimental techniques, largely from psycholinguistics, to areas of interest in pragmatics. Techniques include on-line measures like eye-tracking and timed responses to stimuli, and off-line measures like choosing the best sentence to describe a scene from a set of candidates. Experimental pragmatics is a very recent development, although existing psycholinguistic work on disambiguation, semantic illusions, and other aspects of interpretation is relevant.

Topic – 194 Cognitive Pragmatics

According to Bruno G. Bara (2010), Cognitive pragmatics focuses on the mental states and mental correlates of the participants in a conversation. The mental processes of human communication are based on three fundamental concepts: cooperation, sharedness, and communicative intention. These three fundamentals were proposed by Grice in 1975, though each has since been refined by other scholars.

The cooperative nature of communication is justified by the evolutionary perspective through which cooperative reasoning underlying a conversation is explained. Sharedness accounts for the possibility of comprehending non-standard communication such as deceit, irony, and figurative language. According to Nicholas Allott (1988), the role of language is to allow the communication of thoughts. For cognitive linguists, language and the way we think are not to be artificially separated, and the study of language is expected to yield insights into cognition in general: "language is a window into the mind" (Fauconnier).

Topic – 195 Fragment

Linguistic material that is less than a complete sentence is called a fragment. Many utterances are fragments. For example: "Over here!", "Water!", "On the second shelf down, behind the jam.", "Nice one!", and in dialogue: A: "How many cats do you have?" B: "Five."

Fragments are generally, although not always, linguistic constituents: preposition phrases, noun phrases, and so on. Uttering a non-constituent is usually strange, such as "*shelf down" or "*cats do you." Fragments can be used to express complete propositions. For example, a speaker uttering "On the top shelf" might mean "The jar is on the top shelf." In response to "Where are you going?" the answer can be "to school." In response to "Did you eat something?" the answer can be "ate nothing." It is controversial whether fragments are sometimes or never syntactically elliptical. Example: "Are you writing something?" — "A letter to my friend."

Topic – 196 Metaphor and Synecdoche

Metaphor is a type of figurative speech. Typically, a metaphor ascribes to an entity a property that it does not, strictly and literally speaking, possess, although not all metaphors fit this definition. Metaphors are not restricted to any particular type of word or phrase. The metaphorical element of a sentence can be a noun phrase, as in "John is an iceberg." Verbs can also be used metaphorically, as in "Flintoff drilled the ball to the boundary."

Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which an expression that denotes the part of something is used to refer to the whole. For example, "mouth" in "I've got six hungry mouths to feed." Another example is "willow" for cricket bat in phrases like "to wield the willow."

The term "synecdoche" is sometimes also regarded as including the use of an expression denoting a smaller class to refer to a larger class, and the converse situation. This is a very broad definition since it would include obvious metaphors such as "that animal" for "that man." Many cases of polysemy are regarded as related through synecdoche. One example is the two senses of "chicken": the type of bird, and the meat.

🔑 Definition — Synecdoche: a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole (or a smaller class for a larger class).

Topic – 197 Hyperbole and Irony

Hyperbole is a figure of speech also known as an overstatement, in which a speaker expresses an exaggerated meaning beyond what their words carry in themselves. Intuitively, this is a very common figure of speech. People often say "I am starving" when they mean they are merely rather hungry. "It's miles and miles" is a common way of complaining about even quite short distances. On a Gricean analysis, hyperbole is a blatant violation of the first maxim of quality. For example, the speaker is not literally starving. In the second example, the destination might be in the next street, but the speaker is exaggerating.

Irony is a figure of speech seen in examples like: Alistair (stepping out into heavy rain): "Another lovely day!" The classical conception of irony is that it is a figure of speech in which the speaker means the opposite of what her words mean. However, this condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for irony. For example, someone sees a car with a broken window and, attempting to draw attention to it ironically, says, "Look! That car hasn't got a broken window."

🔑 Definition — Hyperbole: a figure of speech involving exaggeration that goes beyond literal truth (overstatement). 🔑 Definition — Irony: a figure of speech where the speaker's intended meaning contrasts with the literal meaning of the words (traditionally the opposite).

Topic – 198 I-Principle and M-Principle

In neo-Gricean pragmatics, the I-principle or Informativeness-principle is one of a small number of principles that govern communicative behaviour. The I-principle enjoins speakers to say as little as necessary (while bearing in mind the opposing Q-principle). If a speaker's utterance appears to be governed by the I-principle, then the hearer can take it that the speaker expressed herself economically. The hearer can interpret the utterance as implicating information that is more specific than what is said, along stereotypical or expected lines.

When marked expressions are used, the M-principle comes into play. In neo-Gricean pragmatics, the M-principle or Manner principle is one of a small number of heuristics governing communicative behaviour. A brief formulation is: Speaker: Do not say things in an abnormal way without reason. Addressee: What is said in an abnormal way indicates an abnormal situation.

🔑 Definition — I-Principle: say as little as necessary; the hearer can infer more specific, stereotypical information. 🔑 Definition — M-Principle: abnormal expressions indicate abnormal situations.

Topic – 199 Q-Principle and R-Principle

In neo-Gricean pragmatics, the Q-principle or Quantity Principle is one of a small number of principles thought to govern communicative behaviour and the production of implicatures. The Q-principle is: Make your contribution sufficient; Say as much as you can (Given R). The Q-principle is intended to subsume Grice's first maxim of quantity and his first and second manner maxims. It enjoins the speaker to maximize the amount of information encoded and is described as a lower-bounding principle, responsible for implicatures.

In neo-Gricean pragmatics, the R-principle or Relation-principle is one of the small set of principles governing communicative behaviour. On one formulation: Make your contribution necessary; Say no more than you must (given the Q-principle). The R-principle enjoins the speaker to minimize the amount of linguistic material uttered, or more generally to minimize the effort involved in speech. It is described as an upper-bounding principle.

🔑 Definition — Q-Principle: say as much as you can (sufficient information); lower-bounding principle. 🔑 Definition — R-Principle: say no more than you must (minimize effort); upper-bounding principle.

Topic – 200 Linguistic Under-Determinacy Thesis

The linguistic underdeterminacy thesis (also called semantic underdeterminacy thesis or underdeterminacy thesis) is used for several distinct but related hypotheses. One hypothesis is that no sentences, or very few, encode a unique proposition: there are no "eternal sentences," or only a small proportion of sentences are "eternal." A second version is that in all or most cases when a sentence is uttered, what is encoded by the sentence falls short of the proposition expressed by the speaker. Both claims are controversial.

There is general agreement that for a hearer to arrive at the proposition expressed, reference must be assigned to indexicals and ambiguities must be resolved, as in: "I decided to sell the bat here last week." The linguistic underdeterminacy thesis claims that even abstracting away from indexicals and ambiguity, the proposition expressed by the speaker goes beyond the linguistic meaning of the sentence. On this view, sentences uttered must be enriched by pragmatic inference to arrive at the proposition expressed. In either case, the proposition expressed cannot be read off the sentence uttered—it must be inferred partly on the basis of the sentence, background knowledge, and other clues to the speaker's intentions.

🔑 Definition — Linguistic Underdeterminacy Thesis: the claim that what is linguistically encoded by a sentence falls short of the proposition expressed; pragmatic inference is needed to reach full speaker meaning.

Topic – 201 Manifestness and Markedness

In relevance theory, manifestness is the degree to which an assumption is accessible in a context on the basis of perception or inference. An assumption is manifest to a given individual whether or not they are capable of entertaining that assumption as true or false—the assumption need not actually be true; false assumptions can be entertained as true. Manifestness is a weaker notion than knowledge. It is a matter of degree: the more likely an assumption is to be entertained, the more highly manifest it is.

Mutual-manifestness refers to a shared cognitive environment in which it is manifest which people share. Mutual manifestness plays a role in relevance theory analogous to the role that some other pragmatic theorists have assigned to mutual knowledge. It explains how speaker and hearer can coordinate on an interpretation of an utterance.

Markedness is the extent to which an item in a language is out-of-the-ordinary. Unmarked items are normal, whereas marked items are relatively unusual. For example, the word "kine" is marked, while "cattle" is relatively unmarked. The idea that some linguistic items are more natural and common than others was an important feature of the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson. In pragmatics, it has been argued that an utterance containing marked items should have a marked meaning.

🔑 Definition — Manifestness: the degree to which an assumption is accessible in a context (weaker than knowledge). 🔑 Definition — Mutual-Manifestness: a shared cognitive environment where assumptions are manifest to all participants. 🔑 Definition — Markedness: the degree to which a linguistic item is unusual or out-of-the-ordinary.

Topic – 202 Misfire

In Austin's work, a misfire is one of the two ways in which a speech act can be unsuccessful. According to speech-act theory, there are felicity conditions on speech acts. If certain conditions are not met, then no speech act is performed. The relevant conditions are: (1) There is a conventional procedure with a conventional effect; (2) the participants and situation are appropriate according to that procedure; and (3) the procedure is carried out correctly and completely.

Consider this example: "The tailor pressed one suit in the municipal court." The reader may think suit refers to a piece of clothing, but here it refers to a legal action. Another example: "Stolen gun found by the victim." Here the reader interprets that the gun was found beside the victim (not that the victim found it, which was the intended meaning). Despite such possibilities, misfires are rare, and normally speakers can convey the meanings they intend with remarkable consistency.

🔑 Definition — Misfire: a speech act that fails to be performed because felicity conditions are not met.

Topic – 203 Prosody and Tautology

Prosody refers to variation in the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech at the level of utterances, rather than at the lexical level. The interaction of prosody with syntactic structure and its effect on interpretation are not well understood in general. For example, the difference in stress between "REcord" (noun) and "reCORD" (verb) is not a prosodic difference. However, the difference in stress positions in the following examples is prosodic: Alice eats GRASS. vs. Alice EATS grass.

Tautology is a statement that expresses a proposition that is necessarily true. For example: "2 + 2 = 4," "War is war," "If it rains, it rains." Since tautologies are necessarily true, it is hard to see how uttering one can be informative, relevant, or cooperative. Yet people do utter tautologies and are understood. An utterance of "War is war" might implicate that terrible things inevitably happen during wartime. However, what is communicated by a tautology can vary widely. For instance: Archie: "Can I borrow your pen?" Brenda: "Here you are. It's only a biro, though." Archie: "A pen is a pen." Here the tautology implicates that any pen, including Brenda's biro, will do for the task. The challenge is to show how such disparate implicatures can be derived.

🔑 Definition — Tautology: a statement that expresses a necessarily true proposition. 🔑 Definition — Prosody: variations in rhythm, stress, and intonation at the utterance level.

⭐ Key Takeaways

The lecture presents a comprehensive set of advanced pragmatic terms that every student must master for exam purposes. Key distinctions include the difference between formal pragmatics (using logic and mathematics) and experimental pragmatics (using psycholinguistic techniques), as well as the three fundamentals of cognitive pragmatics: cooperation, sharedness, and communicative intention. Students must understand the neo-Gricean principles (I, M, Q, and R principles) and how they govern implicature production. The linguistic underdeterminacy thesis is crucial—it asserts that sentences do not fully encode propositions and require pragmatic enrichment. Finally, the various figures of speech (metaphor, synecdoche, hyperbole, irony) and key notions (fragments, misfire, prosody, tautology, manifestness, and markedness) must be defined precisely with examples.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between formal pragmatics and experimental pragmatics, and what techniques does each use?

2. Define the I-principle and M-principle in neo-Gricean pragmatics. How do they interact in communication?

3. What does the linguistic underdeterminacy thesis claim, and why is it important for understanding speaker meaning?

4. Explain the difference between manifestness and mutual-manifestness in relevance theory.

5. What is a misfire in speech act theory? Provide the conditions that must be met for a speech act to be successful.

📘 Lecture 40 — KEY THINKERS IN PRAGMATICS

📖 Overview: This lecture introduces key thinkers who have shaped the field of pragmatics, including their major theories and contributions. It covers J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, Noam Chomsky’s views on meaning and grammar, H.P. Grice’s theories of meaning and conversation, Stephen Levinson’s work on politeness and implicatures, and John Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts. Understanding these foundational thinkers is essential for grasping how pragmatics evolved as a discipline distinct from semantics.

🗂️ Topics Covered

This lecture covers five major thinkers in pragmatics: John Langshaw Austin and his performative vs. constative utterances and speech act theory; Noam Avram Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance, Universal Grammar, and his skeptical views on pragmatics; Herbert Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning, conversational maxims, and implicature; Stephen C. Levinson’s theory of politeness, face, and generalized vs. particularized conversational implicatures; and John Rogers Searle’s work on speech act classification, direction of fit, and the Background.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 204 John Langshaw Austin

J.L. Austin, author of How to Do Things with Words, founded speech act theory by focusing on actions performed with language beyond making statements. He provided three justifications for this approach: first, how to use words; second, words are distinct from facts and things they describe; and third, our common vocabulary embodies all distinctions humans have found worth drawing. Austin examined several tests but found none that reliably discriminates between performatives and constatives. A decisive consideration is that the same form of words can function as either a performative (an utterance that performs an action) or a constative (an utterance that states a fact), depending on intention and context.

Austin preferred to see all utterances as performative, including apparent constatives like assertions and statements. According to him, if the force of an utterance is not determined by its linguistic structure—just as actions are not merely physical bodily movements—the question arises what else determines the type of action performed. Austin considered both the speaker’s intentions and social conventions as possible candidates. In his discussion of performatives, he was more attracted to the idea that conventions decide the illocutionary force of an utterance, having in mind speech acts embedded in fixed social routines, such as naming a ship.

💡 Why this matters: Austin shifted the focus of language study from truth-conditional meaning to what people do with words, laying the foundation for all subsequent work in pragmatics.

🔑 Definition — Performative utterance: an utterance that performs an action rather than simply describing or stating something (e.g., “I name this ship the Titanic”). 🔑 Definition — Constative utterance: an utterance that describes or states a fact and can be evaluated as true or false. 🔑 Definition — Illocutionary force: the intended function or act performed by an utterance (e.g., warning, promising, ordering).

Topic – 205 Noam Avram Chomsky

Chomsky’s views on meaning are directly relevant to pragmatics. He has stated that there is no such thing as semantics—only syntax and pragmatics—and has been interpreted as suggesting that a theory of language use is impossible since it would require a theory of everything. A fundamental of Chomskyan linguistics is the distinction between competence (what is unconsciously known about language) and performance (what is done with that knowledge). This distinction allows linguists to focus on properties of the grammatical system, abstracting away from how it is used.

Principles shared by all languages are taken to be aspects of Universal Grammar, innately specified. For example, natural language is recursive, allowing a phrase to be embedded in another phrase with no principled limit on depth of embedding. All languages also have structural dependencies between elements within sentences—structural limitations on which words can be linked. Most of Chomsky’s work aims at understanding the organizing principles of grammar that underlie such facts, with an emphasis on explaining rather than simply cataloguing.

Generative Grammar is a term introduced by Chomsky. This work on the nature and acquisition of grammar must be supplemented with an account of the acquisition of individual lexical items—for example, how the word “cat” links the speech sounds /kæt/ to a certain concept. Chomsky describes Descartes’ view of language use, which he shares, as follows: “Normal human speech is unbounded, free of stimulus control, coherent and appropriate, evoking thoughts that the listener might have expressed—what we might call the creative aspect of language use.” He thinks that pragmatics—systematic study of the use of language—is pointless or impossible.

🔑 Definition — Competence: the unconscious knowledge a speaker has about the rules of their language. 🔑 Definition — Performance: the actual use of language in concrete situations. 🔑 Definition — Universal Grammar: the set of innate, universal principles that govern all human languages. 🔑 Definition — Generative Grammar: a formal system for describing the syntactic structure of sentences, introduced by Chomsky. 🔑 Definition — Creative aspect of language use: the unbounded, stimulus-free, coherent, and appropriate nature of normal human speech.

Topic – 206 Herbert Paul Grice

Of all thinkers, Grice has had the greatest influence on the development of pragmatics. Two connected parts of his work have been profoundly influential: his theory of meaning and his theory of conversation. Grice introduces his distinction between natural and non-natural meaning by way of “linguistic botanizing.” He notes that the words “mean” and “meaning” can be used in different ways. One way is exemplified by “Those spots mean measles”—this is natural meaning. The other use is found in “Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full”—this is non-natural meaning.

A borrowed term maxim is a principle that motivates an agent to act in a certain way. The conversational maxims outline how an agent should behave to be cooperative in a conversation. Speakers know that hearers can do this, and therefore a speaker can make an utterance with the rational intention to convey an implicature. The conversational maxims outline how an agent should behave to be cooperative. Grice’s focus was to understand humans as rational agents—beings who have reasons for their actions and attitudes. He tried to understand actions and attitudes partly in terms of the reasons people might give for them and the reasoning they might follow to work out which attitude to adopt or action to take.

🔑 Definition — Natural meaning: meaning that is a matter of fact or evidence (e.g., spots meaning measles). 🔑 Definition — Non-natural meaning (meaningNN): meaning that depends on the intentions of a speaker to communicate something to a hearer. 🔑 Definition — Conversational maxim: a guiding principle for cooperative conversation (quantity, quality, relation, manner). 🔑 Definition — Implicature: what is communicated indirectly beyond the literal meaning of an utterance.

Topic – 207 Stephen C. Levinson

Levinson describes politeness phenomena in language use, which is largely responsible for the proliferation of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies of politeness in speech. Levinson’s theory describes two aspects of people’s face: negative face (the desire for autonomy and freedom from imposition) and positive face (the desire for approval and belonging). He introduces the term Face Threatening Acts (FTAs)—utterances that potentially threaten someone’s face. Positive politeness is directed towards the addressee’s positive face, and negative politeness is directed towards the negative face of the addressee. Levinson argued that a distinction between utterance-type and utterance-token meaning is necessary to capture facts about implicatures.

Generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs) are defined as those that are normally carried without any reference to context. Particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs), on the other hand, require special circumstances—they are not conveyed just by a certain way of saying something, but by saying it in a certain context. According to Levinson, the I-principle and the M-principle also give rise to GCIs. The claim is that default interpretations are necessary for efficient communication given limitations on the physical channel of communication—that we speak slowly and sequentially.

Levinson also explores possible connections between default interpretations and defeasible inferences (inferences that can be canceled). In Presumptive Meanings, Levinson contributes to the debate about linguistic under-determinacy of the proposition expressed. He suggests that GCIs contribute to the truth conditions of utterances, including constructions formed by logical operators: conjunction, disjunction, conditionals, and so on.

🔑 Definition — Negative face: the desire to be unimpeded, free from imposition. 🔑 Definition — Positive face: the desire to be liked, approved of, and valued. 🔑 Definition — Face Threatening Act (FTA): an utterance that potentially damages someone's face. 🔑 Definition — Generalized conversational implicature (GCI): an implicature that arises by default without requiring special context. 🔑 Definition — Particularized conversational implicature (PCI): an implicature that depends on specific contextual circumstances. 🔑 Definition — Defeasible inference: an inference that can be canceled or overridden by additional information.

Topic – 208 John Rogers Searle

John Searle is an American philosopher best known in pragmatics for his work on speech acts. Searle’s notion of “the Background” is also relevant to pragmatics. Searle’s contributions extend to philosophy of mind and social philosophy as well as philosophy of language. Searle tried to answer these questions about speech acts: Why are speech acts grouped together in classes? Why are there five classes, and not more or fewer? He proposed that classes of speech acts can be distinguished by two properties: direction of fit and what it is that they express. Searle uses the phrase “direction of fit” as a label for a distinction inspired by something.

According to Searle, there are four possible directions of fit. As well as word-to-world (words match the world) and world-to-word (the world is changed to match words), there is the double direction of fit (both word-to-world and world-to-word) and the null direction of fit. Searle proposes that declarations have the double direction of fit—they change the world by representing it as changed.

Expressives have the null direction of fit: they express an emotional attitude towards a fact presumed to be true—for example, “I am sorry that I tripped you.” Commissives share the world-to-word direction of fit with directives, with the intention belonging to the speaker. This taxonomy of speech acts has been influential but has come in for serious criticism. Searle wrote that it is “pointless and perverse” to study language abstracting away from its use in communication.

🔑 Definition — Direction of fit: the relationship between words and the world; whether words are intended to match the world (word-to-world) or the world is intended to match words (world-to-word). 🔑 Definition — Declaration: a speech act that changes the world by representing it as changed (double direction of fit; e.g., “I now pronounce you husband and wife”). 🔑 Definition — Expressive: a speech act that expresses a psychological state about a state of affairs (null direction of fit; e.g., apologizing, thanking). 🔑 Definition — Commissive: a speech act that commits the speaker to some future action (world-to-word direction of fit; e.g., promising). 🔑 Definition — Directive: a speech act that attempts to get the hearer to do something (world-to-word direction of fit; e.g., ordering, requesting).

⭐ Key Takeaways

This lecture covers five foundational thinkers in pragmatics, each contributing distinct but interconnected ideas. J.L. Austin founded speech act theory by showing that utterances can perform actions (performatives) in addition to stating facts (constatives), with illocutionary force determined by intention and convention. Noam Chomsky introduced the competence-performance distinction and Universal Grammar, but controversially considered pragmatics impossible to study systematically. H.P. Grice provided the most influential framework with his distinction between natural and non-natural meaning, the cooperative principle and conversational maxims, and the concept of implicature. Stephen Levinson advanced politeness theory through the concepts of face (positive and negative), face-threatening acts, and the distinction between generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. Finally, John Searle systematized speech act classification using direction of fit (word-to-world, world-to-word, double, and null), proposing five classes of speech acts. For the exam, you must understand each thinker’s core concept, how they differ from one another, and how their theories connect to the broader study of pragmatics.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between a performative utterance and a constative utterance according to Austin, and what determines which one a given utterance is?
2. Explain Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance, and why he believed pragmatics might be impossible to study systematically.
3. What is the difference between natural meaning and non-natural meaning in Grice’s theory?
4. How does Levinson distinguish between generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs) and particularized conversational implicatures (PCIs)?
5. According to Searle, what are the four possible directions of fit, and which direction of fit do declarations have?

📘 Lecture 41 — Interactional Construction of Identity

📖 Overview: This lecture explores how identity is constructed and performed through language in social interactions, focusing on the sociopragmatic dimensions of speaking. It examines how speakers use linguistic strategies to signal group membership, navigate cultural expectations, and negotiate their identities in both L1 and L2 contexts. Understanding these processes is crucial for second language learners and educators to facilitate effective cross-cultural communication.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers the introduction to interactional construction of identity through sociopragmatics, the role of sociocultural factors in identity formation for language learners, Action Theory and Clark's framework for understanding joint activities and pragmatic meaning, studies of identities through code-switching in community settings like the Lotería game, occasioning identity work in conversational discourse, and identity work in educational contexts for ESL learners.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 209 Introduction

Sociopragmatics focuses primarily on the social rules of speaking and how communication of pragmatic meaning involves speakers' presentation of their identities (LoCastro, 2012). Convergence to social norms occurs where the speaker indicates a desire to be a member of a community. While interacting with other community members, the speaker adapts norms and nonstandard language unwillingly.

The categories used to describe features of human beings, such as ethnicity, race, gender, and socioeconomic background/class, are abstractions. Those abstractions become real or transparent as they are enacted through our choices of clothing, hairstyles, posture, lifestyles, and most assuredly how we use language. Word choice, prosody, tone of voice, degree of grammatical complexity, and interactional routines are components of socio-pragmatics. Linguistic strategies and cues convey and build identities of speakers/listeners as they "perform identity."

While individuals are likely to use more than one cue to display their identities in doing relational work in a group setting, one may suffice to signal one aspect of a person (LoCastro, 2012). For instance, pronouncing 'hotpot' in Pakistani rural areas shows the involvement of other culture in native accent.

💡 Why this matters: The enactment of identity in the construction of interactional meaning is critical for pragmatics, especially for second language learners who must navigate multiple cultural and linguistic identities.

Topic – 210 Role of Sociocultural Factors in Identity

Language learners may experience difficulties in relation to their L1 identities in acquiring a second language. For instance, American women who were working or studying in Japan realized that their culture was the major language barrier. They had to face unexamined, external expectations, both at the individual and group level. Even their teaching materials reproduced the gender assumptions of the local, Japanese cultural values.

Non-native speakers of an L2 may seek to maintain their ethnolinguistic identity owing to pressures from their L1 community as many speakers use English as Lingua Franca. Maintaining a "foreign" accent allows the speakers to avoid heavy sanctions for inappropriately signaling pragmatic meaning as a nonnative speaker. Examples of ethnolinguistic identity maintenance include code switching and maintenance of sociolinguistic markers in speech.

Al-Issa (2003: 594) analyzed a conversation of three interviewees who used "God willing" (in Sha'Allah) in their English refusal responses (LoCastro, 2012). When asked about the use of the expression, all seemed to emphasize the role of Islam in their lives and how Muslims should obey its rules.

💡 Why this matters: To understand sociocultural factors, think about quotes you mention in your daily life – religious, historical, socio-cultural, etc. – or of any person who has an impact on your identity.

Topic – 211 Action Theory

All theories of pragmatic meaning include a basic notion, labeled shared background knowledge, world knowledge, or common ground (LoCastro 2012). Action and Activity – Joint actions can consist of speech events, in which conversants "negotiate deals, gossip, get to know each other" (Clark 1996: 17).

However, when the frame for a joint activity is not shared, then the participants even at a supermarket may not be able to achieve their goals. Coordination problems at the level of local joint actions are multiple, the primary one being "what the speakers mean and what their addressees understand them to mean" (Clark, 1996: 73).

Mis-coordination can be wiped out through language, the conventional signaling system par excellence, or through coordination devices such as gestures. Features of language in use – the length of clauses, the rhythmic placement of turn-taking cues, and tag questions – develop out of the need to achieve joint activities.

Pragmatic meaning – that "extra" meaning that goes beyond the linguistic signals – is created in the course of joint action. Clark's theory provides a framework for studying how speakers and listeners embed signals regarding their identities in their talk. The only evidence to support action theory involves the sociolinguistic dimensions of interactional discourse (LoCastro, 2012).

Topic – 212 Studies of Identities

One study that clearly demonstrates the ways in which participants in local talk-in-interaction enact their identities in the flow of playing a game at a senior citizens' program was carried out by Cashman (2005).

Rather than follow the more traditional or classic view of code switching based on language code change as a reflection of the social structure of the urban Latino community, Cashman observed members of the community as they did "identity work," embedded in the social activity of playing lotería, a Mexican version of bingo that uses pictures rather than numbers or letters. The players of the Lotería had varying degrees of Spanish-English bilingual proficiency and they used language preference and alternation as a resource to do identity work.

📌 Example: Ednita signals she is Spanish-dominant (LoCastro, 2012). Ednita is calling a game of lotería, which entails shaking a jar full of bottle caps, then taking a cap out and saying aloud what the picture is on the cap. She tells participants in Spanish that the bottle cap has a picture of the world with a man below holding the globe up. Yesenia, the program coordinator, translates Ednita's talk and then elaborates in Spanish. Cashman claims Yesenia uses both languages because, in her role as coordinator, she needs to attend to the needs of both Spanish- and English-speaking senior citizens. This "preference-related code-switching" is not necessarily related to the speakers' communicative ability in the language varieties in the community's linguistic repertoire (Cashman 2005: 306).

Topic – 213 Occasioning Identity Work

Identity becomes transparent in the course of conversations, where an unexpected intonation contour provides a clue that the speaker is, despite fluency in English, originally from Italy, and this background information is a feature of that person's identity. Identity also becomes noticeable in the course of a discussion of content where an individual contributes information about Middle Eastern food preparation.

The focus is on the identity work a speaker did while talking about his teaching practices during an interview (LoCastro, 2012). The researcher posed open-ended questions so that he could communicate his own thinking about his membership in the category of a professional, responsible teacher in the cultural context of teaching U.S. undergraduates. The noticeable topic of the talk that evidences his doing identity work is the comparisons he makes between "other" graduate teaching assistants and himself.

He focuses on how many other teachers talk or dominate in the classrooms. Seemingly out of awareness, he distances himself from the others and tries to demonstrate how he is better than they are. He puts himself into the category of being a "good" teacher by modeling his behavior on the "cool" Caucasian or American teaching assistants. Within the discourse of discussing his teaching practices with the researcher, he is expressing his resistance to being positioned as a typical teaching assistant, often denigrated at the university by regular faculty, students, and administrators (LoCastro, 2012).

Topic – 214 Identity Work in an Educational Context

Identity in an L2 context may be problematic for learners of the L2, even in the foreign language learning environment. The word "identity" does not commonly come into the media talk, yet it is clearly part of the discourse, unexamined though it may be even by the participants. It is such populations, of international or nonnative speakers as residents within the receiving country/culture – particularly if the language is that of a high prestige country – that experience the most problems revolving around the notion of identity and accommodation to the local context. Talmy's study (2009) provides a lead-in for discussion regarding the relevance of identity studies for language educators. It depicts the learning environment of ESL students at a Honolulu high school, but the situation is by no means unique to that school (LoCastro, 2012). Menard-Warwick (2009) states that resistance to learning develops when educational systems fail to take into account identity.

Language educators can facilitate linguistic and pragmatic competence development of such students by going beyond the regular curriculum to promote motivation and encouraging further learning of a language. Online exchanges may also address the important question of identity in an instructed learning environment. Teachers may function as role models and encourage outside of the classroom activities to foster learners' ongoing L2 identity construction (LoCastro, 2012).

⭐ Key Takeaways

The lecture emphasizes that identity is not a fixed trait but is dynamically constructed and performed through linguistic choices in social interactions. Sociopragmatic factors such as word choice, prosody, accent, and code-switching serve as tools for signaling group membership and cultural affiliation. Action Theory, particularly Clark's framework, highlights that pragmatic meaning emerges from joint activities requiring shared background knowledge. Studies like Cashman's Lotería game research demonstrate how bilingual speakers strategically use language preference to negotiate social roles. For educators, acknowledging the role of identity in language learning is critical to overcoming resistance and fostering motivation, especially for L2 learners navigating between cultures.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What is the difference between convergence and ethnolinguistic identity maintenance in sociopragmatic terms?
2. How does Clark's Action Theory explain the creation of pragmatic meaning beyond linguistic signals?
3. In Cashman's Lotería study, what does "preference-related code-switching" reveal about identity work?
4. According to Menard-Warwick (2009), why does resistance to learning develop in educational contexts?
5. How can language educators facilitate L2 identity construction for international students?

📘 Lecture 42 — Language, Gender, and Power

📖 Overview: This lecture explores the relationship between language, gender, and power, examining how gender is enacted through language use in various cultural contexts. It discusses Western and non-Western perspectives on gendered language, the role of power in linguistic interactions, and how political discourse functions as a tool for maintaining power structures. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for analyzing how language both reflects and reinforces social hierarchies.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers the enactment of gender in language use, including how children acquire gendered linguistic awareness and the debate between dominance and difference approaches. It examines Western perspectives on gendered speech variables like h-dropping and honorifics, then contrasts these with non-Western perspectives from Japan, India, and Pakistan. The lecture also addresses the relationship between power, language, and gender, explores social constructionism, and analyzes how power operates in political discourse through critical discourse analysis (CDA).

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 215 Enactment of Gender in Language Use

The term "gendered" communicates that gender is an action, something one does in contexts like media, workplace, religion, and family (LoCastro, 2012). Children acquire awareness of gender at very early ages — for example, female children learn that pink is the color for girls. These nonverbal cues of femaleness translate into differences in language use.

Tannen (1993) claimed that while dominance by men of women exists, it is not possible to attribute the cause of this dominance to specific linguistic realizations such as indirectness, interruptions, or topic shifts (LoCastro, 2012). According to LoCastro (2012), many books have been written on gender-biased language in English, such as the excessive use of 'He' rather than 'She'. Certain language uses, from word choice to speaking styles, remain negatively linked to female gender and serve to construct and reinforce social differences. Cultural differences abound in this regard, resulting in markers of being female as highly valued and desirable.

🔑 Definition — Gendered: The notion that gender is an action, something one performs in various social contexts rather than a fixed biological attribute.

💡 Why this matters: Understanding that gender is enacted through language helps explain how subtle linguistic choices can reinforce or challenge gender stereotypes in everyday interactions.

Topic – 216 Western Perspectives

LoCastro (2012) highlights a speech variable found in Australia and the U.K. where women may drop their h's — a practice called h-dropping, occurring in everyday words like 'ouse (house) and 'ome (home) (Trudgill, 1972; Milroy, 1989).

In Western cultural contexts, men are stereotypically viewed as more likely to dominate in mixed-gender groupings. However, female participants sometimes exclude men from conversation by selecting topics such as choices of dresses, personal feelings, or house chores. In Western societies, research has differentiated between male/female behavior, both verbal and non-verbal. Historically, efforts to describe discrimination against women in U.S. society focused on women's use of language. Women in the U.S. experience the binary choice between being addressed by either Mrs. or Miss plus their family name.

Non-Western Perspectives

In Japan, women use "Respectful Prefixes" known as honorifics, based on politeness in formal contexts (Maynard, 1990). According to Ide and Inoue (1991), Japanese women of higher social status tend to use more elaborated honorifics to signal beauty, grace, and dignity. Ide (2005) uses the term "beautification" honorifics, a form of gendered language use that does not correlate with dominance in Japan.

In India and Pakistan, English is used as a dominant language in the elite class, showing influence by Western culture. Errington states that language is sometimes "gender-neutral" in Asian Culture. Examples of gender-neutral features include: lack of gender marking with articles or morphemes on nouns; specific lexemes like "human" or "person" are not marked for feminine or masculine. The local greeting asks "how many older and younger siblings do you have" rather than "how many brothers and sisters do you have" (Atkinson and Errington, 1990).

🔑 Definition — Honorifics: Linguistic forms (like respectful prefixes) used in Japanese to signal politeness, beauty, grace, and dignity, particularly by women of higher social status.

📌 Example: In Japan, women use elaborated honorifics to signal beauty and dignity (Ide and Inoue, 1991), while in India and Pakistan, English functions as a dominant language marking elite status, showing Western cultural influence.

Topic – 217 Power: Language and Gender

According to LoCastro (2012), power has a role in any consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Keating (2009) defines power "as the ability or capacity to perform or act effectively; to exert control over others" (LoCastro, 2012). For example, participants enact their background knowledge, beliefs, caste, or status (e.g., political background) while talking to friends to create an impact. Language plays a great role in producing and reproducing the underlying structures of power and control in a society (LoCastro, 2012).

Tannen (1993) sees differences arising from how female and male children are raised and socialized in their local communities. Female/male behavior differs in interaction and communication strategies and the use of power in the workplace (LoCastro, 2012).

One marker of women's lower status has been their use of language, such as tentativeness; Lakoff claimed this signaled uncertainty and the need for approval, both pragmatic meanings inferred from interactions (LoCastro, 2012). In cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, gender may vary as an issue. The postmodern stance sees gender not as a static characteristic, but rather as "performed" in local contexts (Butler, 1990).

Social constructionism is based on the assumption that gender, like identity, is not a fixed characteristic of human beings; rather, it is created in the context of everyday talk and interaction. Cameron (2005) claims the real worldview of gender and the institutionalized support for discrimination on the basis of gender must be examined. Cameron argues "the alleged problem of male–female misunderstanding appears to be common in societies where the influence of feminism has made gender relations a matter of contestation."

Variables such as gender, age, social class, and race cannot be ignored (LoCastro, 2012). Individuals cannot be free of wider social, political, and economic pressures from dominant beliefs and practices that stereotype one gender — for example, women as more polite than men, or aggressive speech style as typical only of men.

🔑 Definition — Social constructionism: The assumption that gender, like identity, is not a fixed characteristic but is created in the context of everyday talk and interaction.

🔑 Definition — Postmodern stance on gender: The view that gender is not static but "performed" in local contexts (Butler, 1990).

💡 Why this matters: Recognizing gender as socially constructed rather than fixed allows for understanding how language can either challenge or reinforce gender-based discrimination in different cultural settings.

Topic – 218 Working of Language and Power: Political Discourse

Political discourse is a genre of language in use often viewed as a transparent vehicle used by politicians to preserve or create their own power. The speech of a country's president is supposed to maintain the face of the speaker as the main governmental leader (LoCastro, 2012). The study of language and power also examines how linguistic structures create reality — a reality that maintains and extends power relations in a society.

The study of language and power is often designated as CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) (LoCastro, 2012). There are numerous ways power is enacted in discourse: doctor–patient interactions, immigration checkpoints, political campaigns, or the use of tag questions, turn taking, adjacency pairs, introduction and uptake of topics, politeness strategies, and choice of formal or informal speaking styles.

According to LoCastro (2012), power is often expressed through language. Power cannot be explained without contextualization. The exercise of power involves a latent conflict and clash of interest, which can be obscured because of society's ideologies.

🔑 Definition — Political discourse: A genre of language use where politicians use language as a vehicle to preserve or create their own power.

🔑 Definition — CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis): The study of how language and power interact, examining how linguistic structures create and maintain power relations in society.

📌 Example: Power is enacted in discourse through doctor–patient interactions, immigration checkpoints, political campaigns, tag questions, turn taking, adjacency pairs, politeness strategies, and choice of formal or informal speaking styles.

Topic – 219 Working of Language and Power: Political Discourse

Researchers emphasize language use in context, which includes extra-textual variables such as age, socioeconomic background, social status, and gender. Research emphasizes co-construction of gender identities in everyday talk. For example, a woman tries to prove herself the most beautiful among her friends by giving arguments and comparison with other siblings.

According to Vine (2009), the purpose of each interaction considers the effects on participants as well as the frequency and choice of speech act. If the purpose of interaction is problem solving, then imperatives can be "softened".

Consider these two examples from Vine (2009: 1400):

1. "You finish doing it and make some notes"
2. "Well um put a real- a really simple brief what we need to know in order to respond to that"

In this example, the participants tolerated these direct imperatives in the context of a high-involvement, long planning meeting where they summarized actions to be taken to solve an urgent problem (LoCastro, 2012).

🔑 Definition — Co-construction of gender identities: The process by which gender is created and negotiated through everyday talk and interaction.

📌 Example: A woman trying to prove herself most beautiful among friends by giving arguments and comparisons with other siblings demonstrates co-construction of gender identity in everyday talk.

📐 Analysis: Direct imperatives like "You finish doing it" and "put a real simple brief" are tolerated in high-involvement, problem-solving meetings because the context (urgent problem, long planning meeting) justifies the directness (Vine, 2009).

⭐ Key Takeaways

Gender is enacted through language use across various social contexts, and children acquire gendered linguistic awareness from very early ages through nonverbal cues like color associations. The lecture contrasts Western perspectives (where men stereotypically dominate mixed-gender groupings and women may use h-dropping) with non-Western perspectives (where Japanese women use "beautification" honorifics and Asian languages may be gender-neutral). Power is central to understanding gender and language, with social constructionism arguing that gender is performed and created through everyday talk rather than being a fixed characteristic. Political discourse functions as a tool for maintaining power structures, studied through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), where linguistic structures create and extend power relations. The co-construction of gender identities in everyday talk and the importance of contextual variables (age, class, status) cannot be ignored when analyzing language, gender, and power.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. What does Tannen (1993) claim about the relationship between linguistic features (like interruptions and topic shifts) and male dominance?
2. What is "beautification" honorifics according to Ide (2005), and how do they function in Japanese society?
3. According to social constructionism, how is gender created and what role does everyday talk play?
4. What is CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) and what types of interactions does it examine for power enactment?
5. According to Vine (2009), why are direct imperatives tolerated in certain workplace interactions, and what does this reveal about language and context?

📘 Lecture 43 — Classroom Pragmatic Development

📖 Overview: This lecture examines the teaching and learning of pragmatic competence in second/foreign language instructional settings. It addresses why pragmatic competence is crucial for ESL learners, whether it can be effectively taught in classrooms, and what factors influence its development. The lecture also explores practical solutions for facilitating pragmatic instruction and extends beyond traditional classrooms to workplace contexts.

🗂️ Topics Covered

The lecture covers five main topics: an introduction to the challenges of teaching pragmatics outside the target language community; the importance of pragmatic competence for second language learners; whether pragmatic competence can be taught in instructed contexts; difficulties in developing pragmatic competence in classrooms; what can be done to facilitate teaching and learning of pragmatic competence; and training in pragmatics outside the traditional language classroom, particularly for workplace communication.

📝 Lecture Summary

Topic – 220 Introduction

The main concern is teaching a foreign language outside the target language community, where learners may have virtually no opportunities for contact with speakers of the foreign language or exposure through local media sources such as newspapers, radio, and TV programs (LoCastro, 2012). Some argue that the Internet has solved this problem for cross-cultural communication through social media interactions with different nations. However, these sources lack the important dimension of learners actually producing talk in interactional contexts (LoCastro, 2012).

The main focus of this module is on instructional settings, primarily Pragmatic Development Classrooms, for second/foreign language learners. It asks: Why is pragmatic competence important for ESL learners? Can it be taught in instructional contexts? What factors influence the learning?

💡 Why this matters: This establishes the fundamental challenge that learners in foreign language settings lack authentic interactional exposure, making classroom instruction crucial yet inherently limited.

Topic – 221 Why Is Pragmatic Competence Important for 2nd Language Learners?

According to LoCastro (2012), pragmatic competence for second language learners is important even more than acquiring high linguistic proficiency in the L2. Pragmatic competence helps learners to use the correct phrases in a particular situation. In this situation, a well-phrased question, asking for information about what bus to take, not only goes far to obtain the correct information but also can help to break down barriers.

According to LoCastro (2012), during learning, the learners should be given a chance to bring in personal experience and make connections with the real world of conversational interactions. To sum up, pragmatic competence cannot be ignored in everyday conversation.

🔑 Definition — Pragmatic Competence: The ability to use language appropriately in social contexts, understanding and producing correct phrases for particular situations.

Topic – 222 Can Pragmatic Competence be Taught or Learnt in Instructed Contexts?

LoCastro (2012) has focused on instructed development, that is, in classrooms or other contexts organized for learning, as the acquisition of pragmatic competence in a naturalistic environment. Kasper and Rose (2002) argue that L2 pragmatics can be taught.

According to Kanaggy (1999), the children in Japan are taught the cultural practices and the pragmatic meanings of the routines in classrooms including nonverbal behaviors. Children cannot learn to say "thank you" without an adult in their immediate environment instructing them about the phrase and its context of use.

Local teachers can teach pragmatic competence in a better way because, sometimes, native speakers of the target language may shy away from making learners aware of miscommunication due to local sociocultural influences (Kasper and Rose, 2002).

💡 Why this matters: This counters the assumption that only native speakers can teach pragmatics—local teachers may actually be more effective at addressing sociocultural miscommunication.

Topic – 223 Difficulty in the Development of Pragmatic Competence in a Classroom

According to LoCastro (2012), it is particularly difficult for non-native teachers to develop pragmatic competence in a foreign language context. They may have had no experience abroad in the target language environment. McKay (2002) lists three reasons the ELT field has had to revise its goals and teachers their practices:

1. Learners of English as a second/foreign language do not have to also learn the cultures of native speakers of English;
2. English is not "owned" by native speakers only; and
3. The main goal of learners is to communicate their own ideas and cultures to others, not become native speakers of the language.

Another factor is lack of materials: textbooks, dictionaries, videos, multimedia, and tests. Unfortunately, the materials may misrepresent the target language culture and its social rules of speaking. Another factor which gets in the way to develop pragmatic competence is "learners themselves".

📌 Example of material misrepresentation: Textbooks may present oversimplified or stereotypical versions of greetings, apologies, or requests that do not reflect actual native speaker usage patterns.

Topic – 224 What can be Done to Facilitate the Teaching and Learning of Pragmatic Competence?

According to LoCastro (2012), teachers do not take the pain to develop pragmatic competence because they are non-natives and have not experienced the environment of the target language. If ESL teachers are given a chance of one- or two-months training abroad in that environment, they can be beneficial for the learners.

The second point LoCastro mentions is "Awareness Raising" among teachers because there is a lack of teacher training programs. Teachers should be properly guided about the selection of material, the choice of activities, and the importance of pragmatic competence. In the next step, language teachers would build the awareness in the learners. For example, the skills in the primary language and culture to help them become more capable of understanding and enacting pragmatic meanings in the target language (LoCastro, 2012).

Teachers and students can promote discussion of diversity, difference, and tolerance towards language use variation as well as nonlinguistic behaviors to create mindfulness regarding a non-deficit view of self and others. The students can also collect examples from the public mass media (LoCastro, 2012).

📌 Example of awareness raising: A teacher might show a video of a native speaker refusing an invitation, then guide students to notice the politeness strategies, hesitations, and softeners used, which textbooks often omit.

Topic – 225 Training in Pragmatics Outside the Traditional Language Classroom

Teaching to develop pragmatic competence does not end for L2 learners in language-focused classrooms. Indeed, there exist advanced communicative needs, particularly regarding workplace literacy skills, job interviews, and business letter writing tasks, etc. LoCastro (2012) has mentioned some factors which are highly important to find a good job.

For example, self-presentation, grammatical and lexical accuracy and appropriacy, and the ability to produce synthesized talk about personal and professional experiences and interests, etc. In this regard, Louw, Derwing, and Abbott (2010) have developed a research-based pedagogical process to help L2 learners improve their job-interviewing skills. A combination of videos of simulated job interviews, critiquing by experts on the needed skills, and trial runs by students led to improve their skills. Small talk, enthusiasm, body language, evidence of cross-cultural misunderstanding, intelligibility, and a positive demeanor are also focused.

The instructional process outside of the traditional classroom comprised three phases such as:

1. Students would observe native speaker discourse for job interviews;
2. Becoming aware of differences and salient features; and
3. Having lots of practice using new discourse and socio-pragmatic strategies.

Such training for the workplace context can be a challenge for employers or new employees (LoCastro, 2012).

📌 Example of workplace pragmatics training: A student watches a video of a native speaker job interview, notes how the candidate uses small talk to build rapport, practices using similar strategies in a mock interview, and receives expert feedback on appropriateness.

⭐ Key Takeaways

The most critical points from this lecture are: pragmatic competence is arguably more important than high linguistic proficiency for L2 learners because it enables appropriate social interaction. Pragmatic competence can be taught in instructed contexts, and local non-native teachers may be better positioned than native speakers to address sociocultural miscommunication. However, non-native teachers face significant difficulties due to lack of target language environment experience and inadequate materials. Solutions include short-term teacher training abroad, awareness raising for both teachers and learners, and using authentic materials from mass media. Finally, pragmatic training extends beyond traditional classrooms to workplace contexts like job interviews, where a combination of observation, expert critique, and practice with simulated scenarios has proven effective.

🧠 Quick Revision Questions

1. According to LoCastro (2012), why is pragmatic competence considered more important than high linguistic proficiency for second language learners?
2. What are the three reasons McKay (2002) gives for why the ELT field has had to revise its goals regarding native speaker culture?
3. What is "awareness raising" in the context of teaching pragmatic competence, and how does it work for both teachers and learners?
4. What are the three phases of the instructional process for teaching pragmatics outside the traditional classroom, as developed by Louw, Derwing, and Abbott (2010)?
5. Why might local non-native teachers be better at teaching pragmatic competence than native speakers, according to Kasper and Rose (2002)?