Pragmatics

Pragmatics or pragmalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that is interested in the influence of context on the interpretation of meaning. The context must be understood here as the set of aspects involved in addition to the strictly linguistic ones: communicative status, previous knowledge shared by the speakers, interpersonal relationships, etc. By taking situational factors into account (unlike formal linguistic studies), pragmatics is also the focus of other disciplines such as philosophy of language, communication, and psycholinguistics.

Introduction

Sentences themselves carry semantic content, but their proper meaning and interpretation do not depend solely on that content but require a defined linguistic context in order to be interpreted. It is a well-known elementary fact that the same sentence can have different intentions or interpretations in different contexts (it can be literal, ironic or metaphorical). In fact, in pragmatics a distinction is made between statement (locutionary act) and sentence (grammatical form that the locutionary act takes). Various authors have tried to characterize different aspects of pragmatic knowledge to explain how the speaker makes deductions and inferences about the intentionality of the sentences and how, together with the grammatical decoding that builds the literal semantic content, he adequately interprets the statements.

Reference and inference

The reference is an act carried out by a communicator who sends a message (whether spoken, written or through other linguistic codes) to identify something. For this purpose it uses certain expressions. For each word or each phrase there is a "reference range"; the same word can refer to many real entities. We can even refer to things that we don't know how to name and invent a name or expression for them. However, inference is an act carried out by the receiver of the message (listener or reader) to correctly interpret the reference. The words themselves do not refer, but the one who refers is the one who uses them if he knows or learns them. The success of any act of communication depends to a great extent on the ability of the listener/reader to infer what the speaker means.

Pragmatic Theories

The historical development of pragmatics has given rise to various explanations of partial aspects of language use that complement each other. The various resulting theories refer only to partial aspects, so a complete study of all of them may require the analysis of several of these approaches. The most frequently cited human communication theories in pragmatics textbooks are:

• La Theory of Speech Acts from Searle, based on Austin's previous approach, which explains how certain misunderstandings occur and identifies some assumptions that allow to explain why prayers with different grammatical forms have approximately the same pragmatic sense.
• La theory of relevance from Sperber and Wilson, which through a semi-formal scheme explains how the speakers make deductions and inferences from what is being said in a conversation or linguistic interaction so as to create a linguistic context in which to properly interpret the following statements.
• The principle of cooperation from Grice, which, in the style of the game theory, studies how participants in an interaction use certain tacit principles that facilitate the inference and interpretation of what is said.
• La theory of argumentation Anscombre and Ducrot, which analyzes the linguistic elements associated with informal reasoning, observes how the arguments and conclusions are introduced in a discussion and establishes what is a typical argument pragmatically relevant, although not strictly logical.

Grice's Cooperative Principle

The cooperative principle, which is expressed in Grice's maxims, was drafted by the philosopher Paul Grice with the purpose of describing the pragmatic rules that govern conversation in natural language. It assumes that those involved in a communicative exchange agree to do so, and such an agreement is valid for the beginning or the end of the conversation.

Maximum of Quantity

It is related to the amount of information that must be given. It includes two submaxims:

1. Make your contribution as informative as the exchange requires.
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than the exchange requires.

Maxim of quality (or quality)

It refers to the truth of the contribution, which is also specified in two submaxims:

1. Don't say what you think is false.
2. Don't say anything that doesn't have proper evidence.

Maxim of relation (or relevance)

It includes the maxim that Grice calls "Get to the point" ("Make your contribution relevant").

Maxim of modality (or manner)

The supermaxim is "Be clear" and comprises four submaxims:

1. Avoid the darkness.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be spitious.
4. Be tidy.

However, these maxims are often not followed. In fact, they are often intentionally broken to convey information in a non-literal way (through irony, out of respect, etc.) and to generate pragmatic inferences, known as conversational implicatures (interpretation mechanisms that range from beyond what is stated in the statements).

Sperber and Wilson's theory of relevance

The implicatures, or implicit information, are the additional meanings to the literal, or explicit, meaning that the receiver of a message infers. They are obtained from the recognition of the speaker's intention, taking into account: the literal meaning of the statement, the knowledge that the speaker and listener share, the situational context and the speaker's intention. Conventional implicatures are distinguished -those triggered by lexical elements, such as "but" or "even"- of the conversational ones, which are produced by pragmatic inferences. The latter are divided into generalized and particularized depending on whether their contextual dependence is greater or lesser.

This implicit information is characterized by the following:

• This is intentional information, that is, the issuer intends to transmit that information;
• is also a matter of non-semantic information, but inferred and contextual, deduced jointly from context and words;
• mentally, it is an information that forms secondaryly after rejecting as the only literal meaning of the message.
• It is not a concretion of the literal meaning.
• is not an information that corrects or denies explicit information: it is simply added to it.

Do not confuse the sense or non-literal meaning with the sense or implied meaning. The non-literal meaning supposes modifying the meaning of the words emitted, that is, assuming that this meaning is not the explicit information that is wanted to be transmitted; the implicit meaning is an addition, relevant, to a literal meaning that is maintained.

On the other hand, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson challenge Grice's principles and show that we are cooperative because we have something to gain: knowledge of the world. In this sense, we learn from what is relevant to us: generally, that information that can be incorporated with a minimum processing cost and that provides maximum benefit. Thus, what may be relevant may be the literal meaning of the text as well as its implicatures.

There is also Ducrot's proposal on implicature. That not only interprets speech as an exchange of meanings, but as an intersubjective event in which different types of interhuman relations such as power relations intervene.

Ducrot makes a logical classification of the presuppositions or what is implicit in: The implicit of the statement: when to decipher the implicit meanings of a statement its contextualization is not required. This implicit answers the question of "therefore?" and it is inferred by logical processes from the explicit statements. Within them are all the budgets of existence. Example: "I crashed my red car" implies that he had a car and that it was red.

The implicit based on the enunciation: they are the implicit that can be understood within a context. They usually give us information about what the author considers good, beautiful, fair or true; for what interests him and about which he speaks, the listener's interest in paying attention to that, and above all the power relations established between speaker and listener. This type of presupposition is called an assumption. Example: "I order you to close the door!" It implies that the sender has a hierarchical position superior to that of the listener.

Austin and Searle's speech act theory

In the 1960s, the English philosopher J. L. Austin developed a theory known as Speech Act Theory; in it he proposed that speaking is not only "informing"; but also "perform" something. The proposal was known through his book (first published in 1962) How to do things with words . His position went against the more traditional approaches that saw language as a function of the mere transmission of information. He focused on the study of verbs that he termed "performatives"; (or performatives) like promise, demand, swear, accuse, etc.

For Austin, the speech act has three levels, or is carried out through three joint acts: the locutionary act, which consists merely in enunciating the phrase in question; the act or illocutionary force, which consists of carrying out something through words (promising, threatening, swearing, declaring); and the perlocutionary act or effect, which consists of causing a change in the state of affairs or a reaction in the interlocutor.

Many researchers have continued to work with speech act theory. The most prominent has been a disciple of Austin, John Searle, who criticizes the perlocutionary level of speech acts, since it is not possible to predict the effects that will occur after their production. Searle considers the speech act as the performance of three simultaneous acts: the locutionary act -emission of certain words-, the preaching act -recovers in this way the importance of the propositional content of the statements- and the illocutionary content.

Lakoff's theory of courtesy or public image

In the same way that social interaction is governed by social rules of coexistence, language also incorporates rules that regulate such interaction. The study of these norms belongs to the so-called “theory of courtesy”. Grice himself stated that in addition to the four maxims of the principle of cooperation (quantity, quality, manner and relevance) other conditions should be given, such as being courteous in communication. Robin Lakoff herself defined courtesy as an instrument to smooth friction in social interaction. It is the notion of “social image" (negative or positive) that articulates said theory. That is, it is the public image or prestige that an individual wishes to project and preserve. It can take two forms: a positive image, which represents an individual's desire to appear approving, and a negative image, which represents an individual's desire to be autonomous, not to fall under the control of others.

In conversation, it is in mutual interest to maintain the “image” of oneself and one's interlocutor. Courtesy strategies derive from this need to save or save face, since it is vulnerable.

Many conversational interactions are threats to public image.

• mandates, orders, suggestions, advice, etc., are threats to the “negative face” (of autonomy);
• expressions of disapproval, disagreements, accusations, interruptions, etc., are threats to the “positive face” (of the sense of value);
• confessions and apologies are threats to the “positive face” of the person who makes them.

For this reason, the sender will try to soften the potential threat, and for this courtesy is necessary.

Theory of Charles William Morris

Charles William Morris created a theory based on the following statement: man is a symbolic animal; The author considers that pragmatics is one of the three dimensions that make up semiosis, everything that works as a sign; For this to happen, it is necessary to comply with three factors: what acts as a sign, that is, the vehicle, what the sign refers to, designated interpreter, and finally to whom the message is addressed, that is, the interpreter. This theory is known as the Morris trichotomy.

From this analysis we can outline a first definition of pragmatics, made by Morris, which establishes that: pragmatics studies the relationships of signs with interpreters, this is the pragmatic dimension of semiosis.

Languages were understood as social systems of signs that relate or connect the responses of members of a community between themselves and their environment. The pragmatic rules are the explanation of the customs of behavior guaranteed by the responses of the community learn to formulate when certain signs are used repeatedly. The interpreter's habit of using certain signs in certain circumstances thus becomes the pragmatic correlate of the semantic rules that specify the conditions of denotability of the sign.

The part of semiotics that deals with the origin, use and effects of signs on behaviour; semantics deals with the signification of signs without taking into account their specific meanings or their relations with relative behavior.

Pragmatics, semantics and syntax, understood in this way, can be interpreted in the field of behavioral semiotics, in which syntax studies the possible combinations between signs, semantics the significations of the signs and with it the behavior of the interpretant; pragmatics studies the origin, use and effects of signs in the global behavior of the same interpreters. The difference does not lie in the greater or lesser presence of the behavior but in the partial scope of the behavior repeatedly considered. The integral study of the signs contains the three valuations. It is legitimate and often appropriate to attribute individual semiotic research to pragmatics, semantics, and syntax.

However, in general it is more important to take into account the global scope of semiotics and, in the event of particular problems, to consider everything that may be essential for their solution. The present investigation has pointed out more consciously, the unity of semiotics compared to the possibility of dividing a given problem into each of its pragmatic, semantic and syntactic components (Morris 1946-1973, pp. 325-326).

Assumptions

Presuppositions are what is taken for granted or assumed. In Pragmatics there are several definitions, according to:

• George Lakoff are supposed or speaking beliefs about the context of speech.
• Edward Keenan is the set of conditions to be met so that the proposed speech act is appropriate to the circumstances, that is, to be happy.
• Charles J. Fillmore are those conditions that need to be met so that a concrete illustrious act is effectively executed by uttering the concrete prayers.
• Ray Jackendoff is the one that involves sharing background information.
• Peter Strawson, are a type of pragmatic inference under the following conditions:

A presupposes assertion B if and only if B is a precondition of the certainty or falsehood of A (Levinson 1984:172).

The >> is used to express the presupposition relation. In such a way that «a >> b' means 'a presupposes b'.

Existential presuppositions

They are inferred from possessive or determinative expressions since in any of them the existence of what is expressed by the sender is assumed. For example:

1a. Our bike.

1b. We have a bike.

1c. a.  b.

2a. The boy's playing.

2b. There's a child.

2c. a /1993/ b

Anscombre and Ducrot's theory of argumentation

Unlike the rest of the topics studied by the Anglo-Saxon pragmatic tradition, which focuses on the adequacy of the statements to the external situation, the work of Anscombre and Ducrot points more to the linguistic context and the internal structure of the discourse; in particular, to the implicational relations or chains of the discursive argumentation. Specifically, these two authors intend to demonstrate that the chaining depends more on the linguistic structure of the statements and the elements that introduce or mark them, than on their semantic content or their strict logical structure. Commonly, argumentation is understood as both the set of strategies aimed at adequately organizing a persuasive discourse, as well as the logical structure of the underlying reasoning. Ducrot and Anscombre consider that arguing is basically giving reasons in favor of a conclusion:

A broadcaster makes a argumentation when presenting a statement (or a set of statements) E₁ [arguments] for to admit another statement (or set of statements) E₂ [conclusion]

It can be said, therefore, that an argument is a certain type of discursive relationship that links one or several arguments with a conclusion.

It should be noted that argue should not be understood here as 'formally demonstrating the validity of a conclusion, or the veracity of an assertion', since most arguments Convincing sentences are not strictly logical and are based on other psychological factors, as well as the internal structure of the sentences, which have a persuasive effect on the listener and have nothing to do with logic. The key expression, opposed to the strictly logical conception, is make people admit: it is about presenting something as if it were a good reason for reaching a certain conclusion; but it is not claimed that it really is.

Deixis

Terms such as here, there, this, that, now, later, yesterday depend on the physical context of the speaker, that is, they are deictic terms. One speaks of temporary deixis, of place or of person, depending on what is being referred to.

Another concept that is related to deixis is that of reference understood as an act by which a speaker or writer uses language to make a listener or reader identify an entity.

Inference is any additional information used by the listener to connect what has been said with what is meant.

Finally, what a speaker presupposes as correct and known by the listener is what we call a presupposition.

Pragmatic analysis

In the pragmatic analysis, different relevant variables are analyzed for the understanding of a statement or to explain the choice of certain ways of making the statement based on contextual factors. Among the relevant variables are:

• The situation: This part analyzes the place and time of speech.
• The socio-cultural context.
• People present and the type of relationship.
• The information allegedly shared, concrete.
• The broadcaster.
• Recipient.
• Nuanced and tone of message.