Pragmatic Acts

Introduction

Traditionally, philosophers of language such as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege and Rudolph Carnap, have focused on the truth value of sentences, that is whether a sentence is a true or false representation of real-world facts or conditions. They have been particularly interested in linguistic manipulations of the truth value of sentences. Compare:

If (a) is true, then (b) is false; if (b) is true, then (a) is false. In his later works, Wittgenstein, however, took an entirely different tack, arguing that language was a social activity and that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1953: §43, 20, cited in Bach 2004: 463). Use in language is very much what pragmatics is about. But if we are studying usage, then in fact we are not simply studying sentences, or words, or any other traditional linguistic unit. Many pragmatics scholars deploy the notion of the utterance. Utterances are not abstract like sentences. Sentences can, for example, be realized as many different utterances (think, for example, of the different prosodies with which the sentence I’m sorry could be uttered). Some utterances do have an aspect that can be analyzed in terms of their truth value, but some do not. As exemplified by (a) and (b) above, utterances that have the form of declarative sentences are the main focus of many academic studies, because they express propositions or states of affairs which are truth conditional, that is, the state of affairs represented through the proposition can be evaluated against real-world conditions. This is not the case (or at least not straightforwardly the case) with interrogative or imperative sentences. Moreover, utterances do not even require traditional words in order to be pragmatically meaningful. Asking whether, say, the expressions ah or oh are true or not is simply an irrelevant question. Instead, the utterances are geared towards doing things – towards expressing surprise, confirming, acknowledging and so on. One drawback with the notion of utterance, which we should briefly mention, is that it suggests meanings are simply generated by speech. Of course, writing does this too. More particularly, the term utterance does not capture non-verbal meanings. For example, nodding one’s head is a way of expressing the affirmative in a number of English-speaking cultures. More accurately then, we are dealing with pragmatic behaviors generally, though we shall focus on utterances in particular.

We will elaborate on actions constituting interaction. We start from traditional speech act theory, then discuss the ways in which it has been applied, along with some of its deficiencies, and then in the final topics we suggest some modified or alternative approaches.

الاكثر قراءة في pragmatics

Schemas and scripts

Generalized versus particularized conversational implicatures

The scope of pragmatics

Three stages of interpretation

Direct and indirect speech acts

Denotation, sense, reference and deixis

Deixis

Developing speech act theory: Searle

Utterance-type meaning

Pragmatic acts and activity types

First-order and second-order perspectives on pragmatics

Forms of metapragmatic awareness

Types of meaning

Good cop, bad cop

Pragmatics

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

مكتب المتولي الشرعي للشؤون النسوية يناقش استعداداته لإقامة مهرجان روح النبوة الثامن وحفل تخرج الطالبات العاشر

الهيأة العليا لإحياء التراث تشارك بمؤتمر دولي عن السيد الميلاني (قدس سره) في إيران

وفد متحف الكفيل يطّلع على النفائس والوثائق التاريخية في متاحف العتبة الرضوية المقدسة

قسم الشؤون الطبية يواصل تنظيم ورش تدريبية لرفع كفاءة المنتسبين في الإسعافات الأولية

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

خصوصا مع تقدم السن.. 6 سلوكيات يومية قد تدمّر صحتك

فاكهة خضراء.. علاج طبيعي فعّال للإمساك واضطرابات الهضم

روسيا تبدأ أولى التجارب السريرية للقاح واعد ضد السرطان

كنز غذائي على طبقك.. ماذا تفعل السبانخ بجسمك؟

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

رصد نوع نادر من القطط في تايلاند للمرة الأولى منذ عقود

روسيا تخطط لإقامة محطة نووية في القمر خلال العقد المقبل

كيف قاد إيلون ماسك حملة "غروك" لاختراق عرش الذكاء الاصطناعي

ألتمان: الذكاء الاصطناعي سيتجاوز البشر في 2026 !

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Ambiguity

Speech acts

Maxim flouts

Flouting the maxims

Comedy pragmatics

Defeasible implicatures

The pragmatics of political interviews

Good cop, bad cop

The co-operative principle

Grice’s theory of implicature

Meaning in context

Pragmatics: saying what you mean