1、An Introduction to Pragmatics,Sep. 2011- Jan. 2012,Chapter One Introduction to pragmatics Chapter Two Entailment Chapter Three Presupposition Chapter Four Co-operative principle and conversational implicature,Chapter Five Adaptation theory Chapter Six Speech acts Chapter Seven Face and politeness Ch
2、apter Eight Rapport management: A framework for analysis Chapter Nine Conversation analysis,Chapter Ten Deixis Chapter Eleven Making sense and context Chapter Twelve Critical discourse analysis Chapter Thirteen Pragmatic transfer in intercultural communication Chapter Fourteen Methodological issues
3、in conducting theory-based cross-cultural research,Chapter Fifteen Data collection in pragmatics research Chapter Sixteen Classroom research on interlanguage pragmatics Chapter Eighteen Four perspectives on L2 pragmatic development Chapter Nineteen Appraisal Theory,Chapter One Introduction to pragma
4、tics,1.1 The historical review of pragmatics 1.2 Definitions of pragmatics 1.3 Focus of pragmatics 1.4 Criticisms of pragmatics,1.1 The historical review of pragmatics,Late 1950s- early 1960s- late a960s-2000: Changes from something in the wastebasket to a flourishing area In the late 1950s, Chomsky
5、 discovered the centrality of syntax; but like the structuralists, he still regarded meaning as too messy for serious contemplation. However in the early 1960s, Katz and his collaborators began to find out how to corporate meaning into a formal linguistic theory. So in late 1960s pragmatics was henc
6、eforth on the linguistic map. Pragmatics detect the meanings beyond the scope of traditional language study.,Although pragmatics is a relatively new branch of linguistics, research on it can be dated back to ancient Greece and Rome where the term pragmaticus is found in late Latin and pragmaticos in
7、 Greek, both meaning of being practical. Modern use and current practice of pragmatics is credited to the influence of the American philosophical doctrine of pragmatism.,The term “pragmatics” is attributed to the philosopher Charles Morris (1938) who was concerned to outline the general shape of a s
8、cience of signs or semiotics as Morris preferred Foundations of the Theory of Signs by Charles Morris (1938): The pragmatic interpretation of semiotics and verbal communication studies,Morris distinguished three distinct branches of inquiry: Semiotics can be divided into syntactics, semantics, and p
9、ragmatics. Syntactics(syntax)-the study of the formal relation of signs to one another Semantics-the study of the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable Pragmatics-the study of the relation of signs to interpreters,For Morris, pragmatics studies the relations of signs to
10、 interpreters, while semantics studies the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable, and syntactics studies the formal relations of signs to one another. By elaborating the sense of pragmatism in his concern of conversational meanings, Grice (1975) enlightened modern treat
11、ment of meaning by distinguishing two kinds of meaning, natural and non-natural.,Grice suggested that pragmatics should centre on the more practical dimension of meaning, namely the conversational meaning which was later formulated in a variety of ways (Levinson, 1983; Leech, 1983).,Practical concer
12、ns also helped shift pragmaticians focus to explaining naturally occurring conversations which resulted in hallmark/characteristics discoveries of the Cooperative Principle by Grice (1975) and the Politeness Principle by Leech (1983). Subsequently, Green (1989) explicitly defined pragmatics as natur
13、al language understanding. This was echoed by Blakemore (1990) in her Understanding Utterances: The Pragmatics of Natural Language and Grundy (1995) in his Doing Pragmatics.,The Anglo-American tradition of pragmatic study has been tremendously expanded and enriched with the involvement of researcher
14、s mainly from the Continental countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. A symbol of this development was the establishment of the IPrA (the International Pragmatic Association) in Antwerp in 1987. In its Working Document, IPrA proposed to consider pragmatics as a theory of ling
15、uistic adaptation and look into language use from all dimensions (Verschueren, 1987).,Henceforward, pragmatics has been conceptualized as to incorporate micro and macro components (Mey, 1993). Throughout its development, pragmatics has been steered by the philosophical practice of pragmatism and evo
16、lving to maintain its independence as a linguistic subfield by keeping to its tract of being practical in treating the everyday concerned meaning.,1.2 Definitions of pragmatics,Pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation which
17、 is usually a conversation (hence *conversation analysis). It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning (Leech, 1983; Sperber a
18、nd Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper, 1997),Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others. -(Crystal, 1987) Pragmatics can be useful
19、ly defined as the study of how utterances have meanings in situation. -(Leech, 1983) Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said. (Yule 1996) There is a distinction between a hearers knowledge of her language and her knowledge of the world, it is this distinction that underlie
20、s the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. (Blakemore, 1992),Pragmatic study distinguishes mere correlation between linguistic form and context (coincidence) from incorporation of contextual significance into the associated linguistic form (pragmatic concern). The slurred speech associated
21、with drunkenness may be mere correlation, while the association of intimacy or solidarity with the French pronoun tu is a grammaticalized feature of context.,To make the distinction, we need to suggest the following criteria for a feature of the context to be linguistically encoded : (i) it must be
22、intentionally communicated, (ii) it must be conventionally associated with the linguistic form in question, (iii) the encoding form must be a member in a contrast set, the other members of which encode different features.(Levinson, 2006:11),1.3 Focus of pragmatics,(i) presupposition: referring to th
23、e logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically associated with or entailed by a sentence. (ii) performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only says something but also does certain things: giving information, stating a fact or hinting an attitude. The study of performatives le
24、d to the hypothesis of Speech Act Theory that holds that a speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969).,(iii) implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived from context that is not
25、 present from its conventional use.,To date, a handful of cross-sectional, longitudinal and theoretical studies on classroom basis have been conducted and the potentials along the interface of pragmatics with SLA research have been widely felt.What are some of the pragmatic universals underlying L2
26、acquisition? What influences L1 exerts on the learners L2 acquisition? How shall we measure the learners pragmatic performance with a native pragmatic norm? These are but a few of the interesting ones and we can get more from Kasper & Schmidt (1996), Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford (1996), Takahashi (1996
27、), House (1996) and Cohen (1996).,Another focus is learner language or interlanguage. This interest eventually evolved into interlanguage pragmatics, a branch of pragmatics which specifically discusses how non-native speakers comprehend and produce a speech act in a target language and how their pra
28、gmatic competence develops over time (Kasper Kasper, 1995).,1.4 Criticisms of pragmatics,A traditional criticism has been that pragmatics does not have a clear-cut focus, and there was a tendency to assort those topics without a clear status in linguistics to pragmatics. Thus pragmatics was associat
29、ed with the metaphor of a garbage can (Leech, 1983). Other complaints are that, unlike grammar which resorts to rules, the vague and fuzzy principles in pragmatics are not adequate in telling people what to choose in face of a range of possible meanings for one single utterance in context,An extreme
30、 criticism represented by Marshal (Shi Cun, 1989) was that pragmatics is not eligible as an independent field of learning since meaning is already dealt with in semantics.,In spite of the criticisms, the impact of pragmatics has been colossal and multifaceted. The study of speech acts, for instance,
31、 provided illuminating explanation into sociolinguistic conduct. The findings of the cooperative principle and politeness principle also provided insights into person-to-person interactions. The choice of different linguistic means for a communicative act and the various interpretations for the same
32、 speech act elucidate human mentality in the relevance principle which contributes to the study of communication in particular and cognition in general.,Implications of pragmatic studies are also evident in language teaching practices. Deixis, for instance, is important in the teaching of reading. S
33、peech acts are often helpful for improving translation and writing. Pragmatic principles are also finding their way into the study of literary works as well as language teaching classrooms.,References,Peccei. 2000. Pragmatics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Verschueren, J. 20
34、00. Understanding Pragmatics. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Levinson, S. C. 2000. Pragmatics. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press Mey, Jacob L. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Bijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing House.,Kasper, G. & Blum-Kulka, S. (ed
35、s.) (1993) Interlanguage Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kasper, G. (1995) Interlanguage Pragmatics, in Verschueren, J. & stman Jan-Ola & Blommaert, J. (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics 1995, pp17, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Kasper, G. (1997) Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught? (Network #6: http:/www.lll.hawaii.edu/sltcc/F97NewsLetter/Pubs.htm), a paper delivered at the 1997 TESOL Convention. Leech, G. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman. Mey, J. (1993) Pragmatics. An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.,
