Pragmatics

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

"Pragmatics" was defined by Charles W. Morris (1938) as the branch of semiotics that studies the relation of signs to interpreters, in contrast with semantics, which studies the relation of signs to designata. In practice, it has often been treated as a repository for any aspect of utterance meaning beyond the scope of existing semantic machinery, as in the slogan "Pragmatics = meaning minus truth conditions" (Gazdar 1979). There has been some doubt about whether it is a homogeneous domain (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch 1980).

A more positive view emerges from the work of Herbert Paul Grice, whose William James Lectures (1967) are fundamental. Grice showed that many aspects of utterance meaning traditionally regarded as conventional, or semantic, could be more explanatorily treated as conversational, or pragmatic. For Gricean pragmatists, the crucial feature of pragmatic interpretation is its inferential nature: the hearer is seen as constructing and evaluating a hypothesis about the communicator's intentions, based, on the one hand, on the meaning of the sentence uttered, and on the other, on contextual information and general communicative principles that speakers are normally expected to observe. (For definition and surveys see Levinson 1983.)

In early work, the semantics-pragmatics distinction was often seen as coextensive with the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning (Gazdar 1979). On this approach, pragmatics would deal with a range of disparate phenomena, including (a) Gricean conversational inference, (b) the inferential recognition of illocutionary-force, and (c) the conventional meanings of illocutionary-force indicators and other non-truth-conditional expressions such as but, please, unfortunately (Recanati 1987). From the cognitive point of view, these phenomena have little in common.

Within the cognitive science literature in particular, the semantics-pragmatics distinction is now more generally seen as coextensive with the distinction between decoding and inference (or conventional and conversational meaning). On this approach, all conventional meaning, both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional, is left to linguistic semantics, and the aim of pragmatic theory is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and utterance interpretation is inferentially bridged. A pragmatic theory of this type is developed in D. Sperber and D. Wilson (1986).

Grice's distinction between saying and implicating crosscuts the semantics-pragmatics distinction as defined above. For Grice, "what is said" corresponds to the truth-conditional content of an utterance, and "what is implicated" is everything communicated that is not part of what is said. Grice saw the truth-conditional content of an utterance as determined partly by the conventional (semantic) meaning of the sentence uttered, and partly by contextual (pragmatic) factors governing disambiguation and reference assignment. He saw conventional (semantic) implicatures as determined by the meaning of discourse connectives such as but, moreover and so, and analyzed them as signaling the performance of higher-order speech acts such as contrasting, adding and explaining (Grice 1989). An alternative analysis is developed in D. Blakemore (1987).

Among nonconventional (pragmatic) implicatures, the best known are the conversational ones: These are beliefs that have to be attributed to the speaker in order to preserve the assumption that she was obeying the "cooperative principle" (with associated maxims of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance, and clarity), in saying what she said. In Grice's framework, generalized conversational implicatures are "normally" carried by use of a certain expression, and are easily confused with conventional lexical meaning (Grice 1989). In Grice's view, many earlier philosophical analyses were guilty of such confusion.

Grice's account of conversational implicatures has been questioned on several grounds:

1. The status and content of the cooperative principle and maxims have been debated, and attempts to reduce the maxims or provide alternative sources for implicatures have been undertaken (Davis 1991, Horn 1984, Levinson 1987, Sperber and Wilson 1986).
2. Grice claimed that deliberate, blatant maxim-violation could result in implicatures, in the case of metaphor and irony in particular. This claim has been challenged, and alternative accounts of metaphor and irony developed, in which no maxim-violation takes place (Blakemore 1992, Hugly and Sayward 1979, Sperber and Wilson 1986).
3. Pragmatic principles have been found to make a substantial contribution to explicit communication, not only in disambiguation and reference assignment, but in enriching the linguistically encoded meaning in various ways. This raises the question of where the borderline between explicit and implicit communication should be drawn (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). It has even been argued that many of Grice's best-known cases of generalized conversational implicature might be better analyzed as pragmatically determined aspects of what is said (Carston 1988, Recanati 1989).
4. The idea that the context for utterance interpretation is determined in advance of the utterance has been questioned, and the identification of an appropriate set of contextual assumptions is now seen as an integral part of the utterance-interpretation process (Blakemore 1992, Sperber and Wilson 1986).

Within the cognitive science literature, several approaches to pragmatics are currently being pursued. There are computational attempts to implement the Gricean program via rules for the recognition of coherence relations among discourse segments (Asher and Lascarides 1995, Hobbs 1985). Relations between the Gricean program and speech-act theory are being reassessed (Tsohatzidis 1994). The cognitive foundations of pragmatics and the relations of pragmatics to neighboring disciplines are still being explored (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Sperber 1994). Despite this diversity of approaches, pragmatics now seems to be established as a relatively homogenous domain.

Cognitive Science; Grice, Herbert Paul; Metaphor; Philosophy of Language; Reference; Semantics.

Asher, N., and A. Lascarides. "Lexical Disambiguation in a Discourse Context." Journal of Semantics 12 (1995): 69–108.

Blakemore, D. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

Blakemore, D. Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Carston, R. "Explicature, Implicature and Truth-Theoretic Semantics." In Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality, edited by R. Kempson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Davis, S., ed. Pragmatics: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Gazdar, G. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press, 1979.

Grice, H. P. "Logic and Conversation." William James Lectures. Cambridge, MA, 1967.

Grice, H. P. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Hobbs, J. "On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse." Center for the Study of Language and Information (October 1985).

Horn, L. "A New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature." In Meaning, Form and Use in Context, edited by D. Schiffrin. Washington, DC, 1984.

Hugly, P., and C. Sayward. "A Problem about Conversational Implicature." Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (1979): 19–25.

Levinson, S. "Minimization and Conversational Inference." In The Pragmatic Perspective, edited by J. Verschueren and M. Bertuccelli-Papis. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987.

Levinson, S. Pragmatics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Morris, C. "Foundations of the Theory of Signs." In International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, edited by O. Neurath, R. Carnap, and C. Morriss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.

Recanati, F. Meaning and Force. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Recanati, F. "The Pragmatics of What Is Said." Mind and Language 4 (1989): 295–329.

Searle, J., F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds. Speech-Act Theory and Pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980.

Sperber, D. "Understanding Verbal Understanding." In What Is Intelligence?, edited by J. Khalfa. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford, 1986.

Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. "Postface" to the second edition of Relevance. Oxford, 1995.

Tsohatzidis, S., ed. Foundations of Speech-Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1994.

This is the complete article, containing 1,175 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).