Pragmatics is generally defined as the theory of utterance interpretation, and contrasted with semantics, the theory of sentence meaning. In interpreting an utterance, the hearer has to answer three main questions: What did the speaker intend to say? What did the speaker intend to imply? What was the speaker’s intended attitude to what was said and implied? The goal of pragmatic theory is to explain how this is done.
A major influence has been the philosopher H.P. Grice, whose William James Lectures at Harvard in 1967 (Grice 1989) are fundamental. Grice argued that many aspects of utterance interpretation traditionally regarded as conventional, or semantic, could be more explanatorily treated as conversational, or pragmatic. For Grice, the crucial feature of pragmatic interpretation is its inferential nature: the hearer is seen as constructing and evaluating a hypothesis about the intended interpretation, based, on the one hand, on the meaning of the sentence uttered, and, on the other, on background or contextual assumptions and general communicative principles which speakers are normally expected to observe.
Most recent work in pragmatics takes the inferential nature of utterance interpretation for granted. Controversy exists, however, about the nature and number of communicative principles involved. Grice saw communication as both rational and co-operative, and proposed a co-operative principle and maxims of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and clarity which he saw as universal. The universality of Grice’s maxims has been questioned. It is sometimes claimed that different cultures have different principles or maxims (see e.g. Keenan 1979). An alternative view is that pragmatic variation results from differences in background or contextual assumptions rather than differences in the principles of communication themselves.
Grice’s view that co-operation is essential to communication has also been questioned. Grice’s fundamental communicative principle is the co-operative principle, which instructs speakers to make their conversational contribution such as is required by the accepted purpose or direction of the current talk exchange. An alternative approach is taken by relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), which argues that the key to communication lies in more basic facts about human cognition, and that communication which is not co-operative in Grice’s sense is understood in exactly the same way as co-operative communication.
According to relevance theory, the human cognitive system automatically allocates attention to information that seems relevant. Any act of communication demands the audience’s attention; as a result, it creates an expectation of relevance. In interpreting an utterance or other act of communication, the hearer should rationally choose the interpretation that best satisfies this expectation. Relevance theorists claim that no other principles of communication are needed. In this way, they reject Grice’s co-operative principle and maxims while retaining his central insights about the inferential nature of communication and the importance of speaker intentions.
For a general survey and bibliography, see Levinson (1983) and Schiffrin (1994). Grice’s collected papers on pragmatics are published in Grice (1989). For an introductory survey of relevance theory, see Blakemore (1992).
Deirdre Wilson
University of London
References
Blakemore, D. (1992) Understanding Utterances, Oxford.
Grice, H.P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA.
Keenan, E. (1979) ‘The universality of conversational postulates’ Language in Society 5.
Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge, UK.
Schiffrin, D. (1994) Approaches to Discourse, Oxford.
Sperber, D. and Wilson D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford.
