Semantica e Pragmatica

Nil Gaudio Freire dos Santos

Professora: Andreia Turolo

Letras-ingles

Pragmatics - Christopher Potts

The author talks about the various notions that take part in the speech and in the utterances
from a pragmatic point of view, then I'm going to summarize these topics.
1- Commom Ground
The commom ground is the mutual notion and understanding that all indivuals that are involved
in a conversation or in a situation have. They all have their own individual notions, but its assumed that
their own is the same of the others because they are presumably unsderstanding everything each other
adds to this communication. The author gives an example of a group of individuals making a salad,
sometimes someone add an ingredient to it, but everyone else is aware of that.
2 - Context dependence
The meanings of elements of the natural language are dependable of context. To help clarify it,
there are the indexicals, they are the examples of this dependence. Most commom examples of
indexicals are : here, now, yesterday, I, etc. To understand an utterance one must know the time, place
and agent in it. This quote from the text summarizes well the context dependence: Within theoretical
linguistics, work on context dependence is predominantly about characterising and cataloguing the
types of context dependence that are attested in natural language, which extends far beyond the above
small sample. Thus, the literature is rich in generalisations about what is linguistically possible and
theoretical characterisations of it. This is only one part of the story, though. We also want to know what
actually happens for example, what the preferences are for resolving discourse anaphora, setting
contextual standards, and controlling vagueness.
3 Gricean pragmatics
As we already studied, Grice is known for his Cooperative Principle which has four maxims:
Quality, Quantity, Relation and Manner. As the maxims are already known, here is an example quoted
from the text that show their importance: The utility of the maxims extends far beyond the calculation
of conversational implicatures. For example, I noted in section 7.3 that the lexical content of indexicals
typically underspecifies their referents, even when they are situated in context: here could refer to my
precise global coordinates, but it could also mean that I am in my office, in the department, in
California, on planet Earth. In context, though, some of these resolutions are likely to be uninformative
and others are likely to be clearly false. Thus, Quantity and Quality will help delimit the possibilities,

and information in the common ground (section 7.2) might further cut down on the possibilities,
thereby getting us closer to an acceptable level of indeterminacy.
4 Dimensions of meaning
The text talks about the secondary contributions and ask three questions related to it. And
priorize the third question that is: how do they relate to the primary contribution? He states that it is
pressuposition projection problem. He says that although there are conventionalizations about how to
define a primary and a secondary aspect of an setence, that can't be handled only by semantics, it turn
to be a pragmatic concern, because of the contextual factors involved.

5- Speech acts
The author concentrate in how the speech act(illocutory) is assigned to utterances. Speech-acts
broadly categorise utterances based on the speakers intentions for
their core semantic content, indicating whether it is meant to be asserted, queried,
commanded, exclaimed, and so forth. It is often assumed that there is a deterministic
relationship between clause-types and speech-act force: imperative clauses are for
commanding, interrogative clauses are for querying, declaratives are for asserting, and
so forth, with the deviations from this pattern seen as exceptional (Sadock and Zwicky
1985; Hamblin 1987). However, the factual situation is considerably more complex
than this would seem to suggest.