Disourse and Pragmatics

LIN 207
Context of situation
Week 6 of 14

THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN

INTERPRETATION
1) Pragmatics and discourse context

Pragmaticsis the study of the context-dependent

aspects of MEANING which are systematically
abstracted away from in the construction of LOGICAL
FORM.
Discourse analyst takes a pragmatic approach to the
study of language use
Because the analyst is investigating the use of
language in context by a speaker/ writer, he is more
concerned with the relationship between the speaker
and the utterance, on the particular occasion of use,
than with the potential relationship of one sentence
to another regardless of their use.
Thus, using terms such as reference, presupposition,
implicature and inference , the discourse analyst is
describing what speakers and hearers are doing, and

a)Reference
) Reference is described as the relationship which
holds between words and things is the relationship
of reference; words refer to things. (Lyons, 1968;
404)
) In discourse analysis, reference is treated as an
action on the part of the speaker/ writer.
) E.g.
A: my uncles coming home from Landhoo on
Monday. He is coming for a week.
B: How long has he been away for?
A: Hes lived there for a long time. He was
married to my mothers sister. Well shes been
dead for a number of years now.
) A discourse analyst would say:
) A uses the expressions my uncle and he to refer to
one individual and my mothers sister and she to
refer to another.

b) Presupposition
Defined as assumptions the speaker makes
about what the hearer is likely to accept without
challenge (Givon, 1979).
an implicit assumption about the world or
background belief relating to an utterance whose
truth is taken for granted in discourse
examples of presuppositions include:
Jane no longer writes fiction.
Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction.
Have you stopped eating meat?
Presupposition: you had once eaten meat.
Have you talked to Hans?
Presupposition: Hans exists.

c) Implicatures
Term used by Grice to account for what a
speaker can imply, suggest or mean as distinct
from what the speaker literally says.
Of greater interest to the discourse analyst is the
notion of conversational implicature which is
derived from a general principle of conversation
plus a number of maxims which the speakers
will normally obey (called cooperative principle
Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner.)

d) Inference
Since the discourse analyst like the hearer has
no direct access to a speakers intended
meaning in producing an utterance, he often has
to rely on a process of inference to arrive at an
interpretation for utterances or for the
connections between utterances.
E.g. John was on his way to school
So this could mean
Someonne was on his way to school
John was on his way to somewhere
Someonw was on his say to somewehre.
This provides with limited insight into what
readers would normally interpret as they
read.

d) Inference
E.g. John was on his way to school
Most readers report that they infer that John
is a scchool boy among other things.
When this sentence is followed by:
Last week he had been unable to control the
class.
Readers readily abandoned their original
inference and form another. That John is a
schoolteacher.
We need a relatively little knowledge of
inference based on soci- cultural knowledge.

THE ROLE OF CONTEXT IN

INTERPRETATION

2) The context of situation

Features of context
Consider two invented scenarios
in which an identical utterance
is produced by distinct speakers
A) speaker: a young mother
Hearer: her mother in law
Place: park, by a duckpond
Time: sunny afternoon in
September 1962
They are watching the young
mother's two year old son
chasing ducks and the mother
in law has just remarked that
her son, the childs father, was
rather backward at this age.
The young mother says:

B) Speaker: a student
Hearers: a set of
students
Place: siting around a
coffee table in the
refectory
Time: evening in
March 1080. John one
of the group , has just
told a joke. Everyone
laughs except Adam.
Then Adam laughs.
One of the students
says;
I do think Adams

Hymes (1964) Features of context

Addressor: speaker / writer who produces the

utterance
Addressee: the hearer/ reader who is the recipient of
the utterance.
Topic: what is being talked about
Setting: where the event is situated in place and time
Channel: how is contact between participants in the
event being maintained - by speech, writing, signing,
smoke signals.
Code: what language or dialect or style of language is
being used.
Message-form: what form is intended- chat, debate,
sermon, fairy tale, love letter, sonnet etc.
Event: the nature of the communicative event within
which a genre may be embedded thus a sermon or
prayer may be part of the larger event, a religious
service.
Key: evaluation was it a good sermon, a pathetic