Muhammad Shaban Rafi

In the late 1960s, two elderly American tourists who had been
touring Scotland reported that , in their travels, they had
come to a Scottish town in which there was great ruined
cathedral. As they stood in the ruins, they saw a small boy and
they asked him when the cathedral had been so badly
damaged. He replied in the war. Their immediate
interpretation, in the 1960s, was that he must be refereeing to
the second world war which had ended only twenty years
earlier. But then they thought that the ruins looked as if they
had been in their dilapidate state for much longer than that,
so they asked the boy which war he meant. He replied the
war with the English, which they eventually discovered, had
formally ended in 1745. (Yule, 2009: 112)
What is Pragmatics?
The study of what speakers mean or meaning
is called pragmatics.
In many ways, pragmatics is the study of
invisible meaning or how we recognize what is
meant even when it isn’t actually said or
written.
Our interpretation of the meaning of the sign
is not based solely on the words but on what
we think the writer/speaker intend to
communicate.
Our understanding of much of what we read
and hear is tied to this processing of aspects
of the physical context, particularly the time
and place, in which we encounter linguistic
expressions.
Deixis
People can actually use deixis to have some
fun. The restaurant owner who puts up a big
bill board that reads
Free Meal Tomorrow ( to get you to return to
the restaurant ) can always claim that you are
one day early for the free meal.
Reference
Relationship between linguistics expression and
outside world.
 MEANING
reference
sense denotation

extension intension
Saussure
Dyadic model
Peircean Theory
The semiotic Triangle:

 Sign vehicle: the form of the sign

 Sense: the sense made of the sign
 Referent: what the sign 'stands for’
We saw a funny video about a boy washing a
puppy in a small bath. The puppy started
struggling and shaking and the boy got really
wet. When he let go, it jumped out of the bath
and ran away.

The on going cricket world cup has made

Pakistani players conscious to defend their
last year title. T-20 is on the sports screen
now a days.
How do we refer to things in a discourse we
can not name?
We even use reference for those things we
are not sure what to call them for example:
the blue thing and the icy stuff.
Inference
An additional information used by the listener
to create a connection between what is said
and what must be meant. For example:
Where is the spinach salad sitting?
Can I look at your Chomsky?
Presupposition
We design our linguistic messages on the
basis of large scale assumptions about what
our listeners already know. Some of these
assumptions are mistaken and mostly they
are appropriate.
What a speaker/writer assumes is true or
known by a listener/reader can be described
as a presupposition.
 grammar context

SYNTAX SEMANTICS PRAGMATICS

A revised picture
grammar context

SYNTAX LINGUISTIC PROPOSITIONAL PRAGMATICS

SEMANTICS SEMANTICS

reference assignment

implicature
Language Processing
Models
Theories of Meaning
Semantics vs.
Pragmatics
SEMANTICS  PRAGMATICS
 Language Internal Language External
 Linguistic Meaning Communication
 What expressions What speakers
mean mean
 What is Said What is implied
 Language itself Use of language
Geoffrey Leech