According
to Yule (1996), the area of pragmatics deals with speakers meaning and
contextual meaning. Speaker meaning is concerned with the analysis of what
people mean by their utterances rather than what the words and phrases in those
utterances might mean in and of themselves. Thus when a speaker says “I am
hungry,” the semantic meaning of this utterance is that the speaker feel pangs
of hunger. Pragmatically viewed, if the sentence is produced by a youngster who
has come back from school at noon speaking to his mother in the kitchen, it
probably functions as a request for a lunch. Alternatively, if it is produced
by the same youngster after having completed lunch, it could function as a
complaint expressing the opinion that there hasn’t been enough food to eat for
lunch, or perhaps the child intends it as a request for a dessert. Speaker
meaning, rather than sentence meaning, can only begin to be understood when
context is taken into consideration Any utterance, therefore, can take on
various meanings depending on who produced it and under what circumstances.
Pragmatics
studies the context within which an interaction occurs as well as the intention
of the language user. Who are the addresses, what is the relation between
speakers/writers and hearers/readers, when and where does the speech event
occur ? and so on. Thus, the same utterance “I am hungry” when produced by a
street beggar and addressed to a passerby would be generally perceived as a
request for money rather than for food since shared knowledge- in this case-
leads to this interpretation.
Pragmatics
also explores how listeners and readers can make inferences about what is said
or written in order to arrive at an interpretation of the user’s intended
meaning. Obviously, the emphasis in this kind of exploration must be placed not
only on what is actually said but also on what is not being said explicitly but
recognized implicitly as part of communicative exchange, such as
presupposition, implication, shared knowledge, and circumstantial evidence.
Fro
the above description of description of pragmatics, it may seem to the reader
that this is an impossible area of communicative interaction to analyze since
it seems so difficult to predict what different people might be intending. What
makes human communication possible, however is the fact that pragmatic
competence relies very heavily on conventional culturally appropriate, and
socially acceptable ways of interacting. These rules of appropriacy result in
regular and expected behaviors in language use. It is generally understood
that within a given social and cultural group, people usually know what is
expected and what is considered appropriate behavior, and this knowledge
enables them to interpret the language uses they encounter.
Furthermore
language forms are selected or preferred by interactants so as to accommodate
and strengthen some of shared and mutually perceived situational phenomena. Two
areas of language analysis that have looked at what allows the listener or
reader to make inferences based on what is said or written are presupposition
and implication.
When
a proposition is presupposed, it cannot be denied or called into question. For
example :
A:
Isn’t it odd that John didn’t come ?
B:No,
it’s not odd at all.
In
this brief exchange both speaker A and speaker B shared the presupposition
“John didn’t come.” The interlocutors in this exchange chose linguistic forms
that enable them to share the persupposition. Notice that not all verbs or
predicate adjectives have this property. If we change “odd” to “true,” there
would be no constant presupposition since the truth value of “John didn’t come”
changes from one syntactic environment to the next when the proposition is
danied or questioned :
1.
It is true that John didn’t come.
2.
It isn’t true that Jhonn didn’t come
3.
Isn’t it true that John didn’t came ?
It
is combined knowledge of pragmatics and linguistics that enables interlocutors
to be effective users of presupposition.
In
this case of implication, the hearer/listener is able to make certain inferences
based on what is said or written. These inferences go beyond the words
themselves, yet are generally predictable from the linguistic forms chosen. For
example, if someone says “Jane will support Bo. After all, she is his sister,” we know that the speaker
is not only giving a reason in the second clause for Janes’ behavior,which is
described in the first clause; through his use of the connector “after all,”
the speaker is also indicating that he believes both he and the listener share
some obvious prior knowledge (i.e, Jane is Bob’s sister). Here again we see how
the choice of linguistic forms reflects the knowledge shared by the
interlocutors.
From
the examples given above, it seems obvious that a very important factor
facilitating both spoken and written communication is shared knowledge. As we
have seen, language users make linguistic decisions and choices based on
certain persuppositions with respect to the situation and the participants in
the communicative interaction. Such decision are baseds primarily on what is
perceived as shared knowledge.
Obviously,
when we misjudge shared knowledge or the preceptions of the other participants
in the interaction we might create an instance of miscomunication. This can
happen among speakers of the same language and within the same sociocultural
setting, as will become obvious from the following exchange between a
university student and a clerk in a departmental office at a university in the
United States both view native speaker of English :
Woman
(student): Excuse me, where can I make some Xerox copies ?
Clerk
: For ?
Woman
: (silence)
Clerk
: Are you an instructor ?
Woman
:No, a student.
Clerk
: We can only make Xerox copies for instructor.
Woman:
Well, I... OK. Nut where can I find s [pay] Xerox machine ? (the original
intention)
Clerk:
Oh, I see. Up the stairs, pat the bookstore.
In
the above exchange 1 there was obviously a breakdown in communication since the
first utterance, which was an information question, was misunderstood by the
clerk as a request: the clerk then applied to this situation nonrelevant prior
knowledge that was unshared by the student.
In
exchanges that take place between language users from different social or
cultural groups of different linguistic groups, miscomunication can result from
lack of shared knowledge of the world and of the appropriate target behavior.
In our attempt to lead the L2 learner to communicative competence, which goes
far beyond linguistic competence, pragmatic must be taken into account. While
developing knowledge and understanding of how the language work, the learner
must also develop awareness and sensitivity to socialcultural patterns of
behavior. It is only skillfully combined linguistic and pragmatic knowledge
that can lead to communicative competence in the second language.
