8 - Pragmatics: reference and speech acts

Summary

The previous seven chapters largely concerned semantics, apart from some passing attention to the interpretation of original metaphor in Chapter 7. Chapters 8 and 9 shift focus to pragmatics, and, following on from Chapter 7, it is worth explaining more about the semantic–pragmatic distinction at the outset.

To recap, a language is a code more or less shared by the members of a linguistic community. Semantics attempts to describe the meanings of this code and the relations between the meanings of the items of the code, as the survey in Chapters 3 to 6 shows. We compose sentences (messages) out of the items in this code, and semantics investigates what the sentences mean. Pragmatics, on the other hand, is about what a speaker means, that is, intends, by the utterance of a sentence in a particular context.

There are three important ways in which semantic meanings differ from pragmatic meanings. Firstly, pragmatic meanings are non-conventional: when sentences are uttered in context their conventional meanings may be pragmatically overridden. This means different contexts will produce different pragmatic implications. If I see one of my twenty-year-old students with a Mickey Mouse pencil case and ask “How old are you now?”, I imply a criticism of their childish tastes rather than asking a real question as I would if I knew it was their birthday and uttered the same question. Second, pragmatic meanings are calculable: they are computed through a process of logical inferencing (see 10.3–5). And, thirdly, implicatures are defeasible. If my student replies “I don’t want to grow up too quickly”, as a response to my implied criticism of her immature taste, I can deny the implied criticism and say “I was only asking your age”. Semantic meanings, by contrast, are conventional, less variable according to context, do not need calculating because they are simply decoded, and are non-defeasible: if you make a statement, relying largely on coded meanings, you cannot truthfully claim you didn’t express its semantic meaning (Thomas 1995).