13 - The organization of discourse

Summary

Introduction

The study of discourse belongs to the study of language in use, which means that it is concerned not just with the properties of linguistic representations but also with the nonlinguistic factors that determine what message is conveyed by the use of a linguistic form and whether it counts as an acceptable contribution to the communicative enterprise. While the linguistic properties of an utterance may determine a range of possible interpretations, the actual message recovered by the hearer depends on its nonlinguistic properties. Consider, for example, the exchange in (1):

1. (1) A: You're not eating.

2. B: It's too hot.

A grammar that pairs phonetic and semantic representations of sentences cannot determine the reference of you or it, what meaning of hot is intended, or what it is too hot for. Moreover, it is not evident from the linguistic properties of A's utterance whether he is informing the hearer that she is to refrain from eating, asking the hearer to confirm that she is not eating, or expressing his disapproval of the fact that the hearer is not eating. The hearer is expected to recover a specific message on the basis of nonlinguistic or contextual information.

Some writers, recognizing that the interpretation of an utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic properties as they are defined by a traditional sentence grammar, have argued that the grammar should be extended to include a pragmatic component that assigns interpretations to sentence–context pairs.