.,语言学 Linguistics Week VII Pragmatics A General View,.,Part II Pragmatics Chapter 1 A General View of Pragmatics 1.1 Wastebasket of Pragmatics 1.2 Context in Pragmatics 1.3 History and Definition of Pragmatics 1.4 Why the Necessity of Pragmatics Study?,.,Chomskyian dichotomy of sentence structure: deep structure and surface structure.,S(1) I slept badly. S(2) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. S(3) Flying planes can be dangerous.,different deep structures may merge into a single ambiguous surface structure,.,1.1 Wastebasket of Pragmatics When Chomsky threw his “green ideas” “furiously” into the wastebasket of semantics, others who claim themselves to be syntactic analysts or semanticists continue doing so, each contributing new rules and assertions to the study of language and leaving behind plenty of waste for latecomers to deal with. “The semantics basket being filled to the brim, another waste-basket had to be created to catch the overflow” (Mey). And this “another waste-basket” is Pragmatics.,.,1.2 Context in Pragmatics That scholars have left such a plenty of waste behind seems to suggest that the meaning of a sentence is more elusive and uncertain than we can imagine. Therefore, what weve discussed in Part I, be it syntactic study or semantics, seems to be mainly concerned with, in a sense, the static aspects of language. However, language in use is a rather complicated matter, and the elusiveness and uncertainty of meaning render all the theories so far mentioned controversial and weak under attack. Meaning, in fact, is rather dynamic, and is dependent upon context. Sentences without context can result in ambiguity.,.,Scenario 1: A: I just met the old Irishman and his son, coming out of the toilet. B: I wouldnt have thought there was room for the two of them. A: No silly, I mean I was coming out of the toilet. They were waiting. Scenario 2: What are we going to do about Baba, she asked. What do you mean? She cant remember anything. Did she ask you whether she was taking medicine? No. No shes not or no she didnt ask? She didnt ask. She was supposed to, I said. Well, she didnt.,.,The concept of “context” in pragmatics is different from that referred to in traditional linguistics. It is viewed, by pragmaticians, as dynamic, too. A dynamic context is an environment that is in steady development, prompted by the continuous interaction of the people engaged in language use. Context is the quintessential pragmatic concept; it is by definition proactive, just as people are. By contrast, a pure linguistic description is retroactive and static: it takes a snapshot of what is the case at any particular moment, and tries to freeze that picture. Pure descriptions have no dynamics; they can never capture the richness of the developments that take place between people using language; the synchronic snapshot of the here and now, the classical hic et nunc, is a philosophical abstraction. (Mey, 2001: 14),.,Context,He Zhaoxiongs Classification of Context,Linguistic knowledge,Extra-linguistic knowledge,Knowledge of the language in use,Knowledge of the previous text of verbal communication,Background knowledge,Situational knowledge,Mutual knowledge,Encyclopedic Knowledge (Common Sense),Social norms of a specific culture,Conversational Rules of a specific culture,Time the relation between the sign and its meaning; the relation between the sign and the sign user.,.,After that, the study of pragmatics began to take shape. However, for a long time, pragmatics “can hardly be considered an autonomous field of study” (Bussmann, 2000: 374): It was once subsumed under the term “sociolinguistics”. In 1970s, pragmatics became almost exclusively identified with Speech Act theory suggested by Austin A bit later: with conversation analysis. And, the distinction between pragmatics and semantics has never been clear-cut. Recently, some scholars even suggested the substitute of “situational semantics” (Gawron sometimes, a pragmatic account is the only one that makes sense”. (Mey, 2001: 12),