Interfaces of Pragmatics

 In this article, we shall be considering the interface of pragmatics and other linguistic disciplines; in other words we shall see how grammar, lexicon and sound/tone of voice interact with pragmatics. The questions we are likely going to answer will include: are there not purely grammatical constructions that convey pragmatic information for example those that reflect the speaker’s and hearer’s beliefs/assumptions about the world (i.e. presupposition) or the propositional attitudes of the addressee? 

How do words (lexical items) include meanings that may be interpreted pragmatically from two conceptual settings? Isn’t it possible to convey pragmatic meaning through prosodic variations (e.g.) rising/falling tones)? These and other questions we intended to examine more critically in this unit. We shall equally briefly examine how pragmatics has helped to provide answers to some fundamental theoretical questions in some of these subfields. We shall also examine the relationship between pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Pragmatics and Grammar

Scholars of pragmatics believe that every grammatical truth-condition construction in any natural language has a non-truth condition equivalent that has pragmatic values (Horn 1993, Green 2006). This means that some grammatical constructions which we take for granted as truth-condition statements have some definable pragmatic equivalents. We shall discuss one or two simple examples of this in this sub-section. Now, look at the following sentences:

(1)    a.  The child was knocked down by a car

b.        50 protesters were shot

c.         Some bags of the killer-beans had been sold before it was discovered that it was dangerous

The above constructions or sentences are passive constructions. Why do speakers/writers sometimes (deliberately) choose passive constructions over active ones? Looking at sentence 1a, the truth condition of the sentence is simply that a child was knocked down by a car. But the intention of the speaker (non-truth condition value) may be to highlight the seriousness of knocking down a child; hence ‘the child’ is made prominent as the topic of the sentence (receiving sentence stress). It may merely be to defer information about the agent (the car) till the end of the sentence. It is also possible that the speaker or writer may be deliberately silent about the agent as in sentence 1b. If this statement (1b) appears as a newspaper headline, one may conclude that the newspaper is protecting the interest of the police who are the likely shooters of protesters. Using passive constructions allow the expression of the agent to be entirely suppressed, enabling a speaker to accommodate the fact that it is unknown (as in 1b) or irrelevant (as in 1c) or just avoid saying who the agent is even if the speaker knows (Green 2006). Let us look at other examples:

(2)    a.  She was made to stand for five hours

b.        He was selected as the best student of English

c.         His suggestion was rejected

Using a passive also implies that the event being described had some effect on some individual within a particular context. Often the individual is the agent as in 2a. She (the agent) is made to stand for five hours. We are not told who made her to stand for that long hours but we are made to feel for her. The intention of the speaker might just be to appeal to our emotion. The effect of the situation on the agent may be positive as in 2b and again negative as in 2c. The pragmatic value of that statement might be that the speaker believes that the fact of the rejection may include his person and not just the suggestion.

The point we are making here is that certain conditions expressed in grammar point to beliefs and attitudes of the speaker which amount to presuppositions, and they are so strongly linked to syntactic constructions. So we cannot just hold on to grammatical constructions alone without reference to those beliefs and attitudes that underlie the constructions. Green (2006) uses time relations to explain this fact. For example we use the present tense to refer to future time so long as the event referred to is assumed to be ‘prearranged.’ If I say:

(1)a. The Super Eagles play their first match tomorrow

b. The Super Eagles are going to play their first match tomorrow

I can use 1a, to represent Ib in many of the same situations because the event is mutually understood and prearranged more because the speaker and hearer are speaking from the same contextual platform.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1

i.                    Think of other examples involving the use of verbs or adverbs that illustrate the interaction of grammar and pragmatics.

ii.                 Write at least five passive constructions and explain their pragmatic values

2.2  Pragmatics and the Lexicon

Earlier in this study when we endeavoured to make a distinction between pragmatics and semantics, we noted that semantics dwells on the linguistic aspects of representing the formal (or universal) meaning of words and sentences, while pragmatics is concerned with the context/speaker’s meaning. Thus in examining the pragmatics of lexicon, we are simply considering the tendency of words or lexical units having pragmatic meanings. Some scholars of semantics even agree that a full account of lexical meaning has to include more information than that which allows one to discriminate the meanings of different words (Blutner, 2006). Let’s look at the following examples taken from Blutner 2006:489:

2(a)       Should we take  the lion back to the zoo?

(b)                                                   Should we take the bus back to the zoo?

What is the difference between the meaning of ‘take back’ in the sentence (2a) and that in (2b)?          You will agree that the lion is the object being taken back to the zoo,  while the bus is the instrument that takes back to the zoo. You will also notice that ‘the zoo’ in (2a) is different from what is meant in (2b) in relation to the two items (i.e. the lion and the car). The pragmatic components of utterances is usually embedded in different conceptual setting or context, especially with words that do not discriminate between two occurrences like ‘take back’ in the above sentences. In the Zambian context, several English words have come to be used in a number of contexts that results in semantic extensions or pragmatic usages. Look at the different use of the word see in the following examples:

(c)               I can see the plane from afar

(d)              I would like to see the Vice-Chancellor

(e)               I see what you mean

(f)                To get the contract, you may have to see the personal manager

The meaning of see in (2c) is obvious from a semantic point of view but certainly not in d-f. While meaning is arbitrarily assigned to words in English like in any other language, it is still arguable that our knowledge of the environment, the world/culture is highly related to the meanings we assign to lexical items.

Pragmatics and Intonation

A lot of research evidence abound on the role of prosodic variation, i.e. intonation (high/low; rising/falling tones) accent, contours, pauses, etc. in the interpretation of a wide range of utterances (e.g. Bolinger 1986, Ladd 1996, Hirschberg 2006). In this section, we shall endeavour to show how intonation may affect the interpretation of syntactic structures as well as some semantic phenomena. We shall also examine a few examples of the relationship between changes in intonation and discourse structure and the role of intonational variation in the interpretation of some speech acts.

There has been a lot of interest among linguists over the years in defining a mapping between prosody and syntax and some agree that prosodic phrases divide utterances into meaningful segments of information. And it is possible that phrase boundaries may indicate differences in the interpretation of certain syntactic attachments such as prepositional phrases, adverbial modifiers or relative clauses. 

It has also been found that “the presence or absence of a phrase boundary can distinguish prepositions from particles and can indicate the scope of modifiers in conjoined phrases”. Look at the following sentences and see whether you can identify how phasing indicates possible difference interpretations. Phrase is marked by ‘’.

(a)               I help the child /with the red cap

(b)              The teacher speakers English and French/ you know

(c)               The student that reads poems/ is absent

(d)              My Dad laughed /at the party

Where syntactic ambiguity exists (as with some examples above) prosodic variation may influence their disambiguation. Pitch accent has been the usual way of conveying some nominals. For example:

(e)               ZAMBIAN language teachers (teachers of Zambian language(s)

(f)                Zambian LANGUAGE TEACHERS (language teachers who are Zambians)

(g)              All WIVES and MOTHERS (wives who are also mothers)

(h)              All wives and MOTHERS (wives who are not yet mothers)

At the semantic level, accenthas also been used in the interpretation of sentences especially with highlighting the focus of the statements. Consider the following examples:

(i)                We BOUGHT the car (not borrowed or stolen)

(j)                We bought THE CAR (not the lorry or the train)

(k)              Bola introduced TINU to Ebube (non else was introduced)

(l)                Bola introduced Tinu to EBUBE (to non else)

(m)            ELDERS must be respected (especially elders not youths)

(n)              Elders must be RESPECTED (not slighted, or disrespected)

(o)              Elders MUST be respected (not optional)

The above examples show how accenting certain items indicate the focus of statements.

The role of intonation has also been studied in the interpretation of some discourse phenomena. Pronouns for instance are markable using varying tones or may in fact be accented and interpreted differently depending on whether they are prominent or not in different contexts. If you hear a politician or a middle class businessman say:

(p)              ME, you’re talking to ME like that…. Or

(q)              I don’t belong to THEIR club,

you can easily interpret what the ‘ME’ and ‘THEIR’ represent. Most times, accented pronouns like the ones above are usually (overtly) corroborated by the expression of the face of the speaker. The air of arrogance and pride is usually unmistakable.

Intonational variations may also be used to perform speech acts especially in conveying syntactic mood (e.g. the imperative ‘HOLD it’), speaker attitude, belief or emotion. “Some inherent meaning has often been sought in particular contours – though generally such proposals include some degree of modulations”. 

Voice contours can also be used to distinguish between direct and indirect speech acts. For example, a question requiring yes or no answer may elicit a statement answer depending on intonation. Your visitor, standing on the door says: “Are you around?” and you reply: “Please do come.” A question like “are you around?” in its literal sense will demand a simple yes or no but in this context may be interpreted as a request or perform some action. Look at another example:

(r)                I like girls

(s)               I like girls?

The above examples show that a declarative statement may be turned to a question by using a rising tone or contour. Also, some indirect speech acts such as “you packed your car on the road” or “the door is open” are rendered as direct statements with usually no rising contour. But a speaker may choose to accent any of the lexical items such as ‘road’ or ‘open’ to highlight the focus of the statement. These examples no doubt show the interaction of linguistic pragmatics with intonation.

CONCLUSION

Overtime, studies have proved that virtually all fields of linguistics have some levels of interaction with pragmatics. Because pragmatics is purely about how speakers/writers use all language resources available to them to make meaning in practical communication context, there are bound to be the demonstrations of different forms of strategies involving words, syntactic structures, intonation etc in texts and talks. So we can conveniently conclude that pragmatics does indeed interact effectively with all linguistic sub-fields. And this we have tried to show in this sub­section.