In the preceding chapters, we’ve looked at a wide range of phenomena that have been dealt with under the rubric of pragmatics. Throughout, we’ve also repeatedly run up against the domain of semantics, since semantics and pragmatics share the general territory of linguistic meaning, and linguists are far from unanimous on the issue of how—or even whether—to distinguish them. Broadly speaking, however, we can say that semantic meaning is context-independent, conventional, and affects the truth-conditions of the sentence, whereas pragmatic meaning is context-dependent, generally not conventional, and doesn’t affect the truth-conditions of the sentence. But in stating things in this way, we immediately run into problems: There are cases in which these heuristics are at odds—for example, in the case of conventional implicatures, which are context-independent and conventional, hence would seem to be semantic, but don’t affect the truth-conditions of the sentence, hence would seem to be pragmatic.
This book has operated from a viewpoint of pragmatic meaning as non-truth-conditional and context-dependent, mostly setting aside issues of whether it should also include meaning that is non-truth-conditional yet also context-independent. I’ve discussed some of the boundary issues on a case-by-case basis, such as the question of whether presupposition should be considered within the realm of semantics or pragmatics. But in general, I’ve taken truth-conditionality as the dividing line between the two subfields.
Because this is a slim guide, I have aimed primarily to acquaint the reader with the basics of pragmatic theory, presenting seminal concepts and major developments; however, it goes without saying that a great deal has had to be omitted. What has been presented here, however, should give the reader the necessary basis for further study in advanced topics in pragmatics, some of which were touched on in Chapter 9. By way of a brief summary, here is what we’ve covered in the previous chapters:
• Chapter 1 provided a quick overview of basic terms and concepts, such as truth, propositions, possible worlds, and discourse models. It gave a lightning-fast introduction to semantics for the newcomer, focusing on the concepts that would be relevant for understanding subsequent chapters, such as the logical operators, truth-conditions, propositional logic, and predicate logic.
• Chapter 2 was an introduction to the fundamentals of semantic and pragmatic meaning. It focused on a number of dichotomies, including natural vs. non-natural meaning, conventional vs. intentional meaning, context-dependent vs. context-independent meaning, and truth-conditional vs. non-truth-conditional meaning, and how all of these bear on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.
• Chapter 3 presented Gricean pragmatics, founded on the Cooperative Principle and its maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Grice’s fundamental insight was that interlocutors’ assumption of mutual cooperativity helps explain how we bridge the chasm between what is semantically said and what is pragmatically intended (and, ideally, understood). This chapter showed how this works in practice, discussed tests for implicature, and briefly introduced several later theories that take Grice as their point of departure (with some departing more than others). Grice’s insights provided the backdrop for much of what would be found in later chapters.
• Chapter 4 described the various speech acts that a speaker can perform. It covered performatives, which perform the act they describe; direct speech acts, which perform an act conventionally associated with their form; and indirect speech acts, which perform some other act which requires an inference to identify. It introduced felicity conditions, the conditions that must be met for a speech act to be felicitous, and showed how asserting or questioning
the satisfaction of a felicity condition on a speech act can count as indirectly performing that act. An utterance’s illocutionary force—i.e., the act the speaker intended to perform—was distinguished from its perlocutionary effect on the hearer. The chapter ended with a brief discussion of Politeness Theory and how politeness considerations contribute to the effect of a speech act.
• In
Chapter 5, we considered the complex issue of reference: What a referent is, the nature of the discourse model and our models of each other’s discourse models, and whether it is more accurate to think of the referents of our utterances as being objects in the real world or abstract entities in our discourse models. Relatedly, we considered Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, i.e., between semantic meaning and the contextually intended referent. We also looked at deixis and the relationship between the context of utterance—who uttered it, when, where, and who/what else was present—and our ability to interpret the speaker’s intended meaning.
• Chapter 6 continued the topic of reference, zeroing in on the related issues of definiteness and anaphora. Two broad approaches to definite descriptions were considered—familiarity-based theories and uniqueness-based theories—but neither could fully account for the data. The discussion of anaphora focused on how we determine the intended referent of an anaphoric expression such as a pronoun, particularly in contexts where more than one potential antecedent is present in the discourse context. The chapter ended with a brief discussion of the changing role of
they as a gender-neutral pronoun.
• Definiteness arose again in
Chapter 7’s discussion of presupposition. Definites are one of a number of linguistic expression types that trigger presuppositions, and theorists are conflicted as to whether presuppositions are best dealt with as a semantic or a pragmatic phenomenon. Once again, neither approach accounts straightforwardly for all of the data. The notion of accommodation was brought in to help account for cases in which previously unknown information is treated as presupposed, but this gave rise to the question of what can and cannot be accommodated.
• Chapter 8 covered information structure—the various syntactic options speakers choose from in deciding how to present semantic content. We considered the role of given and new information, and looked at various ways of describing given vs. new information. We saw how preposing, postposing, and argument-reversing constructions give speakers options for packaging information in such a way as to present given before new information, and a description of presupposition/focus constructions brought presupposition back into focus (so to speak). We ended with a discussion of constructions that are sensitive to other factors for their information-packaging effects.
• Chapter 9 offered a brief and necessarily incomplete look at current issues in pragmatics, focusing on research methods and new directions in pragmatic theory. Research methods discussed included corpus linguistics, priming studies, reaction-time studies, eye-tracking studies, event-related potentials, and functional magnetic resonance imaging—though many others exist and more are being developed all the time. Theoretical directions discussed included dynamic semantic theories, Optimality Theory, lexical pragmatics, and Game Theory. Again, it goes without saying that there are many, many more pragmatic theories in development, as a brief scan through any of the several handbooks of pragmatics currently in print (e.g., Horn and Ward 2004, Allan and Jaszczolt 2012, Huang 2017, Barron, Gu, and Steen 2017, and Östman and Verschueren (annual since 1995)) will attest.
The themes that have recurred throughout are those that define the field of pragmatics itself—the centrality of inference to interpretation, communication as a cooperative act, discourse models and their recursive nature (my beliefs about your beliefs about my beliefs), distinctions and interactions between pragmatics and semantics, and the complexity of the speaker’s task in forming an optimally interpretable utterance. What all of these have in common is what Grice recognized decades ago in formulating his Cooperative Principle: the collaborative nature of communication, and the crucial role that context plays in every discourse.
The nature of human communication cannot be fully understood without an understanding of pragmatics, and yet it may be the most difficult of all aspects of linguistics to fully explain, owing to its reliance on context, recursive beliefs, and inference—all of which are highly variable from person to person, utterance to utterance, and context to context. This also makes it one of the most fascinating and exciting of all fields of study (at least from your humble author’s point of view). As an understanding of contextualized human linguistic interaction becomes more central to fields such as natural language processing, artificial intelligence, speech synthesis, machine translation, language and law, social media, and language impairment, the study of pragmatics will become ever more relevant and ever more important to society.
In short, without an understanding of human language, we cannot fully understand human interaction—and without an understanding of pragmatics, we cannot fully understand human language. It stands to reason that the study of pragmatics will be central to the study of human nature for a very long time to come.