pragmatics

pragmatics, in philosophy and linguistics, the study of how linguistic utterances are typically used to communicate propositions, intentions, attitudes, or other aspects of meaning that are not wholly expressed in the literal meanings and grammatical structures of spoken words and sentences. Pragmatics also encompasses analyses of how utterances generally constitute or involve the performance of one or more “speech acts”—such as asserting, describing, promising, accusing, requesting, demanding, and so on—and how utterances may also bring about actions or events, usually intended or foreseen by the speaker, beyond the literal and nonliteral meanings conveyed and the speech acts performed.

Pragmatics is thus typically contrasted with semantics, or the study of the rule systems that determine the literal or conventional meanings of words and sentences. Because ordinary conversation naturally involves both literal and nonliteral meanings, broad theories of pragmatics usually entail the determination of a “dividing line” between the two fields—one that identifies which aspects of communicated meanings are literal and which are also determined by the interpersonal, social, or physical context in which the utterance occurs or by general principles of cognition or rational cooperation adapted to conversational contexts.

Frequently cited examples of the last factor include utterances such as “Mary has three fingers on her right hand,” which conversationally implies—but does not literally mean—that Mary has only three fingers on her right hand; and “John jumped into the pool and swam for 30 minutes,” which conversationally implies—but does not literally mean—that John swam for 30 minutes after he jumped into the pool. According to one theory, the common implication of the former sentence is based on the principle that speakers should be as informative as necessary, while the implication of the latter sentence follows from the principle that past events should be mentioned in the temporal order in which they occurred.

The speech act theory of J.L. Austin

Pragmatics as a distinct academic discipline is generally thought to have originated in the mid-20th century school of ordinary language philosophy and specifically in the work of the University of Oxford professor J.L. (John Langshaw) Austin (1911–60), the creator of speech act theory. Austin rejected the notion, earlier promoted by logical positivists, that a non-tautological sentence is meaningful only if it is empirically verifiable—that is, only if its truth or falsehood could be established, at least in principle, given the existence of an appropriate empirical state of affairs. (Most logical positivists held that sentences concerning aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and religion, among other subject areas, are meaningless because they are not empirically verifiable.) According to Austin and other ordinary-language philosophers, the verifiability principle entails a ridiculously narrow conception of linguistic meaning, one focused on the literal or directly communicated meanings of verifiable sentences. In terms of speech acts, Austin’s criticism amounted to the claim that logical positivism involves a “descriptive fallacy,” in the sense that it treats acts of description as primary and more or less ignores other functions of language.

Austin recognized three general types of speech act, which he called “locutionary,” “illocutionary,” and “perlocutionary.” A locutionary act consists in the utterance of an identifiable set of words or sentences; an illocutionary act consists in a further conversational act performed in or by the act of uttering in a given context; and a perlocutionary act consists in an act, event, or state of mind resulting from the illocutionary act. For example, by performing the locutionary act of uttering the sentence “It’s cold in here,” one may also be performing the illocutionary act of requesting, suggesting, or demanding that the hearer close a door or window or turn on a heater, among many other possible illocutions (e.g., suggesting that both the speaker and listener leave the room); and by performing such an illocutionary act, one may bring about a corresponding perlocutionary act, consisting of the listener’s closing of the door or window, turning on a heater, and so on.

Austin also placed great emphasis on the ways in which illocutionary force is determined by the institutional setting in which an utterance is made. An utterance such as “I christen thee the Queen Elizabeth,” for example, would count as the christening of a ship only in a very special set of circumstances, based on an established practice of christening, the physical presence of a ship, the use of an appropriate christening device, and the status or authority of the speaker. Conversely, “I do” would not count as the completion of a traditional marriage ceremony if it were uttered in a fast-food restaurant in response to the question “Do you want ketchup with your french fries?”

Austin’s theory of speech acts was considerably extended and refined by his American student John Searle. Searle’s elaborate speech act taxonomy consists at its highest level of five categories:

1. Assertives (e.g., statements, descriptions, and predictions)
2. Directives (e.g., orders, requests, and direction giving)
3. Commissives (e.g., promises, oaths, and bets)
4. Expressives (e.g., greetings, congratulations, and thanks)
5. Declarations (e.g., excommunications, hirings, and declarations of war)

Searle also introduced the notion of an indirect speech act, in which the speaker performs one kind of speech act by means of performing another. A possible example is “You are standing on my foot,” an assertion or statement likely used as a means of requesting or demanding that the hearer cease standing on one’s foot.

The implicature theory of H.P. Grice

Austin’s Oxford colleague H.P. (Herbert Paul) Grice (1913–88) developed a sophisticated theory of how nonliteral aspects of meaning are generated and recovered through the use of conversational maxims. The maxims result in efficient communication by facilitating rational cooperation in conversation between speakers and hearers. In “Logic and Conversation”—first published in Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (1975)—Grice proposed a general cooperative principle and a set of four categories under which various maxims, as well as certain “supermaxims” and “submaxims,” could be grouped:

Cooperative principle: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”

Categories and maxims:

• Quantity

  1. “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).”
  2. “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.”
• Quality

  1. “Try to make your contribution one that is true.” Specifically:

     1. “Do not say what you believe to be false.”
     2. “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.”
• Relation

  1. “Be relevant.”
• Manner

  1. “Be perspicuous.” Specifically:

     1. “Avoid obscurity of expression.”
     2. “Avoid ambiguity.”
     3. “Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).”
     4. “Be orderly.”

Regarding the maxim “Be relevant,” Grice acknowledged that its terse formulation

conceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversation are legitimately changed, and so on.

The complex notion underlying these “exceedingly difficult” questions later became the basis of a major school of post-Gricean pragmatics, known as “relevance theory” (see below).

Grice identified three broad groups of implicatures generated through the observance, violation, or “flouting” of maxims in keeping with the cooperative principle. The first group consists of cases in which no maxim is clearly violated; the second group consists of cases in which a maxim is violated presumably in order to avoid violating another maxim; and the third group consists of cases in which a maxim is flouted at the level of what is said but generally observed at the level of what is implicated. Examples of the types of implicatures yielded in Grice’s three groups include the following:

Group 1. Person A stands by an obviously immobilized car, while person B approaches. A says, “I’m out of fuel,” and B replies, “There’s a station around the corner.”

Implicature: B would be violating the maxim of relation (“Be relevant”) unless she knew or at least believed that the station sells fuel for cars and that the station is likely to be open, and so on. B’s utterance thus implicates the same.

Group 2. Person A and person B are planning a trip to France; both know that B wishes to visit her friend C, a resident of France, during their trip. A asks B, “Where does C live?” B replies, “Somewhere in the south of France.”

Implicature: B is violating the first maxim of quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as is required”). But assuming B’s observance of the cooperative principle, this violation can be explained only by the assumption that, by being more informative, B would have violated the second maxim of quality (“Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence”). B thereby implicates that she does not know exactly where in the south of France C lives.

Group 3. Person A, a professor of philosophy, is writing a recommendation letter for a former pupil, B, who is applying for a teaching position. A writes: “Dear Madame: Ms. B’s command of English is excellent, and she has never been late for a seminar.”

Implicature: A is obviously flouting the first maxim of quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as is required”) and probably also the maxim of relation (“Be relevant”). It cannot be assumed that A is purposefully being less informative to avoid violating the second maxim of quantity (“Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence”), because B has been her pupil—A is thus perfectly capable of judging B’s qualifications. A’s flouting of the first maxim of quantity can thus be explained by assuming that she wishes to communicate information that she is reluctant to express explicitly, for some reason (such as kindness or politeness). She therefore implicates that B is not qualified for the teaching position.

Other very common uses of flouting are exemplified in utterances that involve irony. In a context in which A and B each know (and know that the other knows) that A’s close colleague, C, betrayed her to a professional rival, A’s remark to B that “C is a fine friend” would presumably constitute a flouting of the first maxim of quality (“Do not say what you believe to be false”). The most obvious explanation is that A wishes to communicate the exact opposite of what she says; she therefore implicates that C is not a fine friend (or not a friend at all). Other easily recognized flouting implicatures involve metaphors, overstatements, understatements, hyperbole, and intentional obscurity.

In addition to conversational implicatures, Grice recognized a distinct category of what he called “conventional” implicatures, or implicatures that he deemed to be conventionally associated with the literal meanings of certain words or expressions. Thus, according to Grice, an utterance such as “Ms. A is British; therefore, she is brave” conventionally implicates, but does not literally mean, that Ms. A’s British nationality entails (in some sense) that she is brave, or simply that all citizens or residents of Britain are brave. The notion of conventional implicature has proved to be controversial among many pragmatic theorists, because such implicatures often seem to be directly expressed, rather than implied, by utterances containing the associated words or expressions.

Relevance theory

Many later theories of pragmatics consisted of expansions or modifications of speech act theory, implicature theory, or both. One of the most influential contemporary approaches to pragmatics is relevance theory, introduced in the mid-1980s by the cognitive scientists and philosophers Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance theory is in fact a general theory of cognition applied to utterance interpretation. Its central claim is based on an understanding of relevance as a ratio of the number of “positive” utterance-related cognitive effects—including “true contextual implications, or warranted strengthenings or revisions of existing assumptions”—to some measure of the mental effort the hearer must exert to obtain them. An utterance is thus relevant to the extent that such positive cognitive effects are greater than the mental effort required to process them.

On the basis of this understanding, Sperber and Wilson claimed that speakers naturally intend their utterances to be “optimally” relevant to their hearers, in the sense that the number of implications or assumptions involved will exceed the hearers’ processing efforts by a sufficient margin, and that the margin will be the largest that can be achieved by an utterance in that context involving the same implications or assumptions. Likewise, hearers naturally assume that speakers intend their utterances to be optimally relevant in this sense. In Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986; 1995), Sperber and Wilson summarized their account in two principles, which they then called the “presumption of optimal relevance” and the “principle of relevance”:

Presumption of optimal relevance

• The speaker’s utterance is intended to be relevant enough to be worth the hearer’s processing effort.
• The speaker’s utterance is the most relevant one that the speaker could have used to achieve the same communicative effects.

Principle of relevance

• Every communicative utterance conveys the presumption of its own optimal relevance.

From the principle of relevance, Sperber and Wilson conclude that hearers should, and in fact do, “follow a path of least effort” by discontinuing their utterance processing “at the first overall interpretation that satisfies [their] expectations of relevance.”

(In an addendum to the 1995 edition of Relevance, Sperber and Wilson noted that readers had often misused the term “principle of relevance” to refer to the general claim that “human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.” Acknowledging the reasonableness of that interpretation, the authors adopted the claim as the “principle of cognitive relevance” and renamed the principle of relevance itself as the “principle of communicative relevance.” The original presumption of optimal relevance remained valid and informative—unlike the new principle of cognitive relevance, which the authors admitted is “vague…and in need of elaboration”—but the authors no longer cited it as one of the two basic principles of relevance theory.)

Since the 1980s, many neo-Gricean theorists have shifted toward relevance theory, while others have raised significant objections. Some critics have pointed out that relevance as Sperber and Wilson understand it is unmeasurable, because any utterance will technically have an infinite number of “true contextual implications” (consisting of purely logical implications of what is said or implied) and because the nature of the mental effort involved in utterance processing is unknown. (Sperber and Wilson themselves have acknowledged that contextual effects and processing effort cannot be quantitatively measured.) It follows, according to this criticism, that the relevance of an apparent implication cannot be determined, and so the implications of a given utterance cannot be predicted or explained by relevance theory.