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Pragmatics
by Michael (Speech Pathologist)
What is pragmatics?
What does this child need to learn about using language?
- A boy walks through the front door.
- Mother: Wipe your feet, please.
- He removes his muddy shoes and socks and carefully wipes his feet on the doormat.
Well, what this child needs to learn is not vocabulary, or how to parse single-step instructions. His actions perfectly comported with the word of his mother’s injunction, but not the spirit. The problem was that he did not infer the unuttered meaning latent in his mother’s utterance: “wipe your shoes on the doormat.” He hasn’t learned that the intent behind a given expression is not always to be found in the literal meaning of the words which make up that expression, or how to distinguish when someone is using literal, as opposed to figurative, language.
Within the study of linguistics, the domains of semantics and pragmatics are both concerned with how meaning embedded within, and extracted from, language. Where the two differ is in their ontology: if the correct meaning can be extracted using one’s linguistic knowledge alone, then we are operating in the domain of semantics. If, on the other hand, inferring the correct meaning of some or other statement requires drawing upon other knowledge sources, we have entered the domain of pragmatics.
To demonstrate this, let us return to the example of the boy who misinterprets his mother’s request, and how we might react in a similar situation. We would, seemingly automatically, and certainly effortlessly, recognise that we have not been bidden to remove our shoes and wipe our feet on the mat—but how? Context is key. If we have been walking around outside wearing shoes, and our shoes were working as intended, then our feet have been spared the mud and muck that have presumably befouled our shoes. We know that Mum probably wants to avoid tracking said mud and muck through the house, and that we can, as she has indicated, use the mat to help obviate this tragic outcome, whereas cleaning our feet in the same manner would avail us little in this direction. Given our background knowledge about the context in which Mum’s utterance is spoken, one interpretation (the literal one) results in absurdity, whilst the other (the non-literal) makes a good amount of rational sense, meaning that we can discard the former in favour of the latter.
Paraphrase ya
When asked to describe what a statement means, we typically engage in paraphrasing. In traditional terms, a paraphrase retains the meaning of the original statement, but does so through utilising different words and/or structures.
- E.g: Dogs chase cats.
- Paraphrase: Domestic canines pursue domestic felines.
To produce the above involves running an analysis of the sentence termed ‘sentence semantics.’ Once analysed, the contents of the sentence are then reformulated to produce a semantic paraphrase.
Note how we did not need any particular context in order to run the above operation? However, let’s see how the meaning shifts if we introduce a specific context.
- E.g., Melissa: *What’s up with Terry [the cat]? He was running away like his tail was on fire. Did Rufus [the dog] have anything to do with it?”
- Matt: Dogs chase cats.
Running the same sort of analysis, and then arriving at the meaning through the semantic paraphrase “domestic canines pursue domestic felines” no longer seems valid, because in this particular context, it doesn’t actually answer Melissa’s question. Then let us run a pragmatic sentence analysis—that is, an analysis which takes the context into account—and see if we can’t come up with a more illuminating paraphrase:
- Paraphrase: Yep, Rufus was chasing Terry and that’s why Terry was terrified.
Much more satisfactory, no? The above is our pragmatic paraphrase to go along with our pragmatic sentence analysis, and one can see how radically it differs from what we arrived at earlier, and why inferences to the pragmatic meaning of utterances is a skill that develops later than context-agnostic inferences.
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