What is Pragmatics?
Defining Pragmatics
In the early 1980, when it first becarne, common to discuss pragmatics in general textbooks on lingistics, the most common definition of pragmatics were: meaning in use or meaning in context. Although these definitions are accurate enough and perfectly adequate as a starting point, they are too general for our purposes-for example, there are aspects of semantics, particularly semantics of the type develope since the late 1980s, which could well come under the headings of meaning in use or meaning in context. More up-to-date textbooks tend to fall into one of two camps-those who equate pragmatics with speaker meaning and those who equate it with utterance interpretation (they do not necessarily use these terms explicitly). Cetainly each of these definitions captures something of the work now undertaken under the heading of pragmatics, but neither of them is entirely satisfactory. Moreover, they each represent radically different approaches to the sub-discipline of pragmatics. The term speaker meaning tends to be favoured by writers who take a broadly social' View of the discipline; it puts the focus of attention firmly on the producer of the message, but at the same time obscures the fact that the process of interpreting what we hear involves moving between several levels of meaning. The final definition (utterance interpretation), which is favod red by those who take a broadly cognitive approach, avoids this fault, but at the cost of focusing too much on the receiver of the message, which in practice means largely ignoring the social constraitns on utterance production. I am not going to undertake an exhaustive discussion of the relative advantages and disadven-tages of the two competing aproaches just now-this task will be done at appropriate points in later chapters. But we can begin to understand the differences between the two approaches if we examine what is meant by levels of meaning. The first level is that of abstract meaning; we move from abstract meaning to contextual meaning (also called utterance meaning) by assigning sense and/or reference to a word, phares or sentence. The third level of meaning is reached when we consider the speaker's intention, known as the force of an utterance. We shall begin by looking at each of these levels in turn.
Utterence meaning: the first level of speaker meaning
When in interaction we have resolved all the ambiguities of sense, reference and structure-when we have moved from abstract meaning (what a particular sentence could mean in theory) to what the speaker actually does mean by these words on this particular occasion-we have arrived at contextual meaning or utterance meaning. Utterance meaning can be defined as'a sentence-context pairing' (Gazdar 1979) and is the first component of speaker meaning.
Importance of utterance meaning
Now, you my feel, and with some justifikation, that (except, of course, for story book detectives deciphering baffling clues!) in eceryday interaction people do not normally go around straining their interpretative faculties trying to determine sense and reference. Although it is certainly the case that the majority of sentences, taken our of context, are, at least from the point of view of the hearer, potentially multiply ambiguous, in real life we rarely have difficulty in interpreting them correctly in context. In fact, more often than not, we fail to notice ambiguities of sense and refence at all, unless some misunderstanding occurs or unless, as in jokes or word-play, our attention is deliberately drawn to their existence. But, as we have already seen with the example of the Demjanjuk trial, problems rally do occur in assigning sense and reference and there are cases where correctly assigning sense and reference can, quite literally, be a matter of life and death. An example of this can be found in the transcript of a controversial English murder trial, which was held in 1952. A yputh of nineteen, Derek Bentley, was changerd jointly with a sixteen-year-old, Chirstopher Craig, with having committed the then capital offence of murdering a police officer, It was never disputed that it was Craig who fired the fatal shot; Bentley was unarmed and had, in fact, already been caught and was being restrained by a policemant at the time the shot was fired. The case againts Bentley hinged on the allegation that he had shouted, Let, him have it, Chris! At Bentley's trial, the prosecution argued that this meant Shoot the policeman, which in turn was construed as deliberate incitement to murder'. An alternative interpretation proposed later in Bantley's defence was that defence was that it referred to the gun, him referred to the police officer and that far from telling Craig to shoot his pursuer, Bentley was recomending Craig to hand over the gun. This second interpretation was rejected by the court and Bentley was found guilty and hanged. Craig who had actually fired the shot, was still a minor and was sentenced only to youth custody. It is generally true that law courts (at least in Britain) exahibit an extreme reluctance to take account of anything other than the dictionary meaning of particular expressions. A particular source of irritation to me is the use of so-called expert witnesses' in legal cases involving the use of obscence or abusive (often racist) language. In such cases the defence invariably bring in to court some cobwebby philologist who will testify, for example, that to shout Bollocks! is not offensive because it 'means' little balls. It seems that the only linguistic evidence admissible in these cases is the etymology of a word or phrase (and frequently the etymology is wholly spurious)- no account is taken of the circum stances in which the word is used nor of the speaker's intention in uttering it. In another court case, the defendant was charged with four offences againts the owner of a Chinese restaurant. One was that he had called the restaurant owner a Chinky bastard, but this charge was dismissed because an 'expert' testified that the expression 'meant' wandering parentless child travelling through the countryside in the Ching Dynasty and was in no way offnsive. Courts seem incaple of taking on board the fact that the original lexical meaning of an expression is not a good guide to the speaker's intention in employing that expression.
