Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

1.2 Theoretical background and motivation
1.2.1 Pragmatics and Information Structure
1.2.1.1 Pragmatics: a brief introduction and history
Pragmatics, loosely speaking, is the study of what is communicated beyond the truthconditional
(semantic) meaning of an utterance, and of how it is communicated. In everyday
conversation, myriad meanings, desires, requests, attitudes, and beliefs are communicated
without being literally said. Pragmatic inferencing is involved in any communicative content
requiring context for its interpretation, from simple pronoun deixis (e.g. you and I ) to complex
conversational implicatures. The study of pragmatics deals with all areas of non truthconditional
meaning, including presupposition, implicature (and its mechanisms), deixis,
definiteness, reference, and speech acts. Pragmatics also deals with discourse-structuring
phenomena such as foregrounding and backgrounding, and the marking of narrative structure.
1
The first formal study of pragmatics came with Morris (1938) and his theory of the relation
of signs. Semantics relates signs to their meaning; syntax involves the formal relation
of signs to other signs. Pragmatics is the relationship between signs and their “users and
interpreters”, completing the triad that allows for the communication of meaning. (Morris
1938, discussed in Horn & Ward 2004) The study of pragmatics gained a firm hold in
mainstream linguistics with the widespread underground circulation of “Logic and Conversation”
and other lectures on pragmatics given in 1967 by H. Grice, published, much later,
in various editions (e.g. Grice 1989). Grice’s maxims of quantity, quality, relation,
and manner – all falling under a “supermaxim” of cooperative conversation 2 – attempted
to provide an explanatory mechanism for the communication of non-explicit meaning.
Since that time, approaches to pragmatics and its issues (including its very definition,
and the relationship of pragmatics to truth-conditional semantics) 3 have been many and
varied, but mostly focused on the utterance and its interpretations. As late as 1999, Peccei
stated in her introductory textbook that
the focus of pragmatic analysis is on the meaning of speakers’ utterances rather
than on the meaning of words or sentences (Peccei 1999:5).
Undoubtedly, Peccei means that pragmatics deals with what is communicated beyond the
1 An in-depth survey of the field of pragmatics is, sadly, outside the scope of this study, but see e.g.
Levinson (1983); Horn & Ward (2004); Kadmon (2001); Burton-Roberts (2007), among many others.
2 Grice’s cooperative principle:
make your conversation 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 (Grice 1989:45).
3 For a taste of the debate about what comprises pragmatic vs. semantic content (i.e. “the content/context
division” (Atlas 2004:51), and to what extent pragmatic interpretation may affect truth-conditional meaning,
see Bach (1994, 2007); Atlas (2004); Levinson (1983); Horn (2004) and many others. In this study, a basic
definition of pragmatics as non truth-conditional meaning is adopted.
2