Semantics

SEMANTICS AND RELATED DISCIPLINES II: SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS 95
time whether you are above, below or at equal social status in relation to
the addressee. For example, women addressing their husbands need a
pronoun marking that the husband is socially above the wife.
However, there are also non-grammaticalized ways of expressing either
social distance or respect in English. The most common one is by
addressing people not by their first names, but using Mr / Mrs / Miss before
their surnames.
4.5. MEANING AND CONTEXT
We have seen how speakers involved in a conversation calculate the
retrievability of the information available at each point of the verbal
interchange. Saeed explains how these calculations of retrievability are
really guesses about knowledge. A speaker choosing how to make reference
to an entity calculates what his hearers know. Saeed establishes three
sources of knowledge a speaker has to estimate.
1. Knowledge computable from physical context.
2. Knowledge that is available from what has already been said.
3. Knowledge available from background or common knowledge.
The first includes the kind of knowledge obtained by filling in deictic
expressions. We have already studied that in previous sections. The type
of knowledge available from what has already been said is what can be
viewed as the talk itself. This is often called discourse understood as some
kind of context.
Participants in fragments like:
Who typed this bullshit?
Joseph did
Or,
I’m exhausted
Me too
would have no difficulty interpreting Joseph did as Joseph typed this bullshit
and Me too as I’m exhausted, too. The preceding discourse allows these
interpretations.
Another element in the role of discourse is the discourse topic. Note
the following examples taken from Saeed. The first presents Rocky as a
prisoner and the second presents him as a wrestler. Each title leads to a