Semantics

SEMANTICS AND RELATED DISCIPLINES II: SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS 99
Some languages use certain morphological devices to mark focus and
even complete words. Other languages, such as English, use syntactic
devices in addition to intonation. The most common one is the use of
cleft or pseudo-cleft sentences such as in:
It was Mario who got the bank money.
It was the bank money that Mario got.
There are other resources that can be used to emphasize the topic in
the discourse. Some are anaphora, using related lexemes, repetition of
lexemes etc, and all of them create cohesion in the discourse as Halliday
and Hasan (1976) first pointed out.
4.8. REFERENCE AND CONTEXT
Speakers calculate how much information their hearers need to make
a successful reference because much of reference involves reliance on the
context. For example, when shopping and ordeing fruits, the sentence
I still need two more red ones
where the client is referring to two more apples the context provides such
information.
These are called by Saeed and others “short hands” and they are
sometimes grouped with metonymy.
Saeed takes Clark’s example as follows:
“…a hypothetical situation where someone wants to buy two bottles of
Heineken lager. In a pub they might say Two bottles of Heineken, please!
In a theatre bar, where only bottled beer is available, their order might be
Two Heinekens, please! At a sponsor’s stall at an open air concert, which
only serves Heineken beer in bottle and on draught they might say: Two
bottles, please! If the stall only sold bottles, they might say Two please!. The
point here is that the ordinary use of referring expressions involves
calculation of retrievability, which takes account of contextual information.”
4.9. INFERENCE
In studying context and its role in the construction of meaning we
have seen how listeners participate in the construction of meaning. One
way of doing this is by using inferences to fill out the text to build up an
interpretation of speaker meaning. Conversational inference and
conversational implicature are ways of inferring meaning from a context.