Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of

English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

1. What is Pragmatics
• Pragmatics is the study of what speakers mean
or speaker’s meaning . (Yule: 2010: 127)
• Sentence meaning: what a sentence means out of
Lecture 2: Pragmatics context. Sentence meaning is derived from the
meaning of the words used in a sentence.
• Speaker’s meaning: what a speaker means when
he/she utters a sentence, usually in a particular
context. Speaker’s meaning can be completely
different from sentence meaning.
• “It’s raining”

Main issues Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics

1. What is Pragmatics • Syntax:
- the relationships between linguistic forms,
2. Key concepts in Pragmatics
- how they are arranged in sequence,
• Context - and which sequences are well-formed.
• Deixis
• Semantics:
- what linguistic expressions mean out of context
(= truth conditions).

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics 2. Key concepts in Pragmatics

• Pragmatics:
- relationships between linguistic forms and the users • Context
of those forms (speakers).
• Deixis

- how meaning arises from the interaction of linguistic

meaning with contextual factors: the physical situation,
general knowledge, the speaker’s apparent intentions,
the relationship between the speaker and hearer…

Pragmatics CONTEXT

• The advantage of studying language via

pragmatics is that one can talk about Physical Epistemic
people’s intended meanings, their
context context
assumptions, their purposes or goals, and
the kinds of actions that they are Context
performing when they speak.
Linguistic Social
context context

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

Physical context Linguistic context = Co-text

where the conversation is taking place, what
objects are present, what actions are occurring…
• The co-text of a word is the set of other
A: Where’s the cheese sandwich sitting? words used in the same phrase or
sentence or utterance.
B: He’s over there by the window

→ In a restaurant.

Epistemic context Social context

• What speakers know about the world. • The social relationship between the
speaker(s) and hearer(s).
• The background knowledge is shared by
the speakers.

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

Example Deixis
• A technical term known as deictic expressions
Imagine you are in the library. Two people (from Greek) which means ‘pointing’ via language.
come into a library and they are talking
really loud. They sit at your table and • Deixis usually requires a speaker and a hearer
continue their babbling. So, you look up at sharing the same context and it is an application of
them and say: a general pragmatic principle which says that the
more two speakers have in common, the less
• "Excuse me, could you please speak up language they will need to identify familiar things.
a bit more? I missed what you said."

• Physical context : the conversation occurs in a library Types of

Deixis
• Epistemic context : every one knows that libraries are
quiet places
Spatial deixis
person deixis
( place )
• Linguistic context : sarcastic tone of voice (intonation (people , things )

cues are linguistic)

• social context: you have the right to ask someone to be Social deixis Discoursal
deixis
quiet in a place where people are supposed to be quiet, temporal deixis
especially if their rule-breaking is injurious to the needs of
( time )
others, which overrides the social norm of not giving
orders to total strangers.

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU English speaking countries/ ULIS_VNU

2. Social deixis
1. Person deixis
• In some languages (Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean), the
deictic categories of speaker, addressee, and other(s) are
• Pointing to things: elaborated with markers of relative social status.
Expressions which indicate higher status are described as
- it , this, these boxes…
‘honorifics’.

• Pointing to people : • Apparently social deixis is for the sake of politeness in

social interaction. An often cited example is the French “tu”
- I , you, he, she, it , him , them , those idiots … and “vous”, the former a plain way of referring to any
second person hearer while the latter a polite or indirect
way of referring to any second person hearer.

1. Person deixis 3. Spatial Deixis

• Each person in a conversation shifts from being
here, there, near that…
‘I’ to being ‘you’ constantly.

• Some verbs of motion have a deictic sense:

Brother, I want to
have an ice-cream
- ‘come’ (movement toward the speaker)
Ok, Lisa, right
now
after we get - ‘go’ (movement away from the speaker).
home, I’ll get you
a chocolate one. Thank you.

e.g. Here she comes.

There she goes.

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Faculty of Linguistics and Cultures of
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4. Temporal Deixis
• now , then , last week, yesterday, today,
tonight, tomorrow , this week, next month,
from now on, in the future, ...

E.g. Tomorrow , my life will be better.

5. Discoursal Deixis
• A discoursal deixis is self-explicit in that it is used
primarily in a discourse unit and for discoursal
purpose.
• We employ discoursal deixis a lot for textual
coherence or as a procedural indicators. For
instance, we use ‘to begin with, first, next, in
the following paragraph, last but not least,
etc.’ to smooth the transitions or connections
between different parts of a textual units.

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