Pragmatics is the relationship between what is said in communication (that is, the concepts and meanings which are communicated by the speaker's choice of particular words and structures) and what is done in communication ( that is, the effects the speaker's utterance has on the hearer, such as to persuade, inform, amuse, etc.). This focus on speaker-meaning and hearer-effects and encompasses the use of linguistic items for the coding of meaning, as a communicative system. It is a two-way system of interaction. It is speaker-based in that is concerned with meanings the speaker selects, the construction of propositions from concepts, and the speaker's attitudes towards these propositions. It is also hearer based in that the propositions have perlocutionary effects on hearers. It is hence essentially a theory of speech acts.
The concept of speech acts, which, following Austin (1962), is concerned with the acts that we perform through speaking, has been studied extensively in recent years, and has constituted a topical focus for scholars from a greater number of disciplines (see Schmidt and Richards 1980). Speech Act theory has been central to the work of researchers in conversational analysis, discourse analysis and semantics. Our focus is on how propositions are interpreted as different types of speech acts so we have to discuss this in terms of the assumption about the world, about communication, and about linguistic meaning which speakers and hearers share and which they appear to make use of in interpreting utterances and assigning them appropriate meanings. |
