Hello Friday!
Just finished SEA's dancing class. It was so enjoyable but it was so tiring.
I have to practice more to get a good mark on dancing class, Amiin.
I am bored with U***K, this week I always go there.
*Sigh
see you tomorrow.
Jumat, 24 Februari 2012
Kamis, 23 Februari 2012
#4th Daily Journal
Hi Thursday!
What a tiring day!
This week I always went home late because of UKKPK. I must pass the selection because I have been struggling to join there.
Keep Fighting!
See you tomorrow in dancing class!
What a tiring day!
This week I always went home late because of UKKPK. I must pass the selection because I have been struggling to join there.
Keep Fighting!
See you tomorrow in dancing class!
Rabu, 22 Februari 2012
Pragmatics
What is pragmatics?
“We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what we want, when we want. All normal humans can produce and understand any number of new words and sentences. Humans use the multiple options of language often without thinking. But blindly, they sometimes fall into its traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but themselves get caught in the sticky strands.”
Jean Aitchison
“Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.”
David Crystal
“Pragmatics is all about the meanings between the lexis and the grammar and the phonology...Meanings are implied and the rules being followed are unspoken, unwritten ones.”
George Keith
“Pragmatics is a way of investigating how sense can be made of certain texts even when, from a semantic viewpoint, the text seems to be either incomplete or to have a different meaning to what is really intended. Consider a sign seen in a children's wear shop window: “Baby Sale - lots of bargains”. We know without asking that there are no babies are for sale - that what is for sale are items used for babies. Pragmatics allows us to investigate how this “meaning beyond the words” can be understood without ambiguity. The extra meaning is there, not because of the semantic aspects of the words themselves, but because we share certain contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text.
“Pragmatics is an important area of study for your course. A simplified way of thinking about pragmatics is to recognise, for example, that language needs to be kept interesting - a speaker or writer does not want to bore a listener or reader, for example, by being over-long or tedious. So, humans strive to find linguistic means to make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting, more relevant, more purposeful or more personal. Pragmatics allows this. ”
Steve Campsall
Pragmatics is a systematic way of explaining language use in context. It seeks to explain aspects of meaning which cannot be found in the plain sense of words or structures, as explained by semantics. As a field of language study, pragmatics is fairly new. Its origins lie in philosophy of language and the American philosophical school of pragmatism. As a discipline within language science, its roots lie in the work of (Herbert) Paul Grice on conversational implicature and the cooperative principle, and on the work of Stephen Levinson, Penelope Brown and Geoff Leech on politeness.
We can illustrate how pragmatics works by an example from association football (and other field sports). It sometimes happens that a team-mate will shout at me: “Man on!” Semantic analysis can only go so far with this phrase.
For example, it can elicit different lexical meanings of the noun “man” (mankind or the human race, an individual person, a male person specifically) and the preposition “on” (on top of, above, or other relationships as in “on fire”, “on heat”, “on duty”, “on the fiddle” or “on the telly”).
And it can also explain structural meaning, and account for the way this phrase works in longer sequences such as the “first man on the moon”, “a man on the run” or “the man on top of the Clapham omnibus”.
None of this explains the meaning in the context of the football game. This is very complex, but perhaps includes at least the following elements:
My team-mate has seen another player's movement, and thinks that I have either not seen it, or have not responded to it appropriately.
My team-mate wants me to know that I am likely to be tackled or impeded in some way.
My team-mate wants me to respond appropriately, as by shielding the ball, passing it to an unmarked player, laying it off for another team-mate and so on.
My team-mate has an immediate concern for me, but this is really subordinated to a more far-sighted desire for me, as a player on his team, to protect the ball or retain possession, as this will make our team more likely to gain an advantage.
My team-mate understands that my opponent will also hear the warning, but thinks that his hearing it will not harm our team's chances as much as my not being aware of the approaching player.
My team-mate foresees that I may rebuke him (and the other players on our team collectively) if no-one, from a better vantage point, alerts me to the danger.
If this is right (or even part of it), it is clear that my team-mate could not, in the time available, (that is, before the opponent tackles me) communicate this information in the explicit manner above. But it also relies on my knowing the methods of language interchange in football. “Man on” is an established form of warning. For all I know, professional players may have their own covert forms, as when they signal a routine at a free kick, corner or throw-in, by calling a number or other code word.
Also, though my team-mate is giving me information, in the context of the game, he is chiefly concerned about my taking the right action. If response to the alert becomes like a conditioned reflex (I hear the warning and at once lay the ball off or pass), then my contribution to the team effort will be improved. (Reflection on how I play the game is fine after the match, but not helpful at moments when I have to take action.) Note also, that though I have assumed this to be in a game played by men, the phrase “Man on” is used equally in mixed-gender and women's sports - I have heard it frequently in games of field hockey, where the “Man” about to be “on” was a female player. “Woman on” would be inefficient (extra syllable and a difficult intial “w” sound), and might even lead the uncritical player to worry less about the approaching tackle - though probably not more than once.
We use language all the time to make things happen. We ask someone to pass the salt or marry us - not, usually at the same time. We order a pizza or make a dental appointment. Speech acts include asking for a glass of beer, promising to drink the beer, threatening to drink more beer, ordering someone else to drink some beer, and so on. Some special people can do extraordinary things with words, like baptizing a baby, declaring war, awarding a penalty kick to Arsenal FC or sentencing a convict.
Linguists have called these things “speech acts” - and developed a theory (called, unsurprisingly, “speech act theory”) to explain how they work. Some of this is rooted in common sense and stating the obvious - as with felicity conditions. These explain that merely saying the words does not accomplish the act. Judges (unless they are also referees) cannot award penalty kicks to Arsenal, and football referees (unless they are also heads of state) cannot declare war.
Speech act theory is not the whole of pragmatics, but is perhaps currently the most important established part of the subject. Contemporary debate in pragmatics often focuses on its relations with semantics. Since semantics is the study of meaning in language, why add a new field of study to look at meaning from a novel viewpoint?
This is an elementary confusion. Clearly linguists could develop a model of semantics that included pragmatics. Or they could produce a model for each, which allows for some exploration and explanation of the boundary between them - but distinguishes them as in some way different kinds of activity. However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is necessary because it explains meanings that semantics overlooks.
What does pragmatics include?
The lack of a clear consensus appears in the way that no two published accounts list the same categories of pragmatics in quite the same order. But among the things you should know about are:
Speech act theory
Felicity conditions
Conversational implicature
The cooperative principle
Conversational maxims
Relevance
Politeness
Phatic tokens
Deixis
This guide contains some explanation of all of these, as well as related or peripheral subjects. Many of them break down further into their own sub-categories, as with the different kinds of speech acts that linguists have usefully distinguished.
Criticisms of pragmatics
Some of the criticisms directed at pragmatics include these:
It does not have a clear-cut focus
Its principles are vague and fuzzy
It is redundant - semantics already covers the territory adequately
In defending pragmatics we can say that:
The study of speech acts has illuminated social language interactions
It covers things that semantics (hitherto) has overlooked
It can help inform strategies for teaching language
It has given new insights into understanding literature
The theories of the cooperative principle and politeness principle have provided insights into person-to-person interactions.
Speech acts
Performatives | The “hereby” test | Felicity conditions
The philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) claims that many utterances (things people say) are equivalent to actions. When someone says: “I name this ship” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality. We can add many more examples:
Sergeant Major: Squad, by the left… left turn!
Referee: (Pointing to the centre circle) Goal!
Groom: With this ring, I thee wed.
Speech act theory broadly explains these utterances as having three parts or aspects: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.
Locutionary acts are simply the speech acts that have taken place.
Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance, where saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting one's troth, welcoming and warning.
Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the listener, who accepts the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned.
Some linguists have attempted to classify illocutionary acts into a number of categories or types. David Crystal, quoting J.R. Searle, gives five such categories: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. (Perhaps he would have preferred declaratives, but this term was already taken as a description of a kind of sentence that expresses a statement.)
Representatives: here the speaker asserts a proposition to be true, using such verbs as: affirm, believe, conclude, deny, report.
Directives: here the speaker tries to make the hearer do something, with such words as: ask, beg, challenge, command, dare, invite, insist, request.
Commissives: here the speaker commits himself (or herself) to a (future) course of action, with verbs such as: guarantee, pledge, promise, swear, vow, undertake, warrant.
Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude to or about a state of affairs, using such verbs as: apologize, appreciate, congratulate, deplore, detest, regret, thank, welcome.
Declarations the speaker alters the external status or condition of an object or situation, solely by making the utterance: I now pronounce you man and wife, I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you be dead, I name this ship...
Performatives
These are speech acts of a special kind where the utterance of the right words by the right person in the right situation effectively is (or accomplishes) the social act. In some cases, the speech must be accompanied by a ceremonial or ritual action. Whether the speaker in fact has the social or legal (or other kind of) standing to accomplish the act depends on some things beyond the mere speaking of the words. These are felicity conditions, which we can also explain by the “hereby” test. But let's look, first, at some examples.
In the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 19, verses 13-20) we read of some exorcists in Ephesus who tried to copy St. Paul and cast out evil spirits in the name of Jesus: “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims”. On one occasion the possessed man (or the evil spirit) attacked them, and said, “Jesus I know and Paul I know; but who are you?” Evidently St. Paul not only knew the words, but also had the means to call on divine aid for his exorcisms. In a slightly similar vein, Claudius, in Hamlet, sees that his prayer is ineffectual because “Words without thoughts never to Heaven go”.
Outside of miracle or magic, there are social realities that can be enacted by speech, because we all accept the status of the speaker in the appropriate situation. This is an idea expressed in the American Declaration of Independence where we read, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed”.
Here are some examples from different spheres of human activity, where performatives are found at work. These are loose categories, and many performatives belong to more than one of them:
Universities and schools: conferring of degrees, rusticating or excluding students.
The church: baptizing, confirming and marrying, exorcism, commination (cursing) and excommunication.
Governance and civic life: crowning of monarchs, dissolution of Parliament, passing legislation, awarding honours, ennobling or decorating.
The law: enacting or enforcing of various judgements, passing sentence, swearing oaths and plighting one's troth.
The armed services: signing on, giving an order to attack, retreat or open fire.
Sport: cautioning or sending off players, giving players out, appealing for a dismissal or declaring (closing an innings) in cricket.
Business: hiring and firing, establishing a verbal contract, naming a ship.
Gaming: placing a bet, raising the stakes in poker.
The “hereby” test
One simple but crude way to decide whether a speech act is of such a kind that we can aptly call it a performative is to insert the word “hereby” between subject and verb. If the resulting utterance makes sense, then the speech act is probably a performative. For example,
“I hereby confer upon you the honourable degree of Bachelor of Arts…”
“I hereby sentence you to three months' probation, suspended for a year…”
“I hereby appoint you Grandmaster of the Ancient, Scandalous and Disreputable Order of Friends of the Hellfire Club …”
It is crude, because it implies at least one felicity condition - whatever it is to which “hereby” refers. In the first example, “hereby” may refer to a physical action (touching on the head or shoulder with a ceremonial staff or mace, say). In the second example it may refer to the speaker's situation - in sitting as chairman of the bench of magistrates. The third example is my (plausible) invention - showing how all sorts of private groups (Freemasons, Rotarians, even the school Parent Teacher Association) can have their own agreements, which give to some speakers the power to enact performatives.
Felicity conditions
Preparatory conditions | conditions for execution | sincerity conditions
These are conditions necessary to the success of a speech act. They take their name from a Latin root - “felix” or “happy”. They are conditions needed for success or achievement of a performative. Only certain people are qualified to declare war, baptize people or sentence convicted felons. In some cases, the speaker must be sincere (as in apologizing or vowing). And external circumstances must be suitable: “Can you give me a lift?” requires that the hearer has a motor vehicle, is able to drive it somewhere and that the speaker has a reason for the request. It may be that the utterance is meant as a joke or sarcasm, in which case a different interpretation is in order. Loosely speaking, felicity conditions are of three kinds: preparatory conditions, conditions for execution and sincerity conditions.
Preparatory conditions
Preparatory conditions include the status or authority of the speaker to perform the speech act, the situation of other parties and so on.
So, in order to confirm a candidate, the speaker must be a bishop; but a mere priest can baptize people, while various ministers of religion and registrars may solemnize marriages (in England). In the case of marrying, there are other conditions - that neither of the couple is already married, that they make their own speech acts, and so on. We sometimes speculate about the status of people (otherwise free to marry) who act out a wedding scene in a play or film - are they somehow, really, married? In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has no worries, because the words of the ceremony are not spoken on stage, and, anyway, Juliet's part is played by a boy. (Though this may make the wedding scene seem blasphemous to some in the audience.)
In the UK only the monarch can dissolve parliament. A qualified referee can caution a player, if he or she is officiating in a match. The referee's assistant (who, in the higher leagues, is also a qualified referee) cannot do this.
The situation of the utterance is important. If the US President jokingly “declares” war on another country in a private conversation, then the USA is not really at war. This, in fact, happened (on 11 August 1984), when Ronald Reagan made some remarks off-air, as he thought, but which have been recorded for posterity:
“My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Click on the link below to listen to this speech as a sound file in wav format. You will need a sound card, speakers or headphones and suitable software (such as Windows™ Media Player or RealPlayer™) to listen to the file.
Listen to Ronald Reagan's 1984 off-air speech.
One hopes that this utterance also failed in terms of sincerity conditions.
Conditions for execution
Conditions for execution can assume an exaggerated importance. We are so used to a ritual or ceremonial action accompanying the speech act that we believe the act is invalidated, if the action is lacking - but there are few real examples of this.
Take refereeing of association football. When a referee cautions a player, he (or she) should take the player's name, number and note the team for which he plays. The referee may also display a yellow card, but this is not necessary to the giving of the caution:
“The mandatory use of the cards is merely a simple aid for better communication.”
The Football Association (1998); Advice on the Application of the Laws of the Game, p. 9
In knighting their subjects, English monarchs traditionally touch the recipient of the honour on both shoulders with the flat side of a sword blade. But this, too, is not necessary to the performance of the speech act.
A story is told in Oxford of a young man, taking his final exams, who demanded a pint of beer from the invigilators. He pointed out that he was wearing his sword, as required by the mediaeval statute that made provision for the drink. The invigilator (exam supervisor), believing the young man's version of events, brought the beer, but checked the statutes. Later the young man received a fine - he had not, as the statute also required, been wearing his spurs. The story may well be an urban myth (the writer heard it several times from different sources), but illustrates neatly a condition of execution.
Sincerity conditions
At a simple level these show that the speaker must really intend what he or she says. In the case of apologizing or promising, it may be impossible for others to know how sincere the speaker is. Moreover sincerity, as a genuine intention (now) is no assurance that the apologetic attitude will last, or that the promise will be kept. There are some speech acts - such as plighting one's troth or taking an oath - where this sincerity is determined by the presence of witnesses. The one making the promise will not be able later to argue that he or she didn't really mean it.
A more complex example comes in the classroom where the teacher asks a question, but the pupil supposes that the teacher knows the answer and is, therefore, not sincere in asking it. In this case “Can you, please, tell me X?” may be more acceptable to the child than “What is X?”
We can also use our understanding of sincerity conditions humorously, where we ask others, or promise ourselves, to do things which we think the others know to be impossible: “Please can you make it sunny tomorrow?”
Conversational implicature
Conversational maxims | Relevance
In a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1967, the English language philosopher H.P. (Paul) Grice outlined an approach to what he termed conversational implicature - how hearers manage to work out the complete message when speakers mean more than they say. An example of what Grice meant by conversational implicature is the utterance:
“Have you got any cash on you?”
where the speaker really wants the hearer to understand the meaning:
“Can you lend me some money? I don't have much on me.”
The conversational implicature is a message that is not found in the plain sense of the sentence. The speaker implies it. The hearer is able to infer (work out, read between the lines) this message in the utterance, by appealing to the rules governing successful conversational interaction. Grice proposed that implicatures like the second sentence can be calculated from the first, by understanding three things:
The usual linguistic meaning of what is said.
Contextual information (shared or general knowledge).
The assumption that the speaker is obeying what Grice calls the cooperative principal
Conversational maxims and the cooperative principle
The success of a conversation depends upon the various speakers' approach to the interaction. The way in which people try to make conversations work is sometimes called the cooperative principle. We can understand it partly by noting those people who are exceptions to the rule, and are not capable of making the conversation work. We may also, sometimes, find it useful deliberately to infringe or disregard it - as when we receive an unwelcome call from a telephone salesperson, or where we are being interviewed by a police officer on suspicion of some terrible crime.
Paul Grice proposes that in ordinary conversation, speakers and hearers share a cooperative principle. Speakers shape their utterances to be understood by hearers. The principle can be explained by four underlying rules or maxims. (David Crystal calls them conversational maxims. They are also sometimes named Grice's or Gricean maxims.)
They are the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner.
Quality: speakers should be truthful. They should not say what they think is false, or make statements for which they have no evidence.
Quantity: a contribution should be as informative as is required for the conversation to proceed. It should be neither too little, nor too much. (It is not clear how one can decide what quantity of information satisfies the maxim in a given case.)
Relevance: speakers' contributions should relate clearly to the purpose of the exchange.
Manner: speakers' contributions should be perspicuous: clear, orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.
Grice does not of course prescribe the use of such maxims. Nor does he (I hope) suggest that we use them artificially to construct conversations. But they are useful for analysing and interpreting conversation, and may reveal purposes of which (either as speaker or listener) we were not previously aware. Very often, we communicate particular non-literal meanings by appearing to “violate” or “flout” these maxims. If you were to hear someone described as having “one good eye”, you might well assume the person's other eye was defective, even though nothing had been said about it at all.
Relevance
Some linguists (such as Howard Jackson and Peter Stockwell, who call it a “Supermaxim”) single out relevance as of greater importance than Grice recognised (Grice gives quality and manner as supermaxims). Assuming that the cooperative principle is at work in most conversations, we can see how hearers will try to find meaning in utterances that seem meaningless or irrelevant. We assume that there must be a reason for these. Jackson and Stockwell cite a conversation between a shopkeeper and a 16-year old customer:
Customer: Just these, please.
Shopkeeper: Are you eighteen?
Customer: Oh, I'm from Middlesbrough.
Shopkeeper: (after a brief pause) OK (serves beer to him).
Jackson H., and Stockwell, P. (1996), An Introduction to the Nature and Functions of Language, p. 142
Jackson and Stockwell suggest that “there is no explanation for [the customer's] bizarre reply”. Perhaps this should be qualified: we cannot be sure what the explanation is, but we can find some plausible answer. Possible explanations might include these:
The young man thought his being from Middlesbrough might explain whatever it was about him that had made the shopkeeper suspicious about his youth.
The young man thought the shopkeeper's question was provoked by his unfamiliar manner of speaking, so he wanted to explain this.
The young man was genuinely flustered and said the first thing he could think of, while trying to think of a better reason for his looking under-age.
The young man thought that the shopkeeper might treat someone from Middlesbrough in a more indulgent manner than people from elsewhere.
Jackson and Stockwell suggest further that the shopkeeper “derived some inference or other” from the teenager's reply, since she served him the beer. It might of course be that she had raised the question (how old is this customer?) once, but when he appeared to have misunderstood it, was not ready to ask it again or clarify it - perhaps because this seemed too much like hard work, and as a stranger, the teenager would be unlikely to attract attention (from the police or trading standards officers) as a regular under-age purchaser of beer.
In analysing utterances and searching for relevance we can use a hierarchy of propositions - those that might be asserted, presupposed, entailed or inferred from any utterance.
Assertion: what is asserted is the obvious, plain or surface meaning of the utterance (though many utterances are not assertions of anything).
Presupposition: what is taken for granted in the utterance. “I saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre” presupposes that the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre.
Entailments: logical or necessary corollaries of an utterance, thus, the above example entails:
I saw something in the Louvre.
I saw something somewhere.
Something was seen.
There is a Louvre.
There is a Mona Lisa, and so on.
Inferences: these are interpretations that other people draw from the utterance, for which we cannot always directly account. From this example, someone might infer, rationally, that the Mona Lisa is, or was recently, on show to the public. They might infer, less rationally, that the speaker has been to France recently - because if the statement were about something from years ago, he or she would have said so.
The given/new distinction
In conveying a message, we should think about more than just “who did what to whom”. We also have to keep in mind what our listeners know already, and how to present the message in an intelligible and coherent manner.
We should not assume that our listeners have particular knowledge. Even if we are sure they do have knowledge of something about which we wish to speak, we may need to introduce it, or recall what they already know. Our listeners may do this for us, as when one's parent, irked by a personal pronoun demands to know: “Who's she? The cat's mother?”
Similarly, we should not introduce familiar things as if they were new. This may seem patronizing, but can also be confusing, since our listeners may try to find a new interpretation to match our implication of novelty.
One way in which we show that information is new is by using nouns. Once it is familiar we refer (back) to it by using deictic pronouns - like “this” or “it”.
Names and addresses
T and V pronouns | Titles and names
T and V pronouns
Some languages have different forms for “you” (French “tu/vous”, German “du/Sie”, for example). These may originally have indicated number (“vous” and “Sie”) used for plural forms, but now show different levels of formality, with “tu” and “du” being more familiar, “vous” and “Sie” more polite. In English this was shown historically by the contrast between “you” and “thou/thee”. The “thou” form survives in some dialects, while other familiar pronoun forms are “youse” (Liverpool) and “you-all” (southern USA). Where it is possible to make the distinction, this is known as a T/V system of address.
In this system the V form is a marker of politeness or deference. It may also be a marker of status, with the V form used to superiors, the T form to equals or inferiors. T forms are also used to express solidarity or intimacy. The T form is found in Shakespeare's plays, where it almost always shows the speaker's attitude to status and situation. A king is “your majesty” or “you” but a peasant is “thou”. It may be an insult, as when Tybalt addresses Romeo as “thou” (“Romeo, thou art a villain”; Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3). It is also found in petrified or “frozen” language forms, such as the stylized speech of the Society of Friends (“Quakers”) or other non-conformist groups, like Mennonites or the Pennsylvania Amish, in orders of service and prayers. Oddly, many modern speakers think that “thou” (being “old”) is more formal or courteous than “you” - when the reverse is the case!
Titles and names
In English, we also express status and attitude through titles, first names and last names. Titles are such things as Professor, Dr, Sir, Dame, Fr. (Father), Mr, Mrs, Miss, Rabbi, Sr. (Sister) and, in the USA, even such things as coach and chef. Note that we abbreviate some of these in writing, but not in speaking - we write “Mr.” but say “mister”. First names may be given names (Fred, Susan) but include epithets such as chief, guv, mate, man, pal. Last names are usually family names. In general, use of these on their own suggests lack of deference (“Oi, Smith...”) but in some contexts (public schools, the armed forces) they are norms. If one speaker uses title and last name (TLN), and the other first name (FN) only, we infer difference in status. The social superior (the FN speaker) may invite the inferior to use FN in response:
A: Professor Cringeworthy? B: Do call me Cuthbert.
A: Lord Archer? B: Please, it's Jeffrey.
In schools teachers use FN (or FNLN when reprimanding or being sarcastic) in speaking to pupils and receive T (“Sir”) or TLN (“Miss Brodie”) in reply. “Miss” is addressed to women teachers, even where the speaker knows or believes them to be married.
In English avoidance of address is often acceptable - thus where French speakers say “Bonsoir, Monsieur”, English speakers may say merely, “Good evening” (Omitting the address in France would seem impolite.)
The politeness principle
Leech's maxims | Face and politeness strategies | Examples from Brown and Levinson | Phatic tokens
The politeness principle is a series of maxims, which Geoff Leech has proposed as a way of explaining how politeness operates in conversational exchanges. Leech defines politeness as forms of behaviour that establish and maintain comity. That is the ability of participants in a social interaction to engage in interaction in an atmosphere of relative harmony. In stating his maxims Leech uses his own terms for two kinds of illocutionary acts. He calls representatives “assertives”, and calls directives “impositives”.
Each maxim is accompanied by a sub-maxim (between square brackets), which is of less importance. These support the idea that negative politeness (avoidance of discord) is more important than positive politeness (seeking concord).
Not all of the maxims are equally important. For instance, tact influences what we say more powerfully than does generosity, while approbation is more important than modesty.
Note also that speakers may adhere to more than one maxim of politeness at the same time. Often one maxim is on the forefront of the utterance, with a second maxim being invoked by implication.
If politeness is not communicated, we can assume that the politeness attitude is absent.
Leech's maxims
Tact maxim (in directives [impositives] and commissives): minimise cost to other; [maximise benefit to other]
Generosity maxim (in directives and commissives): minimise benefit to self; [maximise cost to self]
Approbation maxim (in expressives and representatives [assertives]): minimise dispraise of other; [maximise praise of other]
Modesty maxim (in expressives and representatives): minimise praise of self; [maximise dispraise of self]
Agreement maxim (in representatives): minimise disagreement between self and other; [maximise agreement between self and other]
Sympathy maxim (in representatives): minimise antipathy between self and other; [maximise sympathy between self and other]
Face and politeness strategies
“Face” (as in “lose face”) refers to a speaker's sense of linguistic and social identity. Any speech act may impose on this sense, and is therefore face threatening. And speakers have strategies for lessening the threat. Positive politeness means being complimentary and gracious to the addressee (but if this is overdone, the speaker may alienate the other party). Negative politeness is found in ways of mitigating the imposition:
Hedging: Er, could you, er, perhaps, close the, um , window?
Pessimism: I don't suppose you could close the window, could you?
Indicating deference: Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I asked you to close the window?
Apologizing: I'm terribly sorry to put you out, but could you close the window?
Impersonalizing: The management requires all windows to be closed.
A good illustration of a breach of these strategies comes from Alan Bleasdale's 1982 TV drama, The Boys from the Black Stuff, where the unemployed Yosser Hughes greets potential employers with the curt demand: “Gizza job!”
Perhaps the most thorough treatment of the concept of politeness is that of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, which was first published in 1978 and then reissued, with a long introduction, in 1987. In their model, politeness is defined as redressive action taken to counter-balance the disruptive effect of face-threatening acts (FTAs).
In their theory, communication is seen as potentially dangerous and antagonistic. A strength of their approach over that of Geoff Leech is that they explain politeness by deriving it from more fundamental notions of what it is to be a human being. The basic notion of their model is “face”. This is defined as “the public self-image that every member (of society) wants to claim for himself”. In their framework, face consists of two related aspects.
One is negative face, or the rights to territories, freedom of action and freedom from imposition - wanting your actions not to be constrained or inhibited by others.
The other is positive face, the positive consistent self-image that people have and their desire to be appreciated and approved of by at least some other people.
The rational actions people take to preserve both kinds of face, for themselves and the people they interact with, add up to politeness. Brown and Levinson also argue that in human communication, either spoken or written, people tend to maintain one another's face continuously.
In everyday conversation, we adapt our conversation to different situations. Among friends we take liberties or say things that would seem discourteous among strangers. And we avoid over-formality with friends. In both situations we try to avoid making the hearer embarrassed or uncomfortable. Face-threatening acts (FTAs) are acts that infringe on the hearers' need to maintain his/her self-esteem, and be respected. Politeness strategies are developed for the main purpose of dealing with these FTAs. Suppose I see a crate of beer in my neighbour's house. Being thirsty, I might say:
I want some beer.
Is it OK for me to have a beer?
I hope it's not too forward, but would it be possible for me to have a beer?
It's so hot. It makes you really thirsty.
Brown and Levinson sum up human politeness behaviour in four strategies, which correspond to these examples: bald on record, negative politeness, positive politeness, and off-record-indirect strategy.
The bald on-record strategy does nothing to minimize threats to the hearer's “face”
The positive politeness strategy shows you recognize that your hearer has a desire to be respected. It also confirms that the relationship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity.
The negative politeness strategy also recognizes the hearer's face. But it also recognizes that you are in some way imposing on them. Some other examples would be to say, “I don't want to bother you but...” or “I was wondering if...”
Off-record indirect strategies take some of the pressure off of you. You are trying to avoid the direct FTA of asking for a beer. Instead you would rather it be offered to you once your hearer sees that you want one.
These strategies are not universal - they are used more or less frequently in other cultures. For example, in some eastern societies the off-record-indirect strategy will place on your hearer a social obligation to give you anything you admire. So speakers learn not to express admiration for expensive and valuable things in homes that they visit.
Examples from Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies
Bald on-record | positive politeness | negative politeness | off-record-indirect
Bald on-record
An emergency: Help!
Task oriented: Give me those!
Request: Put your jacket away.
Alerting: Turn your lights on! (while driving)
Positive Politeness
Attend to the hearer: You must be hungry, it's a long time since breakfast. How about some lunch?
Avoid disagreement: A: What is she, small? B: Yes, yes, she's small, smallish, um, not really small but certainly not very big.
Assume agreement: So when are you coming to see us?
Hedge opinion: You really should sort of try harder.
Negative Politeness
Be indirect: I'm looking for a pen.
Request forgiveness: You must forgive me but....
Minimize imposition: I just want to ask you if I could use your computer?
Pluralize the person responsible: We forgot to tell you that you needed to by your plane ticket by yesterday.
Off-record (indirect)
Give hints: It's a bit cold in here.
Be vague: Perhaps someone should have been more responsible.
Be sarcastic, or joking: Yeah, he's a real Einstein (rocket scientist, Stephen Hawking, genius and so on)!
Phatic tokens
These are ways of showing status by orienting comments to oneself, to the other, or to the general or prevailing situation (in England this is usually the weather).
Self-oriented phatic tokens are personal to the speaker: “I'm not up to this” or “My feet are killing me”.
Other-oriented tokens are related to the hearer: “Do you work here?” or “You seem to know what you're doing”.
A neutral token refers to the context or general state of affairs: “Cold, isn't it?” or “Lovely flowers”.
A superior shows consideration in an other-oriented token, as when the Queen says to the factory worker: “It must be jolly hard to make one of those”. The inferior might respond with a self-oriented token, like “Hard work, this”. On the surface, there is an exchange of information. In reality there is a suggestion and acceptance of a hierarchy of status. The factory worker would be unlikely to respond with, “Yes, but it's not half as hard as travelling the world, trooping the colour, making a speech at Christmas and dissolving Parliament.”
Deixis
Personal deixis | Spatial deixis | Temporal deixis
Note: this section is seriously hard. You have been warned. But first, how do you pronounce it? The term comes from the Greek deiktikos (=“able to show”). This is related to Greek dèiknymi (dyke-nimmy) meaning “explain” or “prove”. The standard pronunciation has two syllables (dyke-sis) while the adjective form is deictic (dyke-tik).
According to Stephen Levinson:
“Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode...features of the context of utterance ... and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.”
Deixis is an important field of language study in its own right - and very important for learners of second languages. But it has some relevance to analysis of conversation and pragmatics. It is often and best described as “verbal pointing”, that is to say pointing by means of language. The linguistic forms of this pointing are called deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic words; they are also sometimes called indexicals.
Deictic expressions include such lexemes as:
Personal or possessive pronouns (I/you/mine/yours),
Demonstrative pronouns (this/that),
(Spatial/temporal) adverbs (here/there/now),
Other pro-forms (so/do),
Personal or possessive adjectives (my/your),
Demonstrative adjectives (this/that),
Articles (the).
Deixis refers to the world outside a text. Reference to the context surrounding an utterance is often referred to as primary deixis, exophoric deixis or simply deixis alone. Primary deixis is used to point to a situation outside a text (situational deixis) or to the speaker's and hearer's (shared) knowledge of the world (knowledge deixis).
Contextual use of deictic expressions is known as secondary deixis, textual deixis or endophoric deixis. Such expressions can refer either backwards or forwards to other elements in a text:
Anaphoric deixis is backward pointing, and is the norm in English texts. Examples include demonstrative pronouns: such, said, similar, (the) same.
Cataphoric deixis is forward pointing. Examples include: the following, certain, some (“the speaker raised some objections...”), this (“Let me say this...”), these, several.
Deictic expressions fall into three categories:
Personal deixis (you, us),
Spatial deixis (here, there) and
Temporal deixis (now, then).
Deixis is clearly tied to the speaker's context, the most basic distinction being between near the speaker (proximal) and away from the speaker (distal).
Proximal deictic expressions include this, here and now.
Distal deictic expressions include that, there and then.
Proximal expressions are generally interpreted in relation to the speaker's location or deictic centre. For example now is taken to mean some point or period in time that matches the time of the speaker's utterance. When we read, “Now Barabbas was a thief” (John 18.40) we do not take the statement to mean the same as “Barabbas was now a thief” (i.e. he had become a thief, having not been so before). Rather we read it as St. John's writing, “I'm telling you now, that Barabbas was (not now but at the time in the past when these events happened) a thief”.
Personal deixis
English does not use personal deixis to indicate relative social status in the same way that other languages do (such as those with TV pronoun systems). But the pronoun we has a potential for ambiguity, i.e. between exclusive we (excludes the hearer) and the hearer-including (inclusive) we.
Spatial deixis
The use of proximal and distal expressions in spatial deixis is confused by deictic projection. This is the speaker's ability to project himself or herself into a location at which he or she is not yet present. A familiar example is the use of here on telephone answering machines (“I'm not here at the moment...”). While writing e-mails, I often edit out the use of here, when I see that the reader will not necessarily understand the intended meaning. (My here is this room in East Yorkshire, England, while yours may be this school in Maryland, this flat in Moscow or this university in Melbourne.)
It is likely that the basis of spatial deixis is psychological distance (rather than physical distance). Usually physical and (metaphorical) psychological distance will appear the same. But a speaker may wish to mark something physically close as psychologically distant, as when you indicate an item of food on your plate with “I don't like that”. Perhaps a better (real example) was Graham Taylor's famous remark on his England soccer team's conceding a goal: “Do I not like that!” This moment, from the qualifying competition for the 1994 World Cup, was recorded for, and broadcast on a documentary film for, Channel 4.
Temporal deixis
Psychological distance can apply to temporal deixis as well. We can treat temporal events as things that move towards us (into view) or away from us (out of view). For instance, we speak of the coming year or the approaching year. This may stem from our perception of things (like weather storms) which we see approaching both spatially and in time. We treat the near or immediate future as being close to utterance time by using the proximal deictic expression this alone, as in “this (that is the next) weekend” or “this evening” (said earlier in the day).
“We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what we want, when we want. All normal humans can produce and understand any number of new words and sentences. Humans use the multiple options of language often without thinking. But blindly, they sometimes fall into its traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but themselves get caught in the sticky strands.”
Jean Aitchison
“Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.”
David Crystal
“Pragmatics is all about the meanings between the lexis and the grammar and the phonology...Meanings are implied and the rules being followed are unspoken, unwritten ones.”
George Keith
“Pragmatics is a way of investigating how sense can be made of certain texts even when, from a semantic viewpoint, the text seems to be either incomplete or to have a different meaning to what is really intended. Consider a sign seen in a children's wear shop window: “Baby Sale - lots of bargains”. We know without asking that there are no babies are for sale - that what is for sale are items used for babies. Pragmatics allows us to investigate how this “meaning beyond the words” can be understood without ambiguity. The extra meaning is there, not because of the semantic aspects of the words themselves, but because we share certain contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text.
“Pragmatics is an important area of study for your course. A simplified way of thinking about pragmatics is to recognise, for example, that language needs to be kept interesting - a speaker or writer does not want to bore a listener or reader, for example, by being over-long or tedious. So, humans strive to find linguistic means to make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting, more relevant, more purposeful or more personal. Pragmatics allows this. ”
Steve Campsall
Pragmatics is a systematic way of explaining language use in context. It seeks to explain aspects of meaning which cannot be found in the plain sense of words or structures, as explained by semantics. As a field of language study, pragmatics is fairly new. Its origins lie in philosophy of language and the American philosophical school of pragmatism. As a discipline within language science, its roots lie in the work of (Herbert) Paul Grice on conversational implicature and the cooperative principle, and on the work of Stephen Levinson, Penelope Brown and Geoff Leech on politeness.
We can illustrate how pragmatics works by an example from association football (and other field sports). It sometimes happens that a team-mate will shout at me: “Man on!” Semantic analysis can only go so far with this phrase.
For example, it can elicit different lexical meanings of the noun “man” (mankind or the human race, an individual person, a male person specifically) and the preposition “on” (on top of, above, or other relationships as in “on fire”, “on heat”, “on duty”, “on the fiddle” or “on the telly”).
And it can also explain structural meaning, and account for the way this phrase works in longer sequences such as the “first man on the moon”, “a man on the run” or “the man on top of the Clapham omnibus”.
None of this explains the meaning in the context of the football game. This is very complex, but perhaps includes at least the following elements:
My team-mate has seen another player's movement, and thinks that I have either not seen it, or have not responded to it appropriately.
My team-mate wants me to know that I am likely to be tackled or impeded in some way.
My team-mate wants me to respond appropriately, as by shielding the ball, passing it to an unmarked player, laying it off for another team-mate and so on.
My team-mate has an immediate concern for me, but this is really subordinated to a more far-sighted desire for me, as a player on his team, to protect the ball or retain possession, as this will make our team more likely to gain an advantage.
My team-mate understands that my opponent will also hear the warning, but thinks that his hearing it will not harm our team's chances as much as my not being aware of the approaching player.
My team-mate foresees that I may rebuke him (and the other players on our team collectively) if no-one, from a better vantage point, alerts me to the danger.
If this is right (or even part of it), it is clear that my team-mate could not, in the time available, (that is, before the opponent tackles me) communicate this information in the explicit manner above. But it also relies on my knowing the methods of language interchange in football. “Man on” is an established form of warning. For all I know, professional players may have their own covert forms, as when they signal a routine at a free kick, corner or throw-in, by calling a number or other code word.
Also, though my team-mate is giving me information, in the context of the game, he is chiefly concerned about my taking the right action. If response to the alert becomes like a conditioned reflex (I hear the warning and at once lay the ball off or pass), then my contribution to the team effort will be improved. (Reflection on how I play the game is fine after the match, but not helpful at moments when I have to take action.) Note also, that though I have assumed this to be in a game played by men, the phrase “Man on” is used equally in mixed-gender and women's sports - I have heard it frequently in games of field hockey, where the “Man” about to be “on” was a female player. “Woman on” would be inefficient (extra syllable and a difficult intial “w” sound), and might even lead the uncritical player to worry less about the approaching tackle - though probably not more than once.
We use language all the time to make things happen. We ask someone to pass the salt or marry us - not, usually at the same time. We order a pizza or make a dental appointment. Speech acts include asking for a glass of beer, promising to drink the beer, threatening to drink more beer, ordering someone else to drink some beer, and so on. Some special people can do extraordinary things with words, like baptizing a baby, declaring war, awarding a penalty kick to Arsenal FC or sentencing a convict.
Linguists have called these things “speech acts” - and developed a theory (called, unsurprisingly, “speech act theory”) to explain how they work. Some of this is rooted in common sense and stating the obvious - as with felicity conditions. These explain that merely saying the words does not accomplish the act. Judges (unless they are also referees) cannot award penalty kicks to Arsenal, and football referees (unless they are also heads of state) cannot declare war.
Speech act theory is not the whole of pragmatics, but is perhaps currently the most important established part of the subject. Contemporary debate in pragmatics often focuses on its relations with semantics. Since semantics is the study of meaning in language, why add a new field of study to look at meaning from a novel viewpoint?
This is an elementary confusion. Clearly linguists could develop a model of semantics that included pragmatics. Or they could produce a model for each, which allows for some exploration and explanation of the boundary between them - but distinguishes them as in some way different kinds of activity. However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is necessary because it explains meanings that semantics overlooks.
What does pragmatics include?
The lack of a clear consensus appears in the way that no two published accounts list the same categories of pragmatics in quite the same order. But among the things you should know about are:
Speech act theory
Felicity conditions
Conversational implicature
The cooperative principle
Conversational maxims
Relevance
Politeness
Phatic tokens
Deixis
This guide contains some explanation of all of these, as well as related or peripheral subjects. Many of them break down further into their own sub-categories, as with the different kinds of speech acts that linguists have usefully distinguished.
Criticisms of pragmatics
Some of the criticisms directed at pragmatics include these:
It does not have a clear-cut focus
Its principles are vague and fuzzy
It is redundant - semantics already covers the territory adequately
In defending pragmatics we can say that:
The study of speech acts has illuminated social language interactions
It covers things that semantics (hitherto) has overlooked
It can help inform strategies for teaching language
It has given new insights into understanding literature
The theories of the cooperative principle and politeness principle have provided insights into person-to-person interactions.
Speech acts
Performatives | The “hereby” test | Felicity conditions
The philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960) claims that many utterances (things people say) are equivalent to actions. When someone says: “I name this ship” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”, the utterance creates a new social or psychological reality. We can add many more examples:
Sergeant Major: Squad, by the left… left turn!
Referee: (Pointing to the centre circle) Goal!
Groom: With this ring, I thee wed.
Speech act theory broadly explains these utterances as having three parts or aspects: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.
Locutionary acts are simply the speech acts that have taken place.
Illocutionary acts are the real actions which are performed by the utterance, where saying equals doing, as in betting, plighting one's troth, welcoming and warning.
Perlocutionary acts are the effects of the utterance on the listener, who accepts the bet or pledge of marriage, is welcomed or warned.
Some linguists have attempted to classify illocutionary acts into a number of categories or types. David Crystal, quoting J.R. Searle, gives five such categories: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. (Perhaps he would have preferred declaratives, but this term was already taken as a description of a kind of sentence that expresses a statement.)
Representatives: here the speaker asserts a proposition to be true, using such verbs as: affirm, believe, conclude, deny, report.
Directives: here the speaker tries to make the hearer do something, with such words as: ask, beg, challenge, command, dare, invite, insist, request.
Commissives: here the speaker commits himself (or herself) to a (future) course of action, with verbs such as: guarantee, pledge, promise, swear, vow, undertake, warrant.
Expressives: the speaker expresses an attitude to or about a state of affairs, using such verbs as: apologize, appreciate, congratulate, deplore, detest, regret, thank, welcome.
Declarations the speaker alters the external status or condition of an object or situation, solely by making the utterance: I now pronounce you man and wife, I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you be dead, I name this ship...
Performatives
These are speech acts of a special kind where the utterance of the right words by the right person in the right situation effectively is (or accomplishes) the social act. In some cases, the speech must be accompanied by a ceremonial or ritual action. Whether the speaker in fact has the social or legal (or other kind of) standing to accomplish the act depends on some things beyond the mere speaking of the words. These are felicity conditions, which we can also explain by the “hereby” test. But let's look, first, at some examples.
In the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 19, verses 13-20) we read of some exorcists in Ephesus who tried to copy St. Paul and cast out evil spirits in the name of Jesus: “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims”. On one occasion the possessed man (or the evil spirit) attacked them, and said, “Jesus I know and Paul I know; but who are you?” Evidently St. Paul not only knew the words, but also had the means to call on divine aid for his exorcisms. In a slightly similar vein, Claudius, in Hamlet, sees that his prayer is ineffectual because “Words without thoughts never to Heaven go”.
Outside of miracle or magic, there are social realities that can be enacted by speech, because we all accept the status of the speaker in the appropriate situation. This is an idea expressed in the American Declaration of Independence where we read, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed”.
Here are some examples from different spheres of human activity, where performatives are found at work. These are loose categories, and many performatives belong to more than one of them:
Universities and schools: conferring of degrees, rusticating or excluding students.
The church: baptizing, confirming and marrying, exorcism, commination (cursing) and excommunication.
Governance and civic life: crowning of monarchs, dissolution of Parliament, passing legislation, awarding honours, ennobling or decorating.
The law: enacting or enforcing of various judgements, passing sentence, swearing oaths and plighting one's troth.
The armed services: signing on, giving an order to attack, retreat or open fire.
Sport: cautioning or sending off players, giving players out, appealing for a dismissal or declaring (closing an innings) in cricket.
Business: hiring and firing, establishing a verbal contract, naming a ship.
Gaming: placing a bet, raising the stakes in poker.
The “hereby” test
One simple but crude way to decide whether a speech act is of such a kind that we can aptly call it a performative is to insert the word “hereby” between subject and verb. If the resulting utterance makes sense, then the speech act is probably a performative. For example,
“I hereby confer upon you the honourable degree of Bachelor of Arts…”
“I hereby sentence you to three months' probation, suspended for a year…”
“I hereby appoint you Grandmaster of the Ancient, Scandalous and Disreputable Order of Friends of the Hellfire Club …”
It is crude, because it implies at least one felicity condition - whatever it is to which “hereby” refers. In the first example, “hereby” may refer to a physical action (touching on the head or shoulder with a ceremonial staff or mace, say). In the second example it may refer to the speaker's situation - in sitting as chairman of the bench of magistrates. The third example is my (plausible) invention - showing how all sorts of private groups (Freemasons, Rotarians, even the school Parent Teacher Association) can have their own agreements, which give to some speakers the power to enact performatives.
Felicity conditions
Preparatory conditions | conditions for execution | sincerity conditions
These are conditions necessary to the success of a speech act. They take their name from a Latin root - “felix” or “happy”. They are conditions needed for success or achievement of a performative. Only certain people are qualified to declare war, baptize people or sentence convicted felons. In some cases, the speaker must be sincere (as in apologizing or vowing). And external circumstances must be suitable: “Can you give me a lift?” requires that the hearer has a motor vehicle, is able to drive it somewhere and that the speaker has a reason for the request. It may be that the utterance is meant as a joke or sarcasm, in which case a different interpretation is in order. Loosely speaking, felicity conditions are of three kinds: preparatory conditions, conditions for execution and sincerity conditions.
Preparatory conditions
Preparatory conditions include the status or authority of the speaker to perform the speech act, the situation of other parties and so on.
So, in order to confirm a candidate, the speaker must be a bishop; but a mere priest can baptize people, while various ministers of religion and registrars may solemnize marriages (in England). In the case of marrying, there are other conditions - that neither of the couple is already married, that they make their own speech acts, and so on. We sometimes speculate about the status of people (otherwise free to marry) who act out a wedding scene in a play or film - are they somehow, really, married? In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has no worries, because the words of the ceremony are not spoken on stage, and, anyway, Juliet's part is played by a boy. (Though this may make the wedding scene seem blasphemous to some in the audience.)
In the UK only the monarch can dissolve parliament. A qualified referee can caution a player, if he or she is officiating in a match. The referee's assistant (who, in the higher leagues, is also a qualified referee) cannot do this.
The situation of the utterance is important. If the US President jokingly “declares” war on another country in a private conversation, then the USA is not really at war. This, in fact, happened (on 11 August 1984), when Ronald Reagan made some remarks off-air, as he thought, but which have been recorded for posterity:
“My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Click on the link below to listen to this speech as a sound file in wav format. You will need a sound card, speakers or headphones and suitable software (such as Windows™ Media Player or RealPlayer™) to listen to the file.
Listen to Ronald Reagan's 1984 off-air speech.
One hopes that this utterance also failed in terms of sincerity conditions.
Conditions for execution
Conditions for execution can assume an exaggerated importance. We are so used to a ritual or ceremonial action accompanying the speech act that we believe the act is invalidated, if the action is lacking - but there are few real examples of this.
Take refereeing of association football. When a referee cautions a player, he (or she) should take the player's name, number and note the team for which he plays. The referee may also display a yellow card, but this is not necessary to the giving of the caution:
“The mandatory use of the cards is merely a simple aid for better communication.”
The Football Association (1998); Advice on the Application of the Laws of the Game, p. 9
In knighting their subjects, English monarchs traditionally touch the recipient of the honour on both shoulders with the flat side of a sword blade. But this, too, is not necessary to the performance of the speech act.
A story is told in Oxford of a young man, taking his final exams, who demanded a pint of beer from the invigilators. He pointed out that he was wearing his sword, as required by the mediaeval statute that made provision for the drink. The invigilator (exam supervisor), believing the young man's version of events, brought the beer, but checked the statutes. Later the young man received a fine - he had not, as the statute also required, been wearing his spurs. The story may well be an urban myth (the writer heard it several times from different sources), but illustrates neatly a condition of execution.
Sincerity conditions
At a simple level these show that the speaker must really intend what he or she says. In the case of apologizing or promising, it may be impossible for others to know how sincere the speaker is. Moreover sincerity, as a genuine intention (now) is no assurance that the apologetic attitude will last, or that the promise will be kept. There are some speech acts - such as plighting one's troth or taking an oath - where this sincerity is determined by the presence of witnesses. The one making the promise will not be able later to argue that he or she didn't really mean it.
A more complex example comes in the classroom where the teacher asks a question, but the pupil supposes that the teacher knows the answer and is, therefore, not sincere in asking it. In this case “Can you, please, tell me X?” may be more acceptable to the child than “What is X?”
We can also use our understanding of sincerity conditions humorously, where we ask others, or promise ourselves, to do things which we think the others know to be impossible: “Please can you make it sunny tomorrow?”
Conversational implicature
Conversational maxims | Relevance
In a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1967, the English language philosopher H.P. (Paul) Grice outlined an approach to what he termed conversational implicature - how hearers manage to work out the complete message when speakers mean more than they say. An example of what Grice meant by conversational implicature is the utterance:
“Have you got any cash on you?”
where the speaker really wants the hearer to understand the meaning:
“Can you lend me some money? I don't have much on me.”
The conversational implicature is a message that is not found in the plain sense of the sentence. The speaker implies it. The hearer is able to infer (work out, read between the lines) this message in the utterance, by appealing to the rules governing successful conversational interaction. Grice proposed that implicatures like the second sentence can be calculated from the first, by understanding three things:
The usual linguistic meaning of what is said.
Contextual information (shared or general knowledge).
The assumption that the speaker is obeying what Grice calls the cooperative principal
Conversational maxims and the cooperative principle
The success of a conversation depends upon the various speakers' approach to the interaction. The way in which people try to make conversations work is sometimes called the cooperative principle. We can understand it partly by noting those people who are exceptions to the rule, and are not capable of making the conversation work. We may also, sometimes, find it useful deliberately to infringe or disregard it - as when we receive an unwelcome call from a telephone salesperson, or where we are being interviewed by a police officer on suspicion of some terrible crime.
Paul Grice proposes that in ordinary conversation, speakers and hearers share a cooperative principle. Speakers shape their utterances to be understood by hearers. The principle can be explained by four underlying rules or maxims. (David Crystal calls them conversational maxims. They are also sometimes named Grice's or Gricean maxims.)
They are the maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner.
Quality: speakers should be truthful. They should not say what they think is false, or make statements for which they have no evidence.
Quantity: a contribution should be as informative as is required for the conversation to proceed. It should be neither too little, nor too much. (It is not clear how one can decide what quantity of information satisfies the maxim in a given case.)
Relevance: speakers' contributions should relate clearly to the purpose of the exchange.
Manner: speakers' contributions should be perspicuous: clear, orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.
Grice does not of course prescribe the use of such maxims. Nor does he (I hope) suggest that we use them artificially to construct conversations. But they are useful for analysing and interpreting conversation, and may reveal purposes of which (either as speaker or listener) we were not previously aware. Very often, we communicate particular non-literal meanings by appearing to “violate” or “flout” these maxims. If you were to hear someone described as having “one good eye”, you might well assume the person's other eye was defective, even though nothing had been said about it at all.
Relevance
Some linguists (such as Howard Jackson and Peter Stockwell, who call it a “Supermaxim”) single out relevance as of greater importance than Grice recognised (Grice gives quality and manner as supermaxims). Assuming that the cooperative principle is at work in most conversations, we can see how hearers will try to find meaning in utterances that seem meaningless or irrelevant. We assume that there must be a reason for these. Jackson and Stockwell cite a conversation between a shopkeeper and a 16-year old customer:
Customer: Just these, please.
Shopkeeper: Are you eighteen?
Customer: Oh, I'm from Middlesbrough.
Shopkeeper: (after a brief pause) OK (serves beer to him).
Jackson H., and Stockwell, P. (1996), An Introduction to the Nature and Functions of Language, p. 142
Jackson and Stockwell suggest that “there is no explanation for [the customer's] bizarre reply”. Perhaps this should be qualified: we cannot be sure what the explanation is, but we can find some plausible answer. Possible explanations might include these:
The young man thought his being from Middlesbrough might explain whatever it was about him that had made the shopkeeper suspicious about his youth.
The young man thought the shopkeeper's question was provoked by his unfamiliar manner of speaking, so he wanted to explain this.
The young man was genuinely flustered and said the first thing he could think of, while trying to think of a better reason for his looking under-age.
The young man thought that the shopkeeper might treat someone from Middlesbrough in a more indulgent manner than people from elsewhere.
Jackson and Stockwell suggest further that the shopkeeper “derived some inference or other” from the teenager's reply, since she served him the beer. It might of course be that she had raised the question (how old is this customer?) once, but when he appeared to have misunderstood it, was not ready to ask it again or clarify it - perhaps because this seemed too much like hard work, and as a stranger, the teenager would be unlikely to attract attention (from the police or trading standards officers) as a regular under-age purchaser of beer.
In analysing utterances and searching for relevance we can use a hierarchy of propositions - those that might be asserted, presupposed, entailed or inferred from any utterance.
Assertion: what is asserted is the obvious, plain or surface meaning of the utterance (though many utterances are not assertions of anything).
Presupposition: what is taken for granted in the utterance. “I saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre” presupposes that the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre.
Entailments: logical or necessary corollaries of an utterance, thus, the above example entails:
I saw something in the Louvre.
I saw something somewhere.
Something was seen.
There is a Louvre.
There is a Mona Lisa, and so on.
Inferences: these are interpretations that other people draw from the utterance, for which we cannot always directly account. From this example, someone might infer, rationally, that the Mona Lisa is, or was recently, on show to the public. They might infer, less rationally, that the speaker has been to France recently - because if the statement were about something from years ago, he or she would have said so.
The given/new distinction
In conveying a message, we should think about more than just “who did what to whom”. We also have to keep in mind what our listeners know already, and how to present the message in an intelligible and coherent manner.
We should not assume that our listeners have particular knowledge. Even if we are sure they do have knowledge of something about which we wish to speak, we may need to introduce it, or recall what they already know. Our listeners may do this for us, as when one's parent, irked by a personal pronoun demands to know: “Who's she? The cat's mother?”
Similarly, we should not introduce familiar things as if they were new. This may seem patronizing, but can also be confusing, since our listeners may try to find a new interpretation to match our implication of novelty.
One way in which we show that information is new is by using nouns. Once it is familiar we refer (back) to it by using deictic pronouns - like “this” or “it”.
Names and addresses
T and V pronouns | Titles and names
T and V pronouns
Some languages have different forms for “you” (French “tu/vous”, German “du/Sie”, for example). These may originally have indicated number (“vous” and “Sie”) used for plural forms, but now show different levels of formality, with “tu” and “du” being more familiar, “vous” and “Sie” more polite. In English this was shown historically by the contrast between “you” and “thou/thee”. The “thou” form survives in some dialects, while other familiar pronoun forms are “youse” (Liverpool) and “you-all” (southern USA). Where it is possible to make the distinction, this is known as a T/V system of address.
In this system the V form is a marker of politeness or deference. It may also be a marker of status, with the V form used to superiors, the T form to equals or inferiors. T forms are also used to express solidarity or intimacy. The T form is found in Shakespeare's plays, where it almost always shows the speaker's attitude to status and situation. A king is “your majesty” or “you” but a peasant is “thou”. It may be an insult, as when Tybalt addresses Romeo as “thou” (“Romeo, thou art a villain”; Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3). It is also found in petrified or “frozen” language forms, such as the stylized speech of the Society of Friends (“Quakers”) or other non-conformist groups, like Mennonites or the Pennsylvania Amish, in orders of service and prayers. Oddly, many modern speakers think that “thou” (being “old”) is more formal or courteous than “you” - when the reverse is the case!
Titles and names
In English, we also express status and attitude through titles, first names and last names. Titles are such things as Professor, Dr, Sir, Dame, Fr. (Father), Mr, Mrs, Miss, Rabbi, Sr. (Sister) and, in the USA, even such things as coach and chef. Note that we abbreviate some of these in writing, but not in speaking - we write “Mr.” but say “mister”. First names may be given names (Fred, Susan) but include epithets such as chief, guv, mate, man, pal. Last names are usually family names. In general, use of these on their own suggests lack of deference (“Oi, Smith...”) but in some contexts (public schools, the armed forces) they are norms. If one speaker uses title and last name (TLN), and the other first name (FN) only, we infer difference in status. The social superior (the FN speaker) may invite the inferior to use FN in response:
A: Professor Cringeworthy? B: Do call me Cuthbert.
A: Lord Archer? B: Please, it's Jeffrey.
In schools teachers use FN (or FNLN when reprimanding or being sarcastic) in speaking to pupils and receive T (“Sir”) or TLN (“Miss Brodie”) in reply. “Miss” is addressed to women teachers, even where the speaker knows or believes them to be married.
In English avoidance of address is often acceptable - thus where French speakers say “Bonsoir, Monsieur”, English speakers may say merely, “Good evening” (Omitting the address in France would seem impolite.)
The politeness principle
Leech's maxims | Face and politeness strategies | Examples from Brown and Levinson | Phatic tokens
The politeness principle is a series of maxims, which Geoff Leech has proposed as a way of explaining how politeness operates in conversational exchanges. Leech defines politeness as forms of behaviour that establish and maintain comity. That is the ability of participants in a social interaction to engage in interaction in an atmosphere of relative harmony. In stating his maxims Leech uses his own terms for two kinds of illocutionary acts. He calls representatives “assertives”, and calls directives “impositives”.
Each maxim is accompanied by a sub-maxim (between square brackets), which is of less importance. These support the idea that negative politeness (avoidance of discord) is more important than positive politeness (seeking concord).
Not all of the maxims are equally important. For instance, tact influences what we say more powerfully than does generosity, while approbation is more important than modesty.
Note also that speakers may adhere to more than one maxim of politeness at the same time. Often one maxim is on the forefront of the utterance, with a second maxim being invoked by implication.
If politeness is not communicated, we can assume that the politeness attitude is absent.
Leech's maxims
Tact maxim (in directives [impositives] and commissives): minimise cost to other; [maximise benefit to other]
Generosity maxim (in directives and commissives): minimise benefit to self; [maximise cost to self]
Approbation maxim (in expressives and representatives [assertives]): minimise dispraise of other; [maximise praise of other]
Modesty maxim (in expressives and representatives): minimise praise of self; [maximise dispraise of self]
Agreement maxim (in representatives): minimise disagreement between self and other; [maximise agreement between self and other]
Sympathy maxim (in representatives): minimise antipathy between self and other; [maximise sympathy between self and other]
Face and politeness strategies
“Face” (as in “lose face”) refers to a speaker's sense of linguistic and social identity. Any speech act may impose on this sense, and is therefore face threatening. And speakers have strategies for lessening the threat. Positive politeness means being complimentary and gracious to the addressee (but if this is overdone, the speaker may alienate the other party). Negative politeness is found in ways of mitigating the imposition:
Hedging: Er, could you, er, perhaps, close the, um , window?
Pessimism: I don't suppose you could close the window, could you?
Indicating deference: Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I asked you to close the window?
Apologizing: I'm terribly sorry to put you out, but could you close the window?
Impersonalizing: The management requires all windows to be closed.
A good illustration of a breach of these strategies comes from Alan Bleasdale's 1982 TV drama, The Boys from the Black Stuff, where the unemployed Yosser Hughes greets potential employers with the curt demand: “Gizza job!”
Perhaps the most thorough treatment of the concept of politeness is that of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, which was first published in 1978 and then reissued, with a long introduction, in 1987. In their model, politeness is defined as redressive action taken to counter-balance the disruptive effect of face-threatening acts (FTAs).
In their theory, communication is seen as potentially dangerous and antagonistic. A strength of their approach over that of Geoff Leech is that they explain politeness by deriving it from more fundamental notions of what it is to be a human being. The basic notion of their model is “face”. This is defined as “the public self-image that every member (of society) wants to claim for himself”. In their framework, face consists of two related aspects.
One is negative face, or the rights to territories, freedom of action and freedom from imposition - wanting your actions not to be constrained or inhibited by others.
The other is positive face, the positive consistent self-image that people have and their desire to be appreciated and approved of by at least some other people.
The rational actions people take to preserve both kinds of face, for themselves and the people they interact with, add up to politeness. Brown and Levinson also argue that in human communication, either spoken or written, people tend to maintain one another's face continuously.
In everyday conversation, we adapt our conversation to different situations. Among friends we take liberties or say things that would seem discourteous among strangers. And we avoid over-formality with friends. In both situations we try to avoid making the hearer embarrassed or uncomfortable. Face-threatening acts (FTAs) are acts that infringe on the hearers' need to maintain his/her self-esteem, and be respected. Politeness strategies are developed for the main purpose of dealing with these FTAs. Suppose I see a crate of beer in my neighbour's house. Being thirsty, I might say:
I want some beer.
Is it OK for me to have a beer?
I hope it's not too forward, but would it be possible for me to have a beer?
It's so hot. It makes you really thirsty.
Brown and Levinson sum up human politeness behaviour in four strategies, which correspond to these examples: bald on record, negative politeness, positive politeness, and off-record-indirect strategy.
The bald on-record strategy does nothing to minimize threats to the hearer's “face”
The positive politeness strategy shows you recognize that your hearer has a desire to be respected. It also confirms that the relationship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity.
The negative politeness strategy also recognizes the hearer's face. But it also recognizes that you are in some way imposing on them. Some other examples would be to say, “I don't want to bother you but...” or “I was wondering if...”
Off-record indirect strategies take some of the pressure off of you. You are trying to avoid the direct FTA of asking for a beer. Instead you would rather it be offered to you once your hearer sees that you want one.
These strategies are not universal - they are used more or less frequently in other cultures. For example, in some eastern societies the off-record-indirect strategy will place on your hearer a social obligation to give you anything you admire. So speakers learn not to express admiration for expensive and valuable things in homes that they visit.
Examples from Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies
Bald on-record | positive politeness | negative politeness | off-record-indirect
Bald on-record
An emergency: Help!
Task oriented: Give me those!
Request: Put your jacket away.
Alerting: Turn your lights on! (while driving)
Positive Politeness
Attend to the hearer: You must be hungry, it's a long time since breakfast. How about some lunch?
Avoid disagreement: A: What is she, small? B: Yes, yes, she's small, smallish, um, not really small but certainly not very big.
Assume agreement: So when are you coming to see us?
Hedge opinion: You really should sort of try harder.
Negative Politeness
Be indirect: I'm looking for a pen.
Request forgiveness: You must forgive me but....
Minimize imposition: I just want to ask you if I could use your computer?
Pluralize the person responsible: We forgot to tell you that you needed to by your plane ticket by yesterday.
Off-record (indirect)
Give hints: It's a bit cold in here.
Be vague: Perhaps someone should have been more responsible.
Be sarcastic, or joking: Yeah, he's a real Einstein (rocket scientist, Stephen Hawking, genius and so on)!
Phatic tokens
These are ways of showing status by orienting comments to oneself, to the other, or to the general or prevailing situation (in England this is usually the weather).
Self-oriented phatic tokens are personal to the speaker: “I'm not up to this” or “My feet are killing me”.
Other-oriented tokens are related to the hearer: “Do you work here?” or “You seem to know what you're doing”.
A neutral token refers to the context or general state of affairs: “Cold, isn't it?” or “Lovely flowers”.
A superior shows consideration in an other-oriented token, as when the Queen says to the factory worker: “It must be jolly hard to make one of those”. The inferior might respond with a self-oriented token, like “Hard work, this”. On the surface, there is an exchange of information. In reality there is a suggestion and acceptance of a hierarchy of status. The factory worker would be unlikely to respond with, “Yes, but it's not half as hard as travelling the world, trooping the colour, making a speech at Christmas and dissolving Parliament.”
Deixis
Personal deixis | Spatial deixis | Temporal deixis
Note: this section is seriously hard. You have been warned. But first, how do you pronounce it? The term comes from the Greek deiktikos (=“able to show”). This is related to Greek dèiknymi (dyke-nimmy) meaning “explain” or “prove”. The standard pronunciation has two syllables (dyke-sis) while the adjective form is deictic (dyke-tik).
According to Stephen Levinson:
“Deixis concerns the ways in which languages encode...features of the context of utterance ... and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.”
Deixis is an important field of language study in its own right - and very important for learners of second languages. But it has some relevance to analysis of conversation and pragmatics. It is often and best described as “verbal pointing”, that is to say pointing by means of language. The linguistic forms of this pointing are called deictic expressions, deictic markers or deictic words; they are also sometimes called indexicals.
Deictic expressions include such lexemes as:
Personal or possessive pronouns (I/you/mine/yours),
Demonstrative pronouns (this/that),
(Spatial/temporal) adverbs (here/there/now),
Other pro-forms (so/do),
Personal or possessive adjectives (my/your),
Demonstrative adjectives (this/that),
Articles (the).
Deixis refers to the world outside a text. Reference to the context surrounding an utterance is often referred to as primary deixis, exophoric deixis or simply deixis alone. Primary deixis is used to point to a situation outside a text (situational deixis) or to the speaker's and hearer's (shared) knowledge of the world (knowledge deixis).
Contextual use of deictic expressions is known as secondary deixis, textual deixis or endophoric deixis. Such expressions can refer either backwards or forwards to other elements in a text:
Anaphoric deixis is backward pointing, and is the norm in English texts. Examples include demonstrative pronouns: such, said, similar, (the) same.
Cataphoric deixis is forward pointing. Examples include: the following, certain, some (“the speaker raised some objections...”), this (“Let me say this...”), these, several.
Deictic expressions fall into three categories:
Personal deixis (you, us),
Spatial deixis (here, there) and
Temporal deixis (now, then).
Deixis is clearly tied to the speaker's context, the most basic distinction being between near the speaker (proximal) and away from the speaker (distal).
Proximal deictic expressions include this, here and now.
Distal deictic expressions include that, there and then.
Proximal expressions are generally interpreted in relation to the speaker's location or deictic centre. For example now is taken to mean some point or period in time that matches the time of the speaker's utterance. When we read, “Now Barabbas was a thief” (John 18.40) we do not take the statement to mean the same as “Barabbas was now a thief” (i.e. he had become a thief, having not been so before). Rather we read it as St. John's writing, “I'm telling you now, that Barabbas was (not now but at the time in the past when these events happened) a thief”.
Personal deixis
English does not use personal deixis to indicate relative social status in the same way that other languages do (such as those with TV pronoun systems). But the pronoun we has a potential for ambiguity, i.e. between exclusive we (excludes the hearer) and the hearer-including (inclusive) we.
Spatial deixis
The use of proximal and distal expressions in spatial deixis is confused by deictic projection. This is the speaker's ability to project himself or herself into a location at which he or she is not yet present. A familiar example is the use of here on telephone answering machines (“I'm not here at the moment...”). While writing e-mails, I often edit out the use of here, when I see that the reader will not necessarily understand the intended meaning. (My here is this room in East Yorkshire, England, while yours may be this school in Maryland, this flat in Moscow or this university in Melbourne.)
It is likely that the basis of spatial deixis is psychological distance (rather than physical distance). Usually physical and (metaphorical) psychological distance will appear the same. But a speaker may wish to mark something physically close as psychologically distant, as when you indicate an item of food on your plate with “I don't like that”. Perhaps a better (real example) was Graham Taylor's famous remark on his England soccer team's conceding a goal: “Do I not like that!” This moment, from the qualifying competition for the 1994 World Cup, was recorded for, and broadcast on a documentary film for, Channel 4.
Temporal deixis
Psychological distance can apply to temporal deixis as well. We can treat temporal events as things that move towards us (into view) or away from us (out of view). For instance, we speak of the coming year or the approaching year. This may stem from our perception of things (like weather storms) which we see approaching both spatially and in time. We treat the near or immediate future as being close to utterance time by using the proximal deictic expression this alone, as in “this (that is the next) weekend” or “this evening” (said earlier in the day).
Phonetics
Dr. C. George Boeree
Shippensburg University
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language. These sounds are called phonemes. There are literally hundreds of them used in different languages. Even a single language like English requires us to distinguish about 40! The key word here is distinguish. We actually make much finer discriminations among sounds, but English only requires 40. The other discriminations are what lets us detect the differences in accents and dialects, identify individuals, and differentiate tiny nuances of speech that indicate things beyond the obvious meanings of the words.
The Vocal Tract
In order to study the sounds of language, we first need to study the vocal tract. Speech starts with the lungs, which push air out and pull it in. The original purpose was, of course, to get oxygen and eliminate carbon dioxide. But it is also essential for speech. There are phonemes that are little more than breathing: the h for example.
Next, we have the larynx, or voice box. It sits at the juncture of the trachea or windpipe coming up from the lungs and the esophagous coming up from the stomach. In the larynx, we have an opening called the glottis, an epiglottis which covers the glottis when we are swallowing, and the vocal cords. The vocal cords consist of two flaps of mucous membrane stretched across the glottis, as in this photograph:
The vocal cords can be tightened and loosened and can vibrate when air is forced past them, creating sound. Some phonemes use that sound, and are called voiced. Examples include the vowels (a, e, i, o, and u, for example) and some of the consonants (m, l, and r, for example). Other phonemes do not involve the vocal cords, such as the consonants h, t, or s, and so are called unvoiced.
The area above the glottis is called the pharynx, or upper throat. It can be tightened to make phryngeal consonants. English doesn’t have any of these, but they sound like when you try to get a piece of food back up out of your throat.
At the top of the throat is the opening to the nasal passages (called the nasopharynx, in case you are interested). When we allow air to pass into the nose while speaking, the sounds we make are called nasal. Examples include m, n, and the ng sound of sing.
Much of the action during speech occurs in the mouth, of course, especially involving the interaction of the tongue with the roof of the mouth. The roof of the mouth has several specific areas: At the very back, just before the nasal passage, is that little bag called the uvula. Its major function seems to be moisturizing the air and making certain sounds called, obviously, uvular. The best known is the kind of r pronounced in the back of the mouth by some French and German speakers. Uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal sounds are often refered to as gutterals.
Next, we have the soft palate, called the velum. If you turn your tongue back as far as it will go and press up, you can feel how soft it is. When you say k or g, you are using the velum, so they are called velar consonants.
Further forward is the hard palate. Quite a few consonants are made using the hard palate, such as s, sh, n, and l, and are called palatals. Just behind the teeth is the dental ridge or alveolus. Here is where many of us make our t’s and d’s -- alveolar consonants.
At the very outer edge of the mouth we have the teeth and the lips. Dental consonants are made by touching the tongue to the teeth. In English, we make the two th sounds like this. Note that one of these is voiced (the th in the) and one is unvoiced (the th in thin).
At the lips we can make several sounds as well. The simplest, perhaps, are the bilabial sounds, made by holding the lips together and then releasing the sound, such as p and b, or by keeping them together and releasing the air through the nose, making the bilabial nasal m. We can also use the upper teeth with the lower lip, for labiodental sounds. This is how we make an f, for example.
Incidentally, we also have two names for the parts of the tongue used with these various parts of the mouth: The front edge is called the corona, and the back is called the dorsum. Sounds like t, th, and s are made with the corona, while k, g, and ng are made with the dorsum.
Consonants
Consonants are sounds which involve full or partial blocking of airflow. In English, the consonants are p, b, t, d, ch, j, k, g, f, v, th, dh, s, z, sh, zh, m, n, ng, l, r, w, and y. They are classified in a number of different ways, depending on the vocal tract details we just discussed.
1. Stops, also known as plosives. The air is blocked for a moment, then released. In English, they are p, b, t, d, k, and g.
a. Bilabial plosives: p (unvoiced) and b (voiced)
b. Alveolar plosives: t (unvoiced) and d (voiced)
c. Velar plosives: k (unvoiced) and g (voiced)
In other languages, we find labiodental, palatal, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal plosives as well, and retroflex plosives, which involve reaching back to the palate with the corona of the tongue.
In many languages, plosives may be followed by aspiration, that is, by a breathy sound like an h. In Chinese, for example, there is a distinction between a p pronounced crisply and an aspirated p. We use both in English (pit vs poo), but it isn’t a distinction that separates one meaning from another.
2. Fricatives involve a slightly resisted flow of air. In English, these include f, v, th, dh, s, z, sh, zh, and h.
a. Labiodental fricatives: f (unvoiced) and v (voiced)
b. Dental fricatives: th (as in thin -- unvoiced) and dh (as in the -- voiced)
c. Alveolar fricatives: s (unvoiced) and z (voiced)
d. Palatal fricatives: sh (unvoiced) and zh (like the s in vision -- voiced)
e. Glottal fricative: h (unvoiced)
3. Affricates are sounds that involve a plosive followed immediately by a fricative at the same location. In English, we have ch (unvoiced) and j (voiced). Many consider these as blends: t-sh and d-zh.
4. Nasals are sounds made with air passing through the nose. In English, these are m, n, and ng.
a. Bilabial nasal: m
b. Alveolar nasal: n
c. Velar nasal: ng
5. Liquids are sounds with very little air resistance. In English, we have l and r, which are both alveolar, but differ in the shape of the tongue. For l, we touch the tip to the ridge of the teeth and let the air go around both sides. For the r, we almost block the air on both sides and let it through at the top. Note that there are many variations of l and r in other languages and even within English itself!
6. Semivowels are sounds that are, as the name implies, very nearly vowels. In English, we have w and y, which you can see are a lot like vowels such as oo and ee, but with the lips almost closed for w (a bilabial) and the tongue almost touching the palate for y (a palatal). They are also called glides, since they normally “glide” into or out of vowel positions (as in woo, yeah, ow, and oy).
In many languages, such as Russian, there is a whole set of palatalized consonants, which means they are followed by a y before the vowel. This is also called an on-glide.
Vowels
There are about 14 vowels in English. They are the ones found in these words: beet, bit, bait, bet, bat, car, pot (in British English), bought, boat, book, boot, bird, but, and the a in ago. There are also three diphthongs or double vowels: bite, cow, and boy. Diphthongs involve off-glides.: You can hear the y in bite and boy, and the w in cow. Actually, the sounds in bait and boat are also diphthongs (with y and w off-glides, respectively), but the first parts of the diphthongs are different from the nearby sounds in bet and bought.
Vowels are classified in three dimensions:
1. The height of the tongue in the mouth -- low, mid, or high
high are beet, bit, boot, and book
mid are bait, bet, but, boat, bought, bird and a in ago
low are bat, car, and british pot
2. How far forward or backward in the mouth the tongue rises -- front, center, or back
front are beet, bit, bait, bet, and bat
center are but, bird, and a in ago
back are boot, book, boat, bought, and british pot
3. How rounded or unrounded the lips are
the front vowels are unrounded
the center and back vowels are rounded
The rounding idea may seem unnecessary until you realize that many languages have rounded front vowels -- such as the German ü and ö and the French u and eu -- and many have unrounded back vowels -- such as the Japanese u. If you took French in high school, you may remember the teacher telling you to say tea with your lips rounded for French tu. It isn’t the best way to teach the sound, but it shows you where it fits in the scheme.
There is one more dimension that doesn’t have much to do with English, but is essential in many languages, and that is vowel length. Vowels can be short or long, and it is just a matter of how long you continue the sound. The closest we get in English is that the vowel in beet is longer (as well as higher) than the vowel in bit. The same goes for boot and book, and for caught and the British pot.
In some languages, such as French, there is another quality to vowels, and that is nasality. Some vowels are pronounced with airflow through the nose as well as the mouth. Originally, these were simply vowels followed by nasal consonants. But over time, the French blended the vowels and the nasals into one unit.
IPA
Over the years, linguists have developed a complex chart of phonemes for transcribing the sounds of all languages around the world. It is called the International Phonetic Alphabet, and much of it is in the charts below. If you get question marks or little squares, that means your computer isn't equipt with unicode.
Vowel length is marked with a colon after the vowel, e.g. i:
Nasal vowels are shown by placing a tilde over the vowel, e.g. ã
There are dozens more phonemes beyond the ones in the preceding charts, but one set is particularly interesting: clicks. Clicks are sounds made by creating a vacuum with the tongue and then suddenly snapping the tongue away. We use these ourselves, though not as parts of words: When we “tsk tsk,” when we make clucking sounds, and when we make a click in the side of our mouths when we tell a horse to get a move on. Clicks are used in the Bushman languages and in the Bantu languages that had prolonged contact with them. The best known is the Bantu language Khosa, because of the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba.
Stress and Tones
In many languages around the world, including English, words are differentiated by means of stress. One syllable is usually given a higher pitch ("up" the musical scale) and sometimes a bit more force. This is how we differentiate af-fect (as in influence) and af-fect (as in emotion), for example. In longer words, there may even be a second semi-stressed syllable, as in math-e-mat-ics: mat has the primary stress, math has the secondary stress. In IPA, primary stress is indicated by preceding the syllable with a high vertical line, secondary with a low vertical line.
Note that even when we do not need to use stress to differentiate words, we use it anyway. Sometimes we can tell where a person is from by how they use stress: insurance is usually stressed on the sur; southerners stress it on the in. But many languages do not use stress at all. To our ears, they sound rather monotone.
Some other languages use dynamic stress or tones. Swedish is an example. This means that there is actual change of stress within syllables. In Swedish, there are two tones:
The single tone starts high and goes down. If a single toneword has a second syllable, that syllable is unstressed. Single tone words don’t sound very unusual to English speakers.
The double tone is only found in two syllable words. The first pitch starts in the middle range of pitch and the second tone starts high and goes down. If there is a third syllable, it is unstressed. The double tone gives the word a sing-song quality to English speakers.
These tones differentiate many words in Swedish. In the single tone, anden, tomten, biten, and slaget mean the duck, the building, the bit, and the battle, respectively. In the double tone, they mean the spirit, the elf, bitten, and beaten, respectively! English uses dynamic stress or tones also, but only one whole phrases, such as the rising pitch at the end of questions.
But many languages in Africa and Asia use far more complex tones, and in fact are called tonal languages. Chinese is the best known example. Although words are often more than one syllable in length, each syllable has a particular meaning. And Chinese uses a very limitied number of phonemes. It is the tones that prevent every syllable from having hundreds of meanings. There are five of them:
Tone 1 -- high and level (as in hey!)
Tone 2 -- middle, then rising (as in was it you?)
Tone 3 -- middle, falling, then rising (as in mom!? spoken by a whining teenager)
Tone 4 -- high, then falling (as in Tom spoken by a disappointed mom)
For example, the simple syllable yi can mean many different things. With tone 1 it means cloth, with tone 2 it means to suspect, with tone 3 it means chair, and with tone 4 it means meaning. The syllable wu means house, none, five, and fog, respectively. And ma means mother, hemp, horse, and scold. In the official transcription, the four tones are indicated by ¯, ´, ˇ, and `.
Thai has five tones: high, middle, low, rising, and falling. The African language Katamba has six, adding a falling, then rising tone. Cantonese has nine tones: high long, high short, middle long, middle short, low long, low short, high falling, middle falling, and low rising.
We don't know how tonal languages arise. Many believe that it has to do with phonemes or even whole syllables that have been lost, but influenced the pronounciation anyway. But this makes it hard to explain that Cantonese, which has kept many old consonant endings, has nine tones, while its relative Mandarin Chinese, which has lost those endings, only has four. Of course a linguist from China might ask how non-tonal languages lost their tones!
One interesting tidbit is that tonality often crosses family lines. In Asia, for example, tonality is found in Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese -- which are unrelated languages. On the other hand, Tibetan and Burmese are related to Chinese, but are not tonal; neither is Khmer, a relative of Vietnamese. Most African languages are tonal, but Swahili is not. Hausa, spoken in Nigeria, is tonal, but relatives like Arabic are not. It is possible that one or another language family influenced others around it, or was original to an area before being invaded by speakers of another language.
Source:http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/phonetics.html
Shippensburg University
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language. These sounds are called phonemes. There are literally hundreds of them used in different languages. Even a single language like English requires us to distinguish about 40! The key word here is distinguish. We actually make much finer discriminations among sounds, but English only requires 40. The other discriminations are what lets us detect the differences in accents and dialects, identify individuals, and differentiate tiny nuances of speech that indicate things beyond the obvious meanings of the words.
The Vocal Tract
In order to study the sounds of language, we first need to study the vocal tract. Speech starts with the lungs, which push air out and pull it in. The original purpose was, of course, to get oxygen and eliminate carbon dioxide. But it is also essential for speech. There are phonemes that are little more than breathing: the h for example.
Next, we have the larynx, or voice box. It sits at the juncture of the trachea or windpipe coming up from the lungs and the esophagous coming up from the stomach. In the larynx, we have an opening called the glottis, an epiglottis which covers the glottis when we are swallowing, and the vocal cords. The vocal cords consist of two flaps of mucous membrane stretched across the glottis, as in this photograph:
The vocal cords can be tightened and loosened and can vibrate when air is forced past them, creating sound. Some phonemes use that sound, and are called voiced. Examples include the vowels (a, e, i, o, and u, for example) and some of the consonants (m, l, and r, for example). Other phonemes do not involve the vocal cords, such as the consonants h, t, or s, and so are called unvoiced.
The area above the glottis is called the pharynx, or upper throat. It can be tightened to make phryngeal consonants. English doesn’t have any of these, but they sound like when you try to get a piece of food back up out of your throat.
At the top of the throat is the opening to the nasal passages (called the nasopharynx, in case you are interested). When we allow air to pass into the nose while speaking, the sounds we make are called nasal. Examples include m, n, and the ng sound of sing.
Much of the action during speech occurs in the mouth, of course, especially involving the interaction of the tongue with the roof of the mouth. The roof of the mouth has several specific areas: At the very back, just before the nasal passage, is that little bag called the uvula. Its major function seems to be moisturizing the air and making certain sounds called, obviously, uvular. The best known is the kind of r pronounced in the back of the mouth by some French and German speakers. Uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal sounds are often refered to as gutterals.
Next, we have the soft palate, called the velum. If you turn your tongue back as far as it will go and press up, you can feel how soft it is. When you say k or g, you are using the velum, so they are called velar consonants.
Further forward is the hard palate. Quite a few consonants are made using the hard palate, such as s, sh, n, and l, and are called palatals. Just behind the teeth is the dental ridge or alveolus. Here is where many of us make our t’s and d’s -- alveolar consonants.
At the very outer edge of the mouth we have the teeth and the lips. Dental consonants are made by touching the tongue to the teeth. In English, we make the two th sounds like this. Note that one of these is voiced (the th in the) and one is unvoiced (the th in thin).
At the lips we can make several sounds as well. The simplest, perhaps, are the bilabial sounds, made by holding the lips together and then releasing the sound, such as p and b, or by keeping them together and releasing the air through the nose, making the bilabial nasal m. We can also use the upper teeth with the lower lip, for labiodental sounds. This is how we make an f, for example.
Incidentally, we also have two names for the parts of the tongue used with these various parts of the mouth: The front edge is called the corona, and the back is called the dorsum. Sounds like t, th, and s are made with the corona, while k, g, and ng are made with the dorsum.
Consonants
Consonants are sounds which involve full or partial blocking of airflow. In English, the consonants are p, b, t, d, ch, j, k, g, f, v, th, dh, s, z, sh, zh, m, n, ng, l, r, w, and y. They are classified in a number of different ways, depending on the vocal tract details we just discussed.
1. Stops, also known as plosives. The air is blocked for a moment, then released. In English, they are p, b, t, d, k, and g.
a. Bilabial plosives: p (unvoiced) and b (voiced)
b. Alveolar plosives: t (unvoiced) and d (voiced)
c. Velar plosives: k (unvoiced) and g (voiced)
In other languages, we find labiodental, palatal, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal plosives as well, and retroflex plosives, which involve reaching back to the palate with the corona of the tongue.
In many languages, plosives may be followed by aspiration, that is, by a breathy sound like an h. In Chinese, for example, there is a distinction between a p pronounced crisply and an aspirated p. We use both in English (pit vs poo), but it isn’t a distinction that separates one meaning from another.
2. Fricatives involve a slightly resisted flow of air. In English, these include f, v, th, dh, s, z, sh, zh, and h.
a. Labiodental fricatives: f (unvoiced) and v (voiced)
b. Dental fricatives: th (as in thin -- unvoiced) and dh (as in the -- voiced)
c. Alveolar fricatives: s (unvoiced) and z (voiced)
d. Palatal fricatives: sh (unvoiced) and zh (like the s in vision -- voiced)
e. Glottal fricative: h (unvoiced)
3. Affricates are sounds that involve a plosive followed immediately by a fricative at the same location. In English, we have ch (unvoiced) and j (voiced). Many consider these as blends: t-sh and d-zh.
4. Nasals are sounds made with air passing through the nose. In English, these are m, n, and ng.
a. Bilabial nasal: m
b. Alveolar nasal: n
c. Velar nasal: ng
5. Liquids are sounds with very little air resistance. In English, we have l and r, which are both alveolar, but differ in the shape of the tongue. For l, we touch the tip to the ridge of the teeth and let the air go around both sides. For the r, we almost block the air on both sides and let it through at the top. Note that there are many variations of l and r in other languages and even within English itself!
6. Semivowels are sounds that are, as the name implies, very nearly vowels. In English, we have w and y, which you can see are a lot like vowels such as oo and ee, but with the lips almost closed for w (a bilabial) and the tongue almost touching the palate for y (a palatal). They are also called glides, since they normally “glide” into or out of vowel positions (as in woo, yeah, ow, and oy).
In many languages, such as Russian, there is a whole set of palatalized consonants, which means they are followed by a y before the vowel. This is also called an on-glide.
Vowels
There are about 14 vowels in English. They are the ones found in these words: beet, bit, bait, bet, bat, car, pot (in British English), bought, boat, book, boot, bird, but, and the a in ago. There are also three diphthongs or double vowels: bite, cow, and boy. Diphthongs involve off-glides.: You can hear the y in bite and boy, and the w in cow. Actually, the sounds in bait and boat are also diphthongs (with y and w off-glides, respectively), but the first parts of the diphthongs are different from the nearby sounds in bet and bought.
Vowels are classified in three dimensions:
1. The height of the tongue in the mouth -- low, mid, or high
high are beet, bit, boot, and book
mid are bait, bet, but, boat, bought, bird and a in ago
low are bat, car, and british pot
2. How far forward or backward in the mouth the tongue rises -- front, center, or back
front are beet, bit, bait, bet, and bat
center are but, bird, and a in ago
back are boot, book, boat, bought, and british pot
3. How rounded or unrounded the lips are
the front vowels are unrounded
the center and back vowels are rounded
The rounding idea may seem unnecessary until you realize that many languages have rounded front vowels -- such as the German ü and ö and the French u and eu -- and many have unrounded back vowels -- such as the Japanese u. If you took French in high school, you may remember the teacher telling you to say tea with your lips rounded for French tu. It isn’t the best way to teach the sound, but it shows you where it fits in the scheme.
There is one more dimension that doesn’t have much to do with English, but is essential in many languages, and that is vowel length. Vowels can be short or long, and it is just a matter of how long you continue the sound. The closest we get in English is that the vowel in beet is longer (as well as higher) than the vowel in bit. The same goes for boot and book, and for caught and the British pot.
In some languages, such as French, there is another quality to vowels, and that is nasality. Some vowels are pronounced with airflow through the nose as well as the mouth. Originally, these were simply vowels followed by nasal consonants. But over time, the French blended the vowels and the nasals into one unit.
IPA
Over the years, linguists have developed a complex chart of phonemes for transcribing the sounds of all languages around the world. It is called the International Phonetic Alphabet, and much of it is in the charts below. If you get question marks or little squares, that means your computer isn't equipt with unicode.
Vowel length is marked with a colon after the vowel, e.g. i:
Nasal vowels are shown by placing a tilde over the vowel, e.g. ã
There are dozens more phonemes beyond the ones in the preceding charts, but one set is particularly interesting: clicks. Clicks are sounds made by creating a vacuum with the tongue and then suddenly snapping the tongue away. We use these ourselves, though not as parts of words: When we “tsk tsk,” when we make clucking sounds, and when we make a click in the side of our mouths when we tell a horse to get a move on. Clicks are used in the Bushman languages and in the Bantu languages that had prolonged contact with them. The best known is the Bantu language Khosa, because of the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba.
Stress and Tones
In many languages around the world, including English, words are differentiated by means of stress. One syllable is usually given a higher pitch ("up" the musical scale) and sometimes a bit more force. This is how we differentiate af-fect (as in influence) and af-fect (as in emotion), for example. In longer words, there may even be a second semi-stressed syllable, as in math-e-mat-ics: mat has the primary stress, math has the secondary stress. In IPA, primary stress is indicated by preceding the syllable with a high vertical line, secondary with a low vertical line.
Note that even when we do not need to use stress to differentiate words, we use it anyway. Sometimes we can tell where a person is from by how they use stress: insurance is usually stressed on the sur; southerners stress it on the in. But many languages do not use stress at all. To our ears, they sound rather monotone.
Some other languages use dynamic stress or tones. Swedish is an example. This means that there is actual change of stress within syllables. In Swedish, there are two tones:
The single tone starts high and goes down. If a single toneword has a second syllable, that syllable is unstressed. Single tone words don’t sound very unusual to English speakers.
The double tone is only found in two syllable words. The first pitch starts in the middle range of pitch and the second tone starts high and goes down. If there is a third syllable, it is unstressed. The double tone gives the word a sing-song quality to English speakers.
These tones differentiate many words in Swedish. In the single tone, anden, tomten, biten, and slaget mean the duck, the building, the bit, and the battle, respectively. In the double tone, they mean the spirit, the elf, bitten, and beaten, respectively! English uses dynamic stress or tones also, but only one whole phrases, such as the rising pitch at the end of questions.
But many languages in Africa and Asia use far more complex tones, and in fact are called tonal languages. Chinese is the best known example. Although words are often more than one syllable in length, each syllable has a particular meaning. And Chinese uses a very limitied number of phonemes. It is the tones that prevent every syllable from having hundreds of meanings. There are five of them:
Tone 1 -- high and level (as in hey!)
Tone 2 -- middle, then rising (as in was it you?)
Tone 3 -- middle, falling, then rising (as in mom!? spoken by a whining teenager)
Tone 4 -- high, then falling (as in Tom spoken by a disappointed mom)
For example, the simple syllable yi can mean many different things. With tone 1 it means cloth, with tone 2 it means to suspect, with tone 3 it means chair, and with tone 4 it means meaning. The syllable wu means house, none, five, and fog, respectively. And ma means mother, hemp, horse, and scold. In the official transcription, the four tones are indicated by ¯, ´, ˇ, and `.
Thai has five tones: high, middle, low, rising, and falling. The African language Katamba has six, adding a falling, then rising tone. Cantonese has nine tones: high long, high short, middle long, middle short, low long, low short, high falling, middle falling, and low rising.
We don't know how tonal languages arise. Many believe that it has to do with phonemes or even whole syllables that have been lost, but influenced the pronounciation anyway. But this makes it hard to explain that Cantonese, which has kept many old consonant endings, has nine tones, while its relative Mandarin Chinese, which has lost those endings, only has four. Of course a linguist from China might ask how non-tonal languages lost their tones!
One interesting tidbit is that tonality often crosses family lines. In Asia, for example, tonality is found in Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese -- which are unrelated languages. On the other hand, Tibetan and Burmese are related to Chinese, but are not tonal; neither is Khmer, a relative of Vietnamese. Most African languages are tonal, but Swahili is not. Hausa, spoken in Nigeria, is tonal, but relatives like Arabic are not. It is possible that one or another language family influenced others around it, or was original to an area before being invaded by speakers of another language.
Source:http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/phonetics.html
#3rd Daily Jounal
Welcome Wednesday !
Got a Fever, but show must go on! Hahahaa :D
Just started my day with anger because of my sister.
I have no spirit to that thing, they are not consistently.
I hate it!
I don't care anymore!
Got a Fever, but show must go on! Hahahaa :D
Just started my day with anger because of my sister.
I have no spirit to that thing, they are not consistently.
I hate it!
I don't care anymore!
Selasa, 21 Februari 2012
History of Linguistics
Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language.
In ancient civilization, linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct description of classical liturgical language, notably that of Sanskrit grammar by Pāṇini (fl. 4th century BC), or by the development of logic and rhetoric among Greeks. Beginning around the 4th century BC, China also developed its own grammatical traditions and Arabic grammar and Hebrew grammar developed during the Middle Ages.
Modern linguistics began to develop in the 18th century, reaching the "golden age of philology" in the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century was marked by the structuralist school, based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in Europe and Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in the United States. The 1960s saw the rise of many new fields in linguistics, such as Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, William Labov's sociolinguistics, Michael Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and also modern psycholinguistics.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics
In ancient civilization, linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct description of classical liturgical language, notably that of Sanskrit grammar by Pāṇini (fl. 4th century BC), or by the development of logic and rhetoric among Greeks. Beginning around the 4th century BC, China also developed its own grammatical traditions and Arabic grammar and Hebrew grammar developed during the Middle Ages.
Modern linguistics began to develop in the 18th century, reaching the "golden age of philology" in the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century was marked by the structuralist school, based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in Europe and Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in the United States. The 1960s saw the rise of many new fields in linguistics, such as Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, William Labov's sociolinguistics, Michael Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and also modern psycholinguistics.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics
#2nd Daily Journal
Welcome Tuesday!
Just done my classes today, but there is something wrong with my feeling.
U***K makes me crazy during this week.
I hate this part!
See you on tomorrow activities!
Just done my classes today, but there is something wrong with my feeling.
U***K makes me crazy during this week.
I hate this part!
See you on tomorrow activities!
Senin, 20 Februari 2012
#1st Daily Journal
Woke up, took a bath, dressed up, and went to campus.
In campus, struggle, struggle, and then survive.
See you on tomorrow activities !
In campus, struggle, struggle, and then survive.
See you on tomorrow activities !
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)