This document provides an overview of context and an introduction to pragmatics and discourse analysis. It defines pragmatics as studying language use in context, considering situational, cultural and interpersonal factors. Discourse analysis examines coherent and meaningful stretches of language. Both approaches study context, text and function. The document discusses three types of context - situational, cultural background knowledge, and co-textual context. It provides examples analyzing conversations and written texts to illustrate how meaning depends on shared assumptions and contextual knowledge between speakers.

1. Department of English Language and Literature
Major: English Language and Literature
Discourse Analysis
Session 3 CONTEXT
Dr. Badriya Al Mamari
Academic year 2021/2022

2. CONTEXT Understanding
concepts
□ introduction
□ situational context
□ cultural and interpersonal background context
□ exophora, deixis and intertextuality

3. Introduction to pragmatics and discourse
The first section of this lecture defines pragmatics and discourse.
First, let us look at what they are not, by using an example. In Queen Victoria’s
famous words ‘We are not amused’, if we analyse the grammar and say that :
1.‘we’ is the noun phrase subject of the sentence containing a first person plural
pronoun,
2.‘are’ is the main verb agreeing with ‘we’,
3.‘not’ is a negative marker, and
4.‘amused’ is an adjectival complement,
We are doing an analysis of the syntax.

4. Syntax
 is the way that words relate to each other, without taking into
account the world outside; it includes grammar, and does not consider
who said it to whom, where, when or why.

5. Returning to the Queen Victoria example, if we analyse the meaning
of her words in isolation, and say that :
• ‘we’ indicates the person speaking,
• ‘are’ identifies a state rather than an action, and
• ‘amused’ has a sense synonymous with ‘entertained’ or ‘distracted’,
We are looking at the semantics of the text.

6. Semantics
 is the study of what the words mean by themselves, out of context, as
they are in a dictionary. Semanticists would not consider, here, the
contextual background features about Queen Victoria and her courtiers,
or why she said this.

7. Moving on to what pragmatics and discourse analysis are, we can
start by saying that they are approaches to studying language’s relation
to the contextual background features

8.  They would take into account the fact that, in the example, Queen
Victoria had been in a prolonged depression, caused by the death of her
husband Albert, and her courtiers knew this, and that her words were a
response to a joke which they had just made. Analysts would infer that the
Queen’s intention was to stop them trying to make her laugh and lift her out
of the depression, and that her statement implies a reminder that she has to
be respected as Queen.

9. Pragmatics and discourse analysis have much in
common:
1. they both study context, text and function.

10. CONTEXT.
 Both pragmatics and discourse analysis study the meaning of words in context,
analysing the parts of meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical
and social world, and the socio-psychological factors influencing communication,
as well as the knowledge of the time and place in which the words are uttered or
written (Stilwell Peccei 1999; Yule 1996).
 Both approaches focus on the meaning of words in interaction and how
interactors communicate more information than the words they use.

11.  The speaker’s meaning is dependent on assumptions of knowledge that
are shared by both speaker and hearer:
 the speaker constructs the linguistic message and intends or implies a
meaning,
 and the hearer interprets the message and infers the meaning (Brown
and Yule 1983; Thomas 1995).

12.  The second feature that pragmatics and discourse analysis have in
common is that they 2.both look at discourse, or the use of language, and
text, or pieces of spoken or written discourse, concentrating on how
stretches of language become meaningful and unified for their users
(Cook 1989).

13.  Discourse analysis calls the quality of being ‘meaningful and unified’
coherence;
 pragmatics calls it relevance. Both approaches would take into account
the fact that Victoria’s words were intended to be seen as relevant to the
courtiers’ joke and to anything that they should say afterwards.

14.  Finally, pragmatics and discourse analysis have in common the fact that
they are 3.both concerned with function: the speakers’ short-term
purposes in speaking, and long-term goals in interacting verbally.
 Function is related to the speech act theory. Speech act theory describes
what utterances are intended to do, such as promise, apologise and
threaten.

15.  Pragmatics 4.differs from discourse analysis in the importance given to
the social principles of discourse. Pragmatics can explain the example thus:
the Queen complied with the social maxims of being relevant, precise,
clear and sincere, and her courtiers expected her to do so, and she obeyed
the social principles of politeness in that her request for the courtiers to
stop is indirect, which aims to avoid offence.

16.  Pragmatics takes a socio-cultural perspective on language usage,
examining the way that the principles of social behaviour are expressed is
determined by the social distance between speakers. It describes the
unwritten maxims of conversation that speakers follow in order to
cooperate and be socially acceptable to each other.

17. Context outside text
 Activity 1:
 This excerpt from a conversation between two students in the common room
of the Applied Linguistics department of the University of Edinburgh. The text
deals with the meaning of words in context (the physical and social world) and
assumptions of knowledge that speaker and hearer share.

18. Comment on the Activity:
Typically, there are three sorts of context to observe here:
the situational context, what speakers know about what they can see
around them
the background knowledge context, what they know about each other and
the world
the co-textual context, what they know about what they have been saying.

19. Situational context
 In the excerpt about hill walking in Arran, there is an example of words taking
on meaning in the situational context: ‘They were like this. Swollen up like this.’
DM must be making a gesture that he knows AF can see, holding his hands open
and rounded to show what Michelle’s knees looked like. You may have seen
people talking on the telephone and making gestures with their hands or face;
what is funny about this is that hearer and speaker do not share the situational
context, so the gestures do not add meaning to the words.

20. The situational context
is the immediate physical co-presence, the situation where the interaction is
taking place at the moment of speaking. It is not by chance that DM uses the
words ‘like this’. ‘This’ is a demonstrative pronoun, used for pointing to
something, an entity, that speaker and hearer can see. Any overhearer who
cannot see DM’s hands would not know how badly his wife’s knees were
swollen.

21. Activity 2
From written language, from “The English Struwwelpeter”, a book from the beginning of the twentieth
century that contains moralistic, humorous tales about naughty children who are punished for their bad
behaviour. There is one such tale called The story of Augustus who would not have any soup. The tale
begins with Augustus as ‘a chubby lad who ate and drank as he was told, and never let his soup grow
cold’. Then one day he screams ‘I won’t have any soup today.’ Here is verse two:
Next day, now look, the picture shows
How lank and lean Augustus grows!
Yet, though he feels so weak and ill, The naughty fellow cries out still – ‘Not any
soup for me, I say:
O, take the nasty soup away!
I won’t have any soup today.’

22. By the fifth day, “Augustus” was dead. The poem is meant to be read to
children who can look at the book in front of them: the words ‘the
picture’ refer to the one in the book, and the name ‘Augustus’ refers to the
boy in the picture. The child who does not look at the picture will not
know exactly ‘how lank and lean’ the boy is. The picture adds a visible
situational context.

23. Background knowledge context
The second type of context is that of assumed background knowledge. This
can be either :
 □ cultural general knowledge that most people carry with them in their
minds, about areas of life
 □ interpersonal knowledge, specific and possibly private knowledge
about the history of the speakers themselves

24. Cultural background knowledge
In the hill-walking-in-Arran excerpt, AF and DM share cultural background
knowledge about the low mountains on the island: AF does not appear
surprised that DM and his friends went ‘hill walking’, that they could walk
for eight hours there, or that the walk was strenuous enough to make
somebody’s knees swell. Here, the community of people who could be
assumed to know about the mountains are British people, or people who
have visited or studied the British Isles.

25. Groups with mutual knowledge vary in size
 For example,
most nationalities of the world would understand a conversation assuming
knowledge of the fact that stars come out at night, the sun is high at midday
or the world is round. The community can also be relatively small: in the hill-
walking example, out of all the forty or so students on the course, maybe
only AF and DM know that ‘Francesca’ is David’s girlfriend, and that ‘Alice’ is
from London.

26. Activity 3
 The community who could fully appreciate the meaning of these words would be people
with an interest in North American popular music.
 Within that community there will be a smaller group of people who know all about
rhythm and blues, its singers and bands, its history and geography.
 Within that community, there will be an even smaller group of people who know every
song that a particular rhythm and blues band has recorded, as well as the life histories of
each of the band members.
 These smaller groups may form what Swales (1990) calls discourse communities, if they
have the broadly agreed common public goals, special mechanisms for communication and
they have a special lexis or vocabulary.

27.  It is this cultural context and shared attitude of a group that can make
the humour of one country difficult to understand for people of another
country, and the humour of one generation incomprehensible to another
generation.

28. To be continued in session 4 >>>>>>