1. Summary
Pragmatics is about the use of utterances in context, about how we manage to convey
more than is literally encoded by the semantics of sentences. The extra and different
meanings inferable asconversational implicates saveproduction effort. Pragmatics builds
on what is semantically encoded in the language. For instance the scale of modal verbs
must > should > may allows a speaker who says “Fred may leave” to implicate that there
is no obligation on Fred toleave. Presupposition is a pervasive feature of communication.
Therearewords, like again, that act as presupposition triggers (this one signaling that the
speaker or writer believes that the state or event referred towas instantiated before), and
some syntactic constructions (for instance, relative clauses) act as pre- supposition
triggers too. Notations were introduced for implicate (+>) and presupposition (+<). In
Chapter 9 it will be seen that the coherence of discourse depends on us fitting our
utterances to the presupposed background.
Also introduced in this chapter were speech acts: conventional acts that we perform with
language – like telling, requesting, asking, greeting, advising, betting and challenging.
Most speech acts have propositional content. The main differences between different
speech acts concerns the way their content is involved: for instance, is it presented as an
up- dating of presuppositions; as a desired change to the presupposed back- ground; or
as a presupposed proposition over which we areexpressingregret,gratitude, or whatever?
Indirect speech acts – as when “Tell me your name” is used not as an order but as a
question – are ones that do not stick to the three main default correlations with sentence
type (stating with declarative sentences, ordering with imperative sentences, and
questioning with interrogative sentences). The forces of indirect speech acts can be
understood as implicates, though some become established as idioms.
Referring is a pragmatic act too, using noun phrases in context tolet your addresseeknow
which people, things, or whatever, you are communicating about.
