Page 199 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

PRAGMATICS

cultural studies, being a fundamental aspect of any study of
meaning.
Further reading: Bennett (1992, 1998)

PRAGMATICS

The study of the interpretation of utterances and more specifically
howthe context of situation influences their meaning. Traditionally
the study of meaning in linguistics has focused upon the meaning of
words or sentences as if meaning inhered within the linguistic
expression itself and was ultimately determined by the linguistic
system. Pragmatics, however, emphasises the role of context in
determining meaning. In fact, of course, it has long been recognised
that linguistic items such as deictics and other indexical expressions
depend for their meaning on the context of situation. In particular,
deictics such as the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘You’ and indexical
expressions such as ‘tomorrow’ all depend for their meaning on the
circumstances in which they are uttered. Thus, the precise meaning of
‘I’ll visit you tomorrow’ will vary depending upon who actually is
speaking to whom, and on when the utterance takes place.
But in any case, even apart from deixis, many words have multiple
senses. Even a simple item such as ‘coach’ has several senses, including
‘a mode of transport’ and ‘someone who trains people in a particular
sport’. Its use, therefore, in an utterance such as ‘Look out for the
coach’ is potentially ambiguous, and we rely upon context to select the
relevant sense.
Pragmatic issues, however, go far beyond issues of word meaning to
include consideration of complicated kinds of contextual effect where
the meaning of an utterance is much more than what is literally said. If
in a reviewof an opera we read that ‘Mr Jones sang a series of notes
which corresponded to those of an aria from Rigoletto’ we infer that he
sang badly, even though the utterance does not actually say so. Similarly, if
while driving in a strange town we ask someone, ‘Is there anywhere
we can get petrol round here?’ and they reply ‘There’s a garage just
round the corner’, we assume that it is the type of garage that sells
petrol (not that it is one for parking your car) and that it is open. These
kinds of inferences that go beyond the literal meaning of what is said
are known as implicatures.
A further kind of contextual effect relates to the notion of speech
act. Directives, for instance, are a commonly occurring type of speech

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