Page 200 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

PRIVATISATION

act designed to get someone to do something. An utterance such as
‘Play the piano, Elton’ is likely to be a directive whatever the
circumstances of its occurrence. But utterances such as ‘Would you
mind playing the piano, Elton?’, ‘Can you play the piano, Elton?’,
‘The piano, Elton’, etc., may or may not prove to be directives
depending on the context of situation. If a teacher in a music lesson
says to a pupil, ‘Can you play the piano, Elton?’, with the piano
waiting for someone to play it, then it is most likely to be heard as a
directive. If, on the other hand, a group of acquaintances are discussing
what instruments they can play and one asks of another ‘Can you play
the piano, Elton?’ then s/he would most likely be heard as requesting
information rather than making a directive. In this way, what an
utterance is heard as doing (in other words, what speech act it is
performing) can vary according to its context of situation.
The aim of pragmatics is in the first place to describe these various
kinds of contextual effect; but more significantly it aims to explain
howlanguage users actually make sense of each other’s utterances in
the face of the various kinds of indeterminancy and ambiguity
outlined above.
The contribution of pragmatics to communication studies is
potentially considerable, although not always realised, since it goes
to the heart of some of the most troubling issues surrounding text and
interpretation (e.g., ‘Where is meaning – in the text; or in the
context?’). At the same time, however, pragmatics has become closely
associated more recently with the interests of cognitive science and the
study of artificial intelligence. Such links tend to produce a strong
emphasis on the supposed rationality of communicators, and on the
universality of the interpretative procedures that they adopt, so that
much work remains to be done on the socially structured distribution
and organisation of pragmatic knowledge and procedures.

See also: Conversation analysis, Meaning, Semantics, Speech act
Further reading: Leech (1983); Levinson (1983)

PRIVATISATION

An economic strategy entailing the release of a government-owned
asset into private hands (or a reduction in government share-holding).
Gayle and Goodrich (1990) include in it the replacement of budgeted
public services by private market mechanisms within the definition of
privatisation practices, such as state management contracts, user

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