Some Notes on Pragmatics

I've had a few fun experiences with pragmatics lately, and I wanted to write them down so I don't forget them.

prag-mat-ics:

n. 1. The study of language as it is used in a social context, including its effect on the interlocutors 2. The branch of semiotics that deals with the relationship between signs, especially words and other elements of language, and their users (from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

Pragmatics, to put it simply, is the study of language as it is used in our everyday lives. Peirce had quite an influence on pragmatics, since he is considered the father of the American school of thought called Pragmatism, as well as Semiotics (the study of signs). However, I'm not going to talk a lot about Peirce right now.

Conversational Implicature

Another highly influential person in pragmatics was H. Paul Grice, a British logician who proposed that there are four maxims of conversation, which must be followed at all times in order to have a "felicitous" conversation, where people understand one another. These maxims are: 1) the maxim of quantity: say only what is necessary, no more and no less; 2) the maxim of quality: say only what you know is true; 3) the maxim of relevance: say only things that pertain to the conversation; 4) the maxim of manner: avoid being ambiguous or obscure, and be orderly.

The problem with these conversational maxims (also called the Gricean maxims) is that many linguists knew that we don't follow them a lot of the time. In fact, we sometimes flout them openly, knowing that those we are talking to will understand that flouting and interepret the statement as meaning the opposite of what it says. One really great example of this kind of flouting is the use of sarcasm. For example, imagine a scenario with three people, A, B, and C, where A and B are talking. A then sees C trip over his shoelaces, and says to B, "C really is graceful." Because of the conditions surrounding this statement, B knows automatically that A is not really being sincere, but is flouting the conversational maxim of quality, and re-interprets the statement as meaning "C sure is clumsy." This kind of occurence is often known as conversational implicature.

Well, conversational implicature causes quite a lot of confusion or humor when it fails. For example, when I was recently in France with my parents, we ran into one of these implicatures. See, we were visiting the castle of Carcassonne, and Dad and I wanted to walk down into the town to get a good picture of the fortress. Mom's not a big walker, so we weren't sure if she'd be willing to come or not. Dad told her that we were going to walk down into town, and Mom replied, "I can read." Dad chose to misinterpret that statement, and he thought she was exulting in her newly-found power of reading (which was, of course, absurd, since Mom has read since kindergarten, like most of us). Dad had skipped over the maxim of relevance, and thought that Mom was just making a random statement that didn't necessarily have anything at all to do with the rest of the conversation. But, being familiar as we all are with the Gricean maxims, he should have assumed that she was making a relevant statement and then inferred that she meant she would sit in the car and read while she waited for us.

Linguistic Social Rituals

We often fossilize certain linguistic acts so that they become social rituals. This is another pragmatic concept, since it deals with a speaker's meaning, which is often quite different in such situations from the sentence meaning. For example, a common American greeting is to ask, "How are you?" In fact, Americans learning another language have a hard time figuring out how to greet someone without asking this question. But, we don't really want to know how someone is. The correct reply to this question is a simple, "Fine." I see this happen all the time on college campuses, because we see people we know, and we don't have time to stop and really talk, but we want them to know that we acknowledge them. If someone gives the wrong answer, such as "Excellent!" or "Absolutely horrible," we can't move on in the same way as we would before. In American culture it is possible to ask this question, get the proper response, and just keep on walking, without ever stopping at all. But when somebody gives the wrong response, we all of sudden have to stop and find out more. This greeting-type use of the question sometimes bothers foreigners because they think that we Americans are being insincere, when we really are just saying hello.

We have similar types of social rituals in all kinds of everyday experiences. A big one is small talk, when you don't know what to talk to somebody about. Some people are really bad at figuring out things to talk to other people about, and so their conversation ends up consisting almost entirely of such small-talk rituals, including "How's life?" "What are you up to these days?" "Where are you from?" and (at college) "What are you studying?" or "What's your major?" (You probably know some of these people, and I bet they drive you crazy!)

A friend of mine, whom we'll call Jill, was talking recently about a social ritual in married life, when people start asking you all the time, "So are you going to have kids?" or just "When are you going to have children?" (In single life, the question we all dread is "So are you dating anyone?") Well, married people dread this question about child-bearing, which really is just none of anybody else's business. But we ask all the time anyway, simply because we can't think of anything else to talk to them about. Jill's parents were unable to have children for about five years after they first got married, and so for five years they got this question more than they could stand. So Jill's mom finally started telling people, "Well, you know, I'm not sure, but after last night, it could be anytime!" This tends to stop people dead in their tracks -- the social ritual has been broken with, and they don't know how to react. They were expecting some run-of-the-mill socially ritualistic answer like, "Well, we're not sure yet" or "We'll see what happens" or maybe "We want children, but we're not ready just yet." And when someone breaks the ritual they literarlly have no idea what to do. Jill did something similar at our recent work party. She was talking to a co-worker's husband who asked her if they were trying to have kids, and she told him, "You know, we're trying every chance we get!" Again, he stopped dead in his tracks, with no clue what to do or say next, the response was so different from what he'd been expecting.