This guide is written for students who are following GCE Advanced level (AS and A2) syllabuses

in English Language. This resource may also be of general interes t to language students on university degree courses, trainee teachers and anyone with a general interest in language science. If you are unsure whether to spend time finding out about this subject, you migh t like to jump straight to the brief section on pragmatics for exam students. On this page I use red type for emphasis. Brown type is used where italics would appear in print (in this screen font, italic looks like this, and is unkind on most readers). Headings have their own hierarchical logic, too: Main section headings look like this Sub-section headings look like this Minor headings within sub-sections look like this Back to top ________________________________________ What is pragmatics? We human beings are odd compared with our nearest animal relatives. Unlike them, we can say what we want, when we want. All normal humans can produce and underst and any number of new words and sentences. Humans use the multiple options of la nguage often without thinking. But blindly, they sometimes fall into its traps. They are like spiders who exploit their webs, but themselves get caught in the s ticky strands. Jean Aitchison Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social inter action and the effects of our choice on others. David Crystal Pragmatics is all about the meanings between the lexis and the grammar and the ph onology...Meanings are implied and the rules being followed are unspoken, unwrit ten ones. George Keith Pragmatics is a way of investigating how sense can be made of certain texts even when, from a semantic viewpoint, the text seems to be either incomplete or to ha ve a different meaning to what is really intended. Consider a sign seen in a chi ldren's wear shop window: Baby Sale - lots of bargains. We know without asking tha t there are no babies are for sale - that what is for sale are items used for ba bies. Pragmatics allows us to investigate how this meaning beyond the words can be understood without ambiguity. The extra meaning is there, not because of the se mantic aspects of the words themselves, but because we share certain contextual knowledge with the writer or speaker of the text. Pragmatics is an important area of study for your course. A simplified way of thi nking about pragmatics is to recognise, for example, that language needs to be k ept interesting - a speaker or writer does not want to bore a listener or reader , for example, by being over-long or tedious. So, humans strive to find linguist ic means to make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting, more relevant, more purposeful or more personal. Pragmatics allows this. Steve Campsall Back to top Pragmatics is a systematic way of explaining language use in context. It seeks t o explain aspects of meaning which cannot be found in the plain sense of words o r structures, as explained by semantics. As a field of language study, pragmatic s is fairly new. Its origins lie in philosophy of language and the American phil osophical school of pragmatism. As a discipline within language science, its roo ts lie in the work of (Herbert) Paul Grice on conversational implicature and the cooperative principle, and on the work of Stephen Levinson, Penelope Brown and Geoff Leech on politeness.

We can illustrate how pragmatics works by an example from association football ( and other field sports). It sometimes happens that a team-mate will shout at me: Man on! Semantic analysis can only go so far with this phrase. For example, it can elicit different lexical meanings of the noun man (mankind or the human race, an individual person, a male person specifically) and the prepos ition on (on top of, above, or other relationships as in on fire, on heat, on duty, e fiddle or on the telly). And it can also explain structural meaning, and account for the way this phrase works in longer sequences such as the first man on the moon, a man on the run or the man on top of the Clapham omnibus. Back to top None of this explains the meaning in the context of the football game. This is v ery complex, but perhaps includes at least the following elements: My team-mate has seen another player's movement, and thinks that I have either n ot seen it, or have not responded to it appropriately.