Pragmatics & Social Interaction
What do we mean by social interaction?
Social interaction is how we engage with others in the world.
We have talked about Pragmatics in other classes because it is the area of
communication studies that explores how language is used in actual
speech events.
Unlike structure pragmatics is not concerned with systematic ‘rules’ like
syntax, morphology or phonology.
Therefore we need to focus on the way language is used to get “things done”
and all the communicative tools and resources we use to exchange our
beliefs, intentions, and meanings (including context, non-verbal behaviours
and paralinguistic features such as intonation)
Humans are social beings…
Humans are by and large social beings BUT remember social
behaviors exist on a continuum and include for example
introverts and extroverts, people who are comfortable
chatting away with others, and people who may be more
reticent.
Within the range of ‘normal’ there are people who may think
that gossiping or chatting about personal topics are enjoyable
ways to pass time and others who feel that ‘talk’ should have
more concrete purposes like exchanging information such as
current affairs or facts. Neither makes a person ‘disordered’.
Social Behaviors vary
Obviously there may be differences in social behaviours and not
just across different ethnic groups. There are also individual
differences within small social networks such as families.
So we need to be aware that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions
when assessing peoples’ pragmatic skills.
We need to consider them in terms of the person’s personality,
life history, occupation, education, interests, beliefs etc.
This is also very important when assessing people with a
cognitive or physical impairment. A Person is more than just
their disability.
Tedtalk
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html
Watch this Tedtalk,
Susan Cain makes some very important points about how we judge people’s
communication styles, particularly when assessing children in the
classroom or during screenings.
This also applies to people with disorders, remember, above and beyond their
disability, they may also just be an introvert. Susan Cain makes some good
points about “group work” which is something to think about when people
are put into ‘therapy groups’ such as with Aphasia – they might actually
prefer individual work.
She is also quite amusing…you may also recognize yourself in this video : )
Functional use of language
Language functions to do a great deal of work when we interact
with others.
It can be used in the following basic ways:
referential (to refer to or explain something)
emotive (express feelings, desires, emotions)
conative (to influence people to do or think
something)
phatic (small talk, chit-chat)
poetic – literature etc
BUT
Remember we don’t just use words, we also use gesture, face
expressions, and intonation to express many of these functions.
This is where pragmatics comes in - we have to think about more than
just the verbal content a person produces (as in formal assessments,
language samples etc).
We also need to be aware of what face expressions or gestures might
be saying… this can be very true in people with dementia, watch
their expressions and NVBs.
FIELDWORK TIP :
Pay attention to these other aspects of communication as well as what
is or isn’t actually said.
Consider some definitions of pragmatics
Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of
language in social interaction and the effects of that choice on
others
David Crystal (1987)
Pragmatics can be usefully defined as the study of how
utterances have meaning in specific situations.
Geoffrey Leech (1983)
Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is
said.
George Yule (1996)
Some key concepts from those definitions …..
Choice
Context
Effect (on others)
More than is contained in the words themselves.
First we need to revisit the notion of ‘meaning’ in the
semantic sense
Meaning (lexical semantics)
Literal meanings from words:
Let’s take 3 words
“cat” “cream” & “drink”
Formal definitions:
Cat
- domestic feline
Cream
- the liquid fat of milk
Drink
- consuming a liquid
Let’s take a sentence and consider
the literal (lexical) meanings
Cats drink cream
Some linguistic choices to express the same proposition
 Domestic felines consume the liquid fat of cream
 Cream is drunk by cats
 The liquid fat of milk is drunk by domestic felines.
Now let’s consider an actual context where this sentence is
used for Pragmatic Meanings (Speech Acts)
Mike, Alice and Mike’s cat Felix are in Mike’s kitchen. Mike is making coffee
and found there is no cream in the fridge. Alice actually used in her coffee
which Mike can see her drinking so how would we interpret the next two
sentences uttered by Mike and Alice
Mike: Where’s the cream?
Alice: Cats drink cream
Mike
SM (semantic meaning) A question asking where the cream is.
PM (pragmatic meaning) An accusation to Alice for using all the cream
Alice
SM = statement noting that domestic felines drink the liquid fat of cream
PM = an excuse claiming Felix drank the cream
So pragmatic interpretation differs from other areas of
language study in that it requires reference to the users
background knowledge of a language, social milieu
(context, action, participants, acceptability and culture).
It draws on interpretation of potential meanings and
contextual knowledge.
Pragmatics is the study of language from a functional
perspective – how we use language to communicate
messages
Review Pragmatic Terms
Presupposition
Implicature
Speech acts
Grice’s maxims
Politeness maxims
Sentence meaning
Speaker meaning
Listener interpretation
Deixis (pointing)
Mutual knowledge
Context
Remember these..
Entailment
Presupposition
Implicature
True/False statements = entailments
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
My mother is a woman
The tiger is an animal
My mother is a doctor
The tiger is unhappy
The mother is a boy
The tiger is a reptile.
Presupposition = the words although posed as
questions imply an actual action has occurred
How did you know that the defendant had bought a knife?
How long have you been selling crack cocaine?
Did you see the murdered woman before she left the office?
How fast was the car going when it ran the red light?
Why did you leave the crime scene?
Grice & Implicature
Cooperation Principle =
All things being equal there is a basic framework that
conversations appear to follow.
Grice’s Maxims [not rules but a descriptive framework
for the way we assume ideal interactions work]
RELEVANCE [relation]
Make sure that whatever you say is relevant to the conversation stay on topic
QUALITY
Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say something for which you do not have adequate evidence.
QUANTITY Make your contribution as informative as is required for the
current purposes of the conversation.
Do not make your contribution more informative than necessary.
give the right amount of information
MANNER [CLARITY]
Do not make your contribution obscure, ambiguous or difficult to
understand.
Be brief, be orderly
Implicature
If we violate Grice’s maxims we generate an
unintentional implicature (implied meaning)
e.g. an autistic person who answers literally.
If we flout Grice’s maxims we generate an
intentional implicature (implied meaning)
M: /\ mm good essay (not what they believe to be
true)
Key point to grasp
Grice said that his maxims appeared to be the
scaffolding of conversations but
Speakers regularly flout Grice’s maxims to generate
implicatures (implied meanings)
So people with dementia often violate our sense of
co-operativity, of relevance but it is not intentional
Grice was interested in inference (implicature)
Think about how we use
language
1 statement can= 2 implicatures
Warning!!
reminder
Exercise
Are you going to Mark’s party tonight?
My parents are in town.
Where’s the salad dressing?
We have no olive oil.
what’s going on
What’s with your mother.
Lets go and look at the garden.
Want some fudge brownies?
I’m not Michael Phelps.
The Art of playing with the truth …not lying but using
language to be
indirect
say less than you believe to be true
ambiguous
So we could write a maxim
When you believe you might upset someone with what
you believe to be true say what you believe to be
untrue
So some things to think about
The actual business of everyday conversations is often
breaking all of Grice’s maxims:
1. We may go off topic
2. We may not give enough information
3. We may not say what we believe to be true
4. We may be (on the surface) irrelevant
FIELDWORK TIP:
Consider how people with CI (cognitive impairment) handle
implied meanings, less than direct comments etc.