LNGN 302: Final Exam
Due 4:00pm May 12, 2014
Name
Discuss ONE of the following topics. Write a sufficiently developed and well organized
short essay for the topic that you choose. Limit your writing within four typed doublespaced pages.
Circle the topic number you choose and submit this page with your essay.
Pay close attention to the boldfaced words in your discussion.
1.
The deictic use of language has two properties: (a) it picks out a referent, and
(b) relates this referent to a kind of common ground that exists between speaker and
addressee. 'Indexicality' provides evidence that language is not just an autonomous or
self-contained phenomenon but that aspects of contexts are organized as grammatical
systems. Discuss the statements with relevant and sufficient examples and explain why
deixis, and indexicality generally, is categorized as pragmatic.
2.
Why are presuppositions regarded as shared assumptions? What is the
relationship between shared assumptions and linguistic forms? What is the relationship
between semantic presuppositions and pragmatic presuppositions, and why are they
regarded as kinds of accommodated meaning? Why are presuppositions regarded as
pragmatically conditioned assumptions? Discuss these questions coherently with
necessary and sufficient examples.
3. j
Discuss Austin's theory of speech acts in terms of three aspects of meaning of an
erance: the locution, the illocution, and the perlocution. Accordingly, explain the
relationship between literal meaning and indirect speech acts in terms of language as a
representation of intention and speech act choice with relevant and sufficient examples.
4.
Discuss Grice's theory of conversational implicature in terms of the distinction
and the relationship between 'natural' and 'non-natural' meaning. Accordingly,
explain the Cooperative Principle and its maxims and the relationship between the
Cooperative Principle and flouting & hedging maxims with necessary and sufficient
examples.
5.
What are the major assumptions underlying Sperber and Wilson's Relevance
Theory regarding 'indeterminacy', 'salience' and 'inference' in speech encoding and
decoding? Discuss the distinction and relationship between 'explicature' and
'implicature' in terms of Relevance Theory's accounts of language understanding.
Provide explanatory examples wherever necessary in your discussion.
6.
In being 'polite', a speaker is attempting to create an implicated context that
matches the one assumed by the addressee, and utterances frequently exhibit a trade-off
between economy and the speaker's preference for a more elaborate linguistic strategy
than is strictly needed to communicate the relevant proposition. What does this statement
mean in terms of linguistic politeness strategies? Discuss and explain politeness
phenomena based on Brown and Levinson's account of face-saving strategies.
Gabrielle Napoli
LNGN 320: Final Exam
Speech Acts Theory
Austin's theory of speech acts helps to explain the performative nature of utterances and
how a speaker exploits particular linguistic means to achieve the most desirable outcome.
Additionally, speech acts theory explains how a listener can infer the intended meaning of what
is said. His theory focuses on three aspects of meaning of an utterance: the locution, the
illocution, and the perlocution. Locution is the literal meaning of what is said. The illocutionary
meaning of an utterance is the social function of what is said and the perlocutionary meaning is
the effect of the utterance.
Speakers must choose the linguistic form of their speech or, in other terms, the locution
of their speech that will help them achieve the most desirable outcome. Locution is the literal
sentence meaning. It is strictly what is said by the speaker. The locution is the linguistic choice
the speaker chooses to use. For example, if someone were to utter the statement, "It is cold
outside," the locution (or literal meaning) of the sentence entails the degree of the temperature
outside and nothing else. The meaning of this sentence is fixed and is context free. We
understand it as it is, without taking into account the context the sentence was uttered in. It is
superficial and semantically driven. For example, when a speaker utters the statement, "I am
hungry", we as listeners understand the statement precisely as it is. We understand it without any
pragmatic meaning; therefore we do not infer anything from the above proposition. We regard
this statement with a truth-value because the nature of all locutions must be truthful.
However, as we look deeper into an utterances meaning, we come to understand the
illocution of the statement. Illocution is what is done or what the speaker intends for the
utterance to mean. It is the intended meaning of the utterance. For example, when the speaker
utters, "I am hungry," he is not simply informing the listener that his stomach is empty. His,
intention is to see if the listener is hungry too and would like to get lunch. Illocution is
pragmatically based. For example, rather than focusing on what the statement entails, illocution
is more concerned with what was intended by the proposition and how the speaker used speech
act choice to arrive at the most desirable outcome. Additionally, the illocution of a proposition is
dynamic, which suggests that the meaning is not fixed. The utterance meaning is dynamic
because the speaker's intended meaning can vary depending on the different situations it is
uttered in. For example, if 1 am in class and my professor says "I have 2 big dogs at home" he is
most likely insinuating that we will leave class early so he can feed them. But if my professor
utters this statement when his coworkers are talking about where they are going to have a party,
he is indirectly insinuating that they cannot have the party at his home because of his 2 big dogs.
Looking back at the statement, "It is cold," when this sentence is used as an utterance, it usually
has the illocutionary force of kindly suggesting to the person to close the window, without
putting too much imposition on the addressee. The speaker in this case uttered the statement for a
specific reason beyond just making a proposition. The illocution of a sentence is used to convey
the real meaning. Without sentence meaning (locution), there would be no utterance meaning
(illocution). The relationship between locution and illocution depends on the speaker's intention.
The speaker's intention therefore determines their linguistic choice. For example, a speaker can
choose to be direct and explicit: "close the door" or they can choose to be indirect and implicit to
reduce the degree of imposition to minimal: "I would really like if you could please close the
door."
Perlocution is the effect or outcome the linguistic form has on the addressee. Referring
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back to the above example, the addressee will either get up and close the window or just agree
with the speaker that it is cold outside. It is up to the speaker to choose the most desirable
linguistic form, the locution of their speech, to achieve a specific outcome, in this case having ^
the addressee close the window. However, in this case the speaker is being indirect and implicit
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in which case the outcome or the perlocution is unforeseeable because we do not know how the
addressee with react.
Language is a representation of intention and speech act choice. In other words, a speaker
chooses the form of speech in order to achieve a specific intention. Every word we utter has an
intended message and that message asks the listener to perform a specific act. For example, in
Peter Grundy's textbook, he talks about a moment when his wife suggests they get a parrot and
then proceeds to say "they're as intelligent as 3-year-olds". Peter's wife did not continue with her
thought simply to inform him that parrots are intelligent. Rather, she told him something about
parrots to try and persuade Peter to buy a parrot. In this example, Peter understood the literal
meaning of his wife's utterances as well as her intended meaning. His wife wanted to avoid or
reduce the weight of imposition on Peter. In this case, his wife chose to be indirect and implici
with her statement.
In linguistic theory, there is one form and one function and they match. When we say that
form and function do not match, the use of language becomes pragmatic. By this we mean that
the function of a sentence such as "Can I have that pencil?" becomes pragmatic because the
request for the pencil is indirect. The function is a request but the form of the sentence is
interrogative. Utterances become more pragmatic because the speaker and the addressee
understand something beyond what is said. The real intention is different than the form the
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speaker chooses. Another example of when form and function do not match is "is everyone
here?" It is an interrogative sentence but the true intention or the function of the utterance is to
know if the speaker can begin the lecture. Additionally, the relationship between literal meaning
and indirect speech acts makes the outcome unforeseeable. Take for example the utterance, "it is
cold outside." The intention of the speaker is to indirectly ask someone to shut the window. The
speaker makes a declarative sentence/proposition but what the speaker's true intention is, is to
tell the addressee to close the window. Like Peter's wife, the speaker will often choose indirect
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and implicit linguistic form to avoid or reduce the weight of imposition on the addressee. In
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cases like this, perlocution is not guaranteed and the linguistic form becomes doubly pragmatic
making this the weakest form of a speech act.