Introduction to Pragmatics
(Einführung in die Pragmatik – Einzelansicht)
Summer 2015
Tuesdays 2:30--4:00pm @ 2321.HS 3H
INSTRUCTOR
Todor Koev ([email protected])
What is semantics?
 Semantics: The study of linguistic meaning.
 More precisely: Semantics is linguistic meaning that ...
o is “literal”
o is conventional / lexically encoded
o is not context-dependent
o decides between truth and falsity
o can be looked up in a dictionary
o…
 Semantics is about linguistic meaning that is invariant across
different uses.
 Semantic meaning can be specified once and for all. It is robust.
Semantics as truth conditions
 Semantics is about sentences and their truth conditions.
 Example of how truth-conditional meaning can be derived
compositionally.
(1) Greece is broke  1 iff Greece   broke
Greece 
 broke  {x | x is broke}
Informally: “Greece is broke” is true if and only if Greece is one
of the entities in the world that are broke
 Truth conditions should hold no matter when and how a particular
sentence is used.
 But: There is more to meaning than truth conditions.
Pragmatics
 Pragmatics: The study of linguistic meaning as arising in context.
 One way to read this definition:
“Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in
which they are performed.” (Robert Stalnaker)
 Sentences do not exist in a vacuum. They are uttered in context to
communicate.
 “Linguistic acts” or speech acts are about how sentences are used
in context.
 Today: We will study the types and properties of speech acts.
 Warm-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgmpbXIGpcc
Speech acts
 Main idea: Speaking is doing things. Uttering a sentence is
performing a communicative act.
 The “meaning” of an utterance then has two components:
o semantic content: what is expressed by the sentence
o communicative act: an action, what the utterance does
 More precisely:
o descriptive/propositional content: The information expressed
by the sentence.
o illocutionary force: The effect the utterance has on the context.
 Example:
are happy)
(2) “Are you happy?”  Question

 (you

illocutionary
force
descriptive content
Speech acts vs. sentence types
 Speech act (pragmatics): What the speaker achieves with her
utterance.
 Sentence type (syntax): A grammatical construction that is
conventionally used to perform a given speech act.
 Although there are strong correlations between sentence type and
speech act, there is by no means a one-to-one correspondence.
 A sample list:
speech act
sentence type
example
assertion
declarative
“John is here.”
question
interrogative
“Are you hungry?”
command/request
imperative
“Close the door.”
performative
first person present tense S
“I thank you.”
Assertion informally
 Assertion: The act of trying to add fresh information to the
common ground/the context (=the agreed-upon information).
o Fresh information: Asserting discourse-old information is usually
unacceptable.
(3) Melanie is rich. She lives in Paris. #She is rich.
Q: What type of content is discourse-old?
o Tries to add information: Asserted content can be rejected by the
hearer.
(4) A: Melanie is rich.
B: No, she is actually very poor.
 Assertion involves a process of negotiation of information among
interlocuters. Only accepted information enters the context.
Assertion formally
 Asserted content, if accepted, reduces the possible ways in which
the world can be.
 More formally: An act of assertion removes from the context the
possible worlds in which the asserted content is false.
 Example (we use the semantics from the slides on Presupposition
Projection):
c  {w1 , w2 , w3 }
Germany won   {w1 , w3 , w4 }
(5) c  Germany won
 c Germany won 
 {w1 , w2 , w3 }  {w1 , w3 , w4 }
 {w1 , w3 }
Questions informally
 Questions: Questioning tries to obtain information from the hearer.
 Two types of questions in language:
o Yes-No questions/Polar questions: Introduce two alternatives
and can be answered with a simple “Yes” or “No”.
(6) Q: Are you coming to the party?
A: Yes./No.
o Content questions/Wh-questions: Ask for specific information
and typically introduce several alternatives/there are several
answers possible.
(7) Q: Who is coming to the party?
A: Matt and Jessica.
 Answers need not be exhaustive: in (7), Kevin and Laura could be
coming to the party as well.
 Q: Why would (7A) be usually understood as exhaustive?
Questions formally
 Questions introduce alternatives, i.e. possible answers.
 The meaning of a question can then be stated as the set of its
possible answers.
(8)  Are you coming to the party? 
{I am coming to the party , I am not coming to the party }
(9) Who is coming to the party? 
{ Matt is coming to the party , Jessica is coming to the party ,...}
 Important: Questions denote sets of sentence meanings. They are
then correctly predicted to not be true or false.
(10) Q: Who passed the exam?
A: #That’s not true.
Questions in context
 What is the effect questions have on the context?
 The context is split into different cells (=sets of worlds) each of
which represents one possible answer to the question.
 Intuitive idea:
(11) Who is coming to the party?
Context
No one.
Matt only.
Jessica only.
Matt and Jessica only.
…
 Q: Is “No one” really a good answer to “Who is coming to the
party”?
Commands/Requests
 Commands/Requests are similar to questions in that they ask the
hearer to do something.
 Unlike questions, they expect physical actions, not information.
 Examples:
(12) Please close the door.
(13) Get out!
(14) Give me your money!
 Interestingly, imperative sentences lack subjects crosslinguistically.
 This suggests that imperatives might denote properties, e.g. in (12)
the property of closing the door.
Commands/Requests formally
 Semantically: imperative sentences denote properties:
(15) get out   {x | x gets out}
 Pragmatically: imperatives ask the hearer to see to it that she fits the
property described by the utterance.
 The “hearer”? Imperatives must then have an indexical component.
(16) Get out!c  hearer (c ) should ensure that hearer (c )  get out 
 Imperatives and Yes-No questions create two alternatives. But:
o Alternatives for imperatives are physical actions, not answers.
o Imperatives “prefer” the positive alternative, i.e. the speaker
wants the hearer to follow the request/command.
Performatives
 A performative utterance is one which self-verifies itself.
 Examples:
(17) I apologize for what I have done.
(18) I promise to never again make snide remarks about
sauerkraut.
 The speaker is describing what her utterance is actually doing.
 The action performed is an apology/promise. The sentence is
describing the action the utterance is performing.
 Such sentences, if sincerely uttered, are then always true.
 All utterances are performative (because they are actions), so such
speech acts are “performative” in the narrow sense of the word.
Performatives: grammar
 Performative utterances are expressed by first person present tense
sentences.
 If they lack these grammatical features, they typically lose their
performative force.
(20) I apologize for what I have done.
(21) I apologized for what I have done.
(22) John apologizes for what he has done.
(performative)
(assertion)
(performative?)
 Exceptions: missing subjects.
(23) Thank you, Gwen.
(24) Sorry.
(performative)
(performative)
Performatives: Hereby test
 How can be test whether an utterance is a performative?
 One empirical diagnostic is the Hereby Test: A performative
sentence should be able to include hereby in it.
(25) I hereby apologize for what I have done.
(26) #I hereby apologized for what I have done.
(27) ?John hereby apologizes for what he has done.
 hereby  “by means of this”
 Q1: What type of expression is hereby, given its meaning?
 Q2: Given your answer to Q1, what is this telling you about the
semantics of performatives?
Performatives: semantics
 Performative sentences describe the event of their own utterance.
 They say what type of event that is: an apology, a promise, a
baptism, etc.
 Performative utterances are then self-referring, in fact self-verifying.
 Approximate semantics (e = the event of uttering the sentence):
(28) I thank you for your attention e  1 iff
e is an event of the speaker thanking the hearer for their
attention
 So hereby = “by means of this utterance”.
The Performative Hypothesis
 Performative utterances are prefixed by a declaration of what the
speaker is doing with the sentence.
(29) I warn you, don’t make me mad!
(30) I bet you 100 Euros Tiger Woods will lose the race.
(31) I now pronounce you husband and wife.
 The Performative Hypothesis (PH) says that such prefixes are
silently present in the syntax of all sentences.
(32) “I’m cold” is really “I tell you that I’m cold”.
(33) “Sit down!” is really “I command you to sit down!”.
(34) “I’ll study for the exam” is really “I promise you to study for
the exam”.
Supporting evidence: reflexives
 Reflexive pronouns: myself, yourself, themselves,…
 Reflexive pronouns need to be preceded by an NP of the same
gender/number or else the sentence is ungrammatical (*).
(35) I / *You have made a cake for myself.
(36) You / *I have made a cake for yourself.
 Certain sentence types (e.g. imperatives) can host first/second
person reflexives without antecedents. This is explained by the PH
since the invisible performative prefix has I and you in it.
(37) Behave yourself!
(what you say)
(38) I am telling you to behave yourself! (full syntactic structure)
Contradicting evidence
 Meanings don’t match.
 (39) means something very different from (40). One can be true and
the other false.
(39) I’m cold.
(40) I tell you that I’m cold.
 The PH is clearly false!
 But it brings up the question: Is illocutionary force part of the
grammar or is it only a matter of pragmatics?
Summary
 We have looked at how sentences are used in discourse.
 We distinguished between the descriptive/propositional content of
the sentence (intuitively, the semantics) and the illocutionary force
(intuitively, the effect on the context).
 We discussed a good sample of speech acts: assertions, questions,
commands/requests, and performatives.
 We saw that performative utterances offer a window into what
speech acts do and the way they interact with the descriptive
content of the sentence.
Reading for next time
 “Coherence relations”