Pragmatastic

In a comment made on one of my postings in May, Julie wrote the wise words:

Isn't a discussion without semantics well nigh impossible? If we allow pragmatics to rule then the content of any discussion is meaningless because we could all be talking about different elements (semantically).

Admittedly, I think she meant that you can nit-pick and hide behind supposed intended meaning in anything you say – which I’m sure is also true – but I get something else from this comment: the reason why pragmatics is so important.

It’s funny – within linguistics, there is general agreement on how we acquire language at the level of phonetics and phonology, syntax, lexis, etc. I think that most people would agree on the whole with Chomsky’s ‘black box’. Irrespective of where someone is born in the world, their brain has some kind of blueprint that will enable them to learn the language(s) that they hear around them. The relevant parts of the black box will be activated, and, by the end of the critical period (let’s say mid-teens), it will in almost all cases no longer be possible to learn another language in terms of pronunciation and structure to a native speaker-like level. As for lexis/vocabulary, well, that’s a slightly different thing, and it’s beyond the scope of this posting, as is also a discussion of the syntax/semantics interface and lexical semantics in general.

However, there is one ‘level’ of linguistics that has generally been overlooked. Or let’s just say that it’s had less attention paid to it than syntax etc. And that’s pragmatics. In general, it deals with how we communicate meaning. As an academic subject, it’s only really taken off in the last twenty to thirty years, although people have written about it for a long time, and in fact I suppose we can trace its roots back in history as far as written records will allow.

Here’s the crunch, though: to my knowledge, most people would agree that in order to understand how we acquire and use language in terms of syntax, phonetics, etc, we need to start with the cognitive universals that are, by definition, common to all humans and all languages. One way to recognise such universals is by comparing differences between different languages. Although this kind of work is also being carried out within comparative pragmatics, there has also been a tendency – within Anglophone pragmatics, at least – to treat the subject as a branch of philosophy, and in a very Anglo-centric manner. This might in part be due to the historical influence of the study of rhetoric. Unlike with the acquisition of language structure and pronunciation, which has always just ‘happened’, I would suggest that we’ve always been more aware of our language usage. I imagine – although I have no knowledge of developmental pragmatics – that we start to acquire pragmatic competence later than our more ‘basic’ language abilities, and my suspicion is that if there is a critical period for pragmatic ability, then it might also occur slightly later than the standard critical period, and that it wouldn’t be so complete a cut-off point, in that we are still able to acquire pragmatic competence in another culture even as adults, although probably in general with less flexibility than before adulthood.

The pragmatics theory that I favour most strongly is Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (RT). This theory takes its starting point in cognition, which I think is the most sensible thing to do. This means that it can meet the specifics of any language and culture. Within RT, it is assumed that the hearer normally believes that the speaker has a reason for saying something, and the hearer will therefore try to understand the speaker with the least effort possible, using what is at their disposal: their encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, including who the speaker is, where they are, etc. If the first meaning makes no sense, the hearer will continue to process until they are satisfied with the meaning. The more processing involved, the greater the effect. For example – and this is a paraphrased version of an example used by Sperber and Wilson – if two colleagues are discussing whether their third colleague, John, will stand up for them and their interests at a departmental meeting, they might say this:

A: Do you think John will work hard for us?

B: He’s a soldier.

In this case A and B both know that the other knows that they know… that John isn’t literally a soldier. Whereas in a different situation, ‘He’s a soldier’ might be a simple answer to a simple question (‘What does he do for a living?’), requiring very little processing effort, in this case it involves more processing effort to understand that person B is saying that the third person has certain attributes that we might assign in our society to a soldier: being hard-working, persistent and thorough, etc. The reason why person B uses such an expression that takes person A slightly longer to process, thus to be rewarded with greater benefits, could be, for instance, in order to stress their point. (I’ve given examples in the past of how this can also be used for humour.) Such devices are a natural part of language as a whole, rather than being particular to the tropes and poetic effects of classical rhetoric and some literary views.

It’s interesting to note that if person A had come from a culture where soldiers were typically given very different attributes, possibly negative ones, then a culturally aware person B would have been less likely to have used that expression. We determine our language usage very much based on, among other things, what we predict about the hearer’s knowledge and background. This in turn is based either on what we already know about the particular hearer in question, or on other hearers that we’ve met in the past who we consider to have a similar background. Sometimes we get things wrong, and we have to repair the damage! Sometimes the hearer will allow us to do that, if they still want effective communication to take place. Sometimes, though, it might not be in their own best interests for successful communication to continue, in which case there’s little you can do. Language usage, behaviour and attitudes are completely linked to each other, in my opinion.

Relevance Theory is not the only theory in pragmatics, of course. Plenty of universities appear to ignore it, in fact, or so it seems to me. I think this is often because they just don’t have the staff. I suppose it can take some time for new ideas to catch on, especially if the current academic staff have a research background which would be seen as being somewhat at odds with a relevance theoretic perspective. People are going to protect their jobs, right? However, I actually think that a lot of Anglo-centric pragmatics is of little use when it claims to have found universals, based primarily on supposed features typical of English. This has especially been the case when considering linguistic politeness, which I’ve written about before, of course – best seen in Unicode (UTF-8).

Me, I think that by understanding Neo-Gricean or cognitive pragmatics we can attain a better understanding of intercultural (and intra-cultural) communication, which is only a good thing in a world where successful communication appears to be so necessary. RT, for example, provides us with a framework that shows us the importance of cultural awareness and acceptance of difference in understanding what both we and other people mean with what we and they say. From an applied linguistics perspective it is also an area with significant research potential (I hope!), and which appears to be regularly ignored by textbooks and ultimately examination boards, possibly because it is difficult for them to make basic rules in the area. Well, let’s not go into that right now…

I’d like to point out that in terms of linguistic politeness and the question of face (face threats and face saving), I would say that face is indeed important, and that we have generally agreed social traditions within our communities as to what does or does not constitute a face threat. I actually think that how we react to a loss of face is very much connected to neurotransmission, although I’m not prepared to write any more on that subject at present. I do not believe, however, that we can provide any linguistic universals with regard to face (despite this still being the most recognised politeness theory within pragmatics), but rather that we can understand such issues better from within a relevance theoretic framework, as I argue in the old essay I’ve linked to in this posting.

Finally, I’m hoping that if you’ve read what I’ve written here, you’ll have a better idea of why I disagree with recent calls in Blogland for some kind of linguistic code of conduct to be ‘created’ for blogging. The language of blogging in my opinion – how we communicate – can be seen as being just another type of normal language. There cannot be any rules, as we all have different backgrounds. With some friends I could comment: “This is nonsense” and with others I might have to write: “I recognise that you make a valid point, however I’m afraid I find it a little difficult to understand why…”. I couldn’t swap the two, as the language would be wrong in both cases. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ to our language usage in blogging, just as there’s no ‘one size fits all’ to our language usage, either written or spoken, in any part of life. We have to take each communicative situation on a case-by-case basis. There are trends, yes, but they are really very vague. And there are certainly no rules. Language usage – it just doesn’t work that way!

http://teflsmiler.typepad.com/weblog/2004/07/pragmatastic.html