PRAGMATI

C
By Group 8
• Amira
• Jui karisma
• Devy puspasari
Pragmatic
 Pragmatics, In linguistics and philosophy, the
study of the use of natural language in
communication; more generally, the study of the
relations between languages and their users. It is
sometimes defined in contrast with linguistic
semantics, which can be described as the study of
the rule systems that determine the literal
meanings of linguistic expressions.
 Pragmatics is then the study of how both literal and
nonliteral aspects of communicated linguistic meaning are
determined by principles that refer to the physical or social
context (broadly construed) in which language is used.

 Among these aspects are conversational and conventional

“implicatures” (e.g., “John has three sons” conversationally
implicates that John has no more than three sons; “He was
poor but honest” conventionally implicates an unspecified
contrast between poverty and honesty).
Cooverative Principle
 A principle proposed by the philosopher Paul
Grice Whereby those involved in comunnication
assume that both parties will normally seek to
cooperate with each other to establish agreed
meaning. It is composed of four maxims : the
maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the
maxim of relation, and the maxim of manner.
Conversational Implicature
 According to Grice, utterance interpretation is not a matter
of decoding messages, but rather involves : taking the
meaning of the sentences together with contextual
information, using interference rules, and working out what
the speaker means on the basis of the assumption that the
utterance confroms to the maxims.

 The main advantage of this approach from Grice’s pont of

view is that it provides a pragmatic explanation for a wide
range of phenomena espacially for coversational
implicature– a kind of extra meaning that is not literally
contained in the utterance.
Implicature
 “Implicature” denotes either (i) the act of meaning or
implying one thing by saying something else, or (ii)
the object of that act. Implicatures can be determined
by sentence meaning or by conversational context,
and can be conventional (in different senses) or
unconventional. Figures of speech such as metaphor
and irony provide familiar examples, as do loose use
and damning with faint praise. Implicature serves a
variety of goals: communication, maintaining good
social relations, misleading without lying, style, and
verbal efficiency.
Speech Acts
 In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is
something expressed by an individual that not only presents
information, but performs an action as well. For example, the
phrase "I would like the kimchi, could you please pass it to me?" is
considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to
acquire the kimchi, as well as presenting a request that someone
pass the kimchi to them.

 According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the

performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different
aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying
something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or
promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience".
Performative Speech Acts
 An interesting type of illocutionary speech act is that
performed in the utterance of what Austin calls
performatives, typical instances of which are "I nominate
John to be President", "I sentence you to ten years'
imprisonment", or "I promise to pay you back." In these
typical, rather explicit cases of performative sentences, the
action that the sentence describes (nominating, sentencing,
promising) is performed by the utterance of the sentence
itself. J.L. Austin claimed that performative sentences could
be "happy or unhappy". They were only happy if the speaker
does the actions he or she talks about. They were unhappy if
this did not happen.
 Performative speech acts also use explicit verbs
instead of implicit ones. For example, stating "I
intend to go." does convey information, but it does
not really mean that you are [e.g.] promising to go;
so it does not count as "performing" an action
("such as" the action of promising to go).
Therefore, it [the word "intend"] is an implicit
verb; i.e., a verb that would not be suitable for use
in performative speech acts.