语言学Pragmatics重点.pptVIP

Pragmatics Lecture 10 Coming Introducing Pragmatics Speech Act Theory Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts Cooperative principle Politeness principle 1. Introducing Pragmatics Semantics What does “X” mean? (literal meaning) Pragmatics What do you mean by saying “X”? (unstated meaning concerning the context.) “You left the door open.” Pragmatics vs. Semantics Utterance meaning vs. Sentence meaning Whether the context of use is considered in the study. The study of meaning as communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener in a particular context. It’s the study of “invisible” meaning. A: I have a fourteen year old son. B: Well that’s all right. A: I also have a dog. B: Oh, I am sorry. Context: A is trying to rent an apartment from B. Knowledge shared by both the speaker and the hearer. The gap between what the speaker implies and what the hearer infers is bridged by context. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. We can understand the sentence in this way (according to Chao [赵元任]) colorless = uninteresting, boring green = fresh sleep ? sleep on (= not decide about (sth) until the next day ) Chao: I have got some ideas recently. So they are green ideas. Some of them are colorful; some are colorless.I don’t want to publish my colorless green ideas immediately. I would rather sleep on them, or, to put it in my favorite way, let them sleep. Unfortunately, these colorless green ideas contradict each other, and fight each other furiously. So I would like to complain to my friends that colorless green ideas sleep furiously. The actual meaning of a sentence is not decided by its syntactic structure but by its context. The same utterance can be interpreted in different ways within different contexts. Different interpretations Time flies! Suppose insects also hold their Olympic Games, and one game is for flies to “run” a race (with their wings, not legs, of course). Once before a race starts, the Chairman o