Unlike the idea of genre, pragmatics in discourse is a notion slightly newer to me which I find a lot more difficult to label. This is not so surprising as Searle, Kiefer & Bierwisch (1980:viii) even suggest that “ Pragmatics is one of those words that gives the impression that something quite specific and technical is being talked about when often in fact it has no clear meaning” (Levinson,1983:6).
Context and pragmatics
After looking at different books on the subject, the notion that has struck me as being in the “centre” of pragmatics is the one of context. Three types of context have been identified: situational context, background knowledge context, and the co-textual context.
Situational Context is “what speakers know about what they can see around them” (Cutting, 2002:3); or more precisely “the immediate physical co presence, the situation where the interaction is taking place at the moment of speaking” (Cutting, 2002:4). Although this definition refers to spoken discourse it also applies to written discourse. In his book Brian Paltridge (2006:54) sites a fine example from Freedman (1989): “a student’s assignment written for a law course takes on a different meaning if it is re-typed on the letterhead of a law firm and addressed to a client”. We can see hear that the same words are attributed different meanings according to where they are written. I believe that a clause is most likely to be insignificant when taken out of context when it includes a demonstrative pronoun such as “this, that, these or those”. For instance, the clause “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” in English meaning: “this is not a pipe” is not significant unless put into situational context as shown in the image below.
After looking at this image you may think that these words are not significant even within situational context; but they are! This is exactly what Magritte is trying to demonstrate. Take a step back and look again: this is not a pipe but the representation of a pipe. This statement however shows that to fully understand the clause “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” the reader may need some background knowledge on the artist, his philosophy and what he does.
This leads us onto the second type of context: background knowledge context which is “what they know about each other and the world” (Cutting, 2002:3). Thus Background knowledge can be cultural general knowledge that most people carry with them in their minds, about areas of life, as demonstrated by the pipe example; or interpersonal knowledge, specific and possibly private knowledge about the history of the speakers themselves (Cutting, 2002:5). For instance to understand the following email you need to share interpersonal knowledge with the writer and the people mentioned.
Discussed early this week with Kate & Paul - Paul to organize a meeting ASAP with MSA owner (D.Delford) in order to integrate a preferred agreed pricing for XXXX XXX in the MSA.
Kate, your call.
(For confidentiality reasons, the names in this email have been changed.)
The third context type is co-textual context which is “what they know about what they have been saying” (Cutting, 2002:3) or what they know about what they have been reading. For example, in this abstract from a news article in the guardian:
“Christine Pratt, the helpline's director, said: "We are not suggesting he is a bully. What we are saying is there are people in his office working directly with him that have issues and concerns, and have contacted our helpline. We believe the present statement put out by Lord Mandelson is a nonsense and non-credible."” (Wintour, P., (2010) Gordon Brown hit by fresh bullying allegations)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/21/gordon-brown-fresh-bullying-allegations
It is assumed that the reader has read the article from the beginning and therefore knows who is referred to through the pronouns: “we”, “he”, “his”, and “him”.This is referred to as grammatical cohesion; it is what meshes the text together (Cutting, 2002:9).
These aspects of context expand to cross-cultural pragmatics; indeed, according to Edward Hall countries can be classified as high or low context. In high-context culture, such as the Japanese culture, communication is less explicit and people must read between the lines to understand the intended meaning of the message (Chaney, 2007: 95). In low-context cultures, such as the North American the message is explicit and may be given in more than one way to ensure understanding by the receiver. Low context language tends to be direct and verbal (Chaney, 2007: 95).
Thus being aware of the context in which words are written or evocated is crucial not only to understand them fully but also when creating your own written or spoken discourse. For instance a consulting report done for an American company is likely to differ from one made for a Japanese company or even a French one. A good guidance about the possible “rules” of communication is Grice’s theory of conversational writing stated below.
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References
Chaney, L.H., Martin, J.S. (2007) Intercultural Business Communication, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall
Cruse, A. (2006) A glossary of Semantics and Pragmatics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
Cutting, J. (2002) Pragmatics and Discourse: A resource book for students. London: Routledge
Levinson, S.C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Paltridge, B. (2006) Discourse analysis: An introduction. London: Continuum.
Schiffrin, D. (1994) Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.
Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F. and Bierwisch, M. (1980) Speech act theory and pragmatics. Dordrecht: D. Reidel
Wintour, P., (2010) Gordon Brown hit by fresh bullying allegations, the guardian, URL:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/feb/21/gordon-brown-fresh-bullying-allegations
This is an interesting approach. In a business context, I believe that considering pragmatics in the three dimensions, you outlined in your post, would be valuable to marketers. If they consider these different contexts, they might make less mistakes when marketing products in a culture that is not their own. An example of such a mistake, which could have been avoided using the context approach, would be Ford’s “Nova” car. “Nova” means “won’t go” in Spanish, which did not help to boost the sales in Spain.
ReplyDeleteI certainly agree with the notion that context is central in pragmatics, particularly when interpreting illocutionary force. Ignoring contextual factors often leads to miscommunication, as the meaning of the utterance may be interpreted completely differently from the intended meaning. For instance, all too often we see headlines in the newspapers, and even before reading the article, we have a preconceived idea as to what the article might be about, based on our background knowledge of the subject. Indeed, when such knowledge is limited, we find ourselves wrongly guessing the content solely based on the information provided in the headline.
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