Pragmatics - The Contribution of Context to Meaning

We do not interpret language in a vacuum. We use our knowledge of the actors, objects and situations to determine more specific interpretations of any sentence. Pragmatics undertakes the study of the ways in which contextual features can determine sentence interpretations.

Oldea Song (South Australia)

marks shivering with cold a big snake tell you

marks put it down a white-blossomed tree

marks to throw sand with one’s hands

To interpret this song you need to understand its cultural context.

A man is shivering with cold; he sees the tracks (marks) of a big snake. He tells another man; together they follow the edible snake and kill it near a white-blossomed tree. The last word of the song refers to the digging of a depression in the sand to make a fire for cooking a snake.

Interpreting traditional songs and stories requires various types of pragmatic information:

	lexical	what are marks?
		put it down = ‘to kill something’
	genre	song lyrics are often less explicit
	culture	people are often cold while hunting
		snakes are a potential food source
		the preparations associated with building a fire

It is easy to find examples of pragmatic contributions to sentence meaning in English:

The councilors refused the marchers a parade permit because they feared violence.

The councilors refused the marchers a parade permit because they advocated violence.

Note the effect that the change in verb has on your interpretation of the pronoun they.

Pragmatics versus semantics

Classical approaches to semantics attempt to fix meaning in isolation from context. The classic approach assumes that semantics analyzes a conventional, context-invariant meaning. The classic approach assumes that pragmatics analyzes how listeners use non-conventional, context-dependent information to augment semantic meaning. The classical separation between semantics and pragmatics fails to explain how pragmatic information is integrated with conventional meaning, and more especially, how pragmatic information changes conventional meaning.

More recent studies have begun to recognize the degree to which our understanding of any word is tied to the context in which it appears. One implication of the tie between language and context is that words and sentences have different interpretations in different contexts. A speaker produces utterance tokens of a single sentence type in different contexts, e.g., Can you take out the trash? Utterances taken out of context will have interpretations that differ from the original intention of the speaker.

Deictic expressions overtly point to features of the physical context:

pronouns I, you, one, it

tense past, present, future

adverbs now, today, here, there

articles the, a, that, this

Deictic expressions provide a miniature laboratory for exploring the connection between semantics and pragmatics. The semantic meaning of a pronoun is an instruction for locating a referent in the context of speech. The pragmatic interpretation of a pronoun is the actual content that the context supplies to complete the interpretation of the pronoun.

Pronouns provide great examples of how context infects the conventional role of pronouns to indicate the person of a participant (Siewierska 2004). Consider the use of pronominal forms in the Mayan language Chontal:

käyälo	‘I fall’	yälon	‘Ifell’
ayälo	‘you fall’	yälet	‘you fell’
uyälo	‘he falls’	yäli	‘he fell’

Chontal uses pronominal forms to express both person and aspect. Around the world, languages use pronouns to express different functions. Spanish and other European languages use person markers to convey social distance and respect in addition to the fusion of person marking and tense. Hale (1966) found that the Australian aboriginal language Lardil used person marking to contrast the difference between participants who belong to the same generation and different generations. Person markers provide the ideal base for marking other sociocultural and discourse features.

Consider the use of the third person masculine singular pronoun he in English. It was once acceptable to use he as a generic pronoun in reference to both genders:

“Every person who turns this page has his own little diary.” W. M. Thackeray, On Lett’s Diary (1869)

The generic use of he contrasts with the generic use of they:

“A person can’t help their birth.” Rosalind in W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)

The search for a generic pronoun in English shows how social perceptions (pragmatics) changes the conventional use of pronouns.

Linguists have identified three types of contextual support for the interpretation of utterances.

The linguistic context in the form of preceding utterances.

The situational context in the form of the physical situation of the utterance.

The social context provides cultural conventions for interpreting utterances.

A surprising amount of information is provided by the situation of the utterance. Deictic expressions provide an obvious example of the ways in which the physical situation aids interpretation. Even sentences without an obvious deictic expression depend on the physical situation to a certain extent. Compare the possible contribution of the situation to the interpretation of the following sentences.

I went there yesterday.

Elwood bought Jake a car.

The information added by the situational context can always be made explicit by adding additional phrases, but an utterance never supplies all of the situational content.

The fictional character Elwood purchased a Ford police cruiser for his brother Jake in Chicago, IL, USA, earth, solar system, Milky Way galaxy, at 3 pm, Wednesday, June 15^th....

Explicitly filling in the situational information in this way shows that in order to serve as a useful means of communication utterances must rely upon context to supply a significant part of their semantic content.

Discourse Relevance

Heim & Kratzer (1998:240) suggest that listeners assign pronoun readings to the most salient individual(s) in the discourse. The factors that we have just reviewed in addition to the context of utterance would affect the saliency of potential pronominal referents. H & K go on to suggest that pronouns in sentences with quantified NPs are non-referring pronouns in contrast to the examples we have discussed so far. An example of such a non-referring pronoun would be

Every farmer beats his donkey.

They argue that in such cases, the pronoun does not single out a single individual and therefore cannot refer to the most salient individual in the discourse. H&K claim that such examples should be analyzed as bound variables since the interpretation of the pronoun is fixed by the quantified expression.

One difficulty their analysis encounters is that it multiplies the types of pronouns, replacing the traditional distinction between deictic and anaphoric pronouns with a new distinction between referential pronouns and bound variables. Their analysis fails to address the question of why languages would use the same words as referential pronouns and bound variables. We also have reason to think the referential reading could be extended to these cases. Consider the sentence

Every student should turn in her paper on time.

In the usual contexts in which such sentences are uttered, the quantified NP is interpreted relative to a specific salient context, namely the students in a particular class. Since listeners must already use context to limit the range of quantified expressions, they should be able to extend this same context to recover a variable interpretation for the pronoun. The bound variable analysis does not account for the differences between the following sentences whereas referential salience would attribute the difference to the success in singling out the salient individuals.

*All students should turn in her paper on time.

Every student should turn in her paper on time.

Each student should turn in her paper on time.

The problem of sloppy identity is illustrated in the following sentence

(On Mary’s birthday), Frank went to his office. Ralph didn’t.

Pragmatic Contributions to Explicature

Robyn Carston (1988) draws attention to a range of ways in which listeners draw upon the context for sentence interpretation. Kearns points to the ambiguity in the sentence

49. The park is some distance from my house.

A logician might consider this sentence to be literally true even when the house is located across the street from the park. Many people would interpret the sentence to mean that the house is a long distance away from the park, at least two or more city blocks. Can we attribute such a discrepancy to implicature? Kearns believes the long distance interpretation should be part of the sentence’s explicature. She thinks this reading does not depend on the interpretation of indexical expressions, although she does not provide an analysis for some.

Kearns offers the following sentences as further evidence that the content of explicature must include contextual information.

53a. We don’t have enough rice.

b. The park is too far from the house.

The words enough and too must be evaluated in relation to some unexpressed purpose or proposed action. Such purposes can be overtly expressed as in the following sentences:

54a. We don’t have enough rice to make curry and rice for three people.

b. The park is too far away from the house to walk the distance in half an hour.

Carston also investigates the variable interpretation of the sentence connective and. Kearns provides the following examples:

55a. Alice opened the wine and poured a glass.

b. Alice opened the wine and after that poured a glass.

56a. Jackie has won the Golden Kiwi and she’s going to pay off the mortgage.

b. Jackie has won the Golden Kiwi and as a consequence she’s going to pay off the mortgage.

57a. Stephen was tuning his bike and he was listening to the cricket.

b. Stephen was tuning his bike and simultaneously he was listening to the cricket.

Listeners are aware of the different connections between these sentences even without the and:

59a. Alice opened the wine. She poured out a glass.

b. Stephen was tuning his bike. He was listening to the cricket.

Carston argues that this pragmatic information should be part of the explicature. She uses evidence from responses to questions and assertions. The following response is made to the explicature, not the implicature:

60. (Jones is generally scruffy, but tidies himself up from time to time when he was a girlfriend. His friends are familiar with this pattern.)

A: Jones has transformed himself again. (implicature: Jones has a new girl.)

B: No he hasn’t. (Denying that he has clean up his act, not that he has a new girl.)

Unlike implicature, the pragmatic relation between clauses can be questioned or denied, e.g.,

A: Jackie has won the Golden Kiwi and she’s going to pay off the mortgage.

B: I thought she paid off the mortgage from her inheritance.

61. A: (to director) I light her cigarette and she smiles, right?

B: No, she smiles and then you light her cigarette.

Carston also discusses examples like (64):

64. It’s better to meet the love of your life and get married than to get married and meet the love of your life.

These examples point to the need to include a wide variety of pragmatic information in interpreting literal meaning.

Grice maintained that implicatures are logically independent of what the speaker actually says. The explicature of the sentence The movie ends at 3:50 is independent of the implicature You can see the film and still attend your 4 o’clock lecture. We can cancel this implicature by adding But I was forgetting the detour at Fifth. We cannot cancel explicature in the same fashion. As Kearns states:

the literal meaning of a sentence lays down a framework which determines the set of propositions, perhaps infinitely many, that a speaker can express by uttering the sentence. But the context allows the hearer to identify which of these propositions the speaker actually expressed. (281)

A speaker must negotiate a common ground with their listeners in order to communicate. Common ground is Stalnaker’s (1972/1999) term for the background information that a speaker must establish for their audience in order to be understood. The opening of any novel provides an example of the author establishing a common ground for their readers.

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of th island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17–, and go back to the time when my father kept the “Admiral Benbow” inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Speakers must share a common set of background assumptions with their listeners in order to communicate their message. A presupposition is an assumption that must hold in order for a sentence to be judged as true or false. If a presupposition does not hold, the truth value of a sentence cannot be determined. Existence presuppositions occur when a sentence refers to specific things.

The Queen of England wears many hats.

How do Stevenson and Joyce accommodate the existence presuppositions of their audience?

Many words and phrases trigger presuppositions. Identify the presupposed information in the following sentences. Remember that the sentence will not have a truth value if the presupposition does not hold.

When did you stop beating your wife?

Ralph knows the sea is salty.

Bush regrets invading Iraq.

Fiona also went to the library.

Felicity

Linguists have an interest in noting the inappropriate use of language as well as its appropriate use. Observations of what listeners find inappropriate about an utterance provide much information about the rules of language. An appropriate utterance is felicitous, whereas an inappropriate utterance is infelicitous. In order to be felicitous, an utterance must be situationally appropriate in its utterance context. One way to produce infelicitous utterances is to utter a sentence with inappropriate presuppositions. The text uses the # sign to indicate infelicitous utterances.

Utterance: # Did you know that the King of France is bald?

Context: Oscar1 is telling his friends about his vacation.

Utterance: # Oscar1 really liked my1 trip to Yellowstone.

Context: Bumping into a stranger in front of Watson Library.

Utterance: # My, what big teeth you have!

Listeners must accommodate the presupposed information in a speaker’s utterances by accepting its truth. The difference between felicitous and infelicitous utterances depends upon the listener’s ability to accept the presupposed information in the speaker’s utterances. Consider the felicity conditions for the following dialogue:

Roomate₁: Where were you last night?

Roomate₂: # I also went to the library.

Speech Acts

One of the most obvious features of language is that we use it to accomplish various functions or speech acts. We use language to convey information, request information, give orders, warn, threaten, promise, advise, etc. Consider what each of the following sentences can accomplish:

The moon is made of green cheese.

Where are my keys?

Please pass the salt.

One more word and you’re out of here.

Look out!

You should check out the sale at Weaver’s.

Speech acts are associated with different sentence types:

Sentence Type	Speech Act	Function	Example
Declarative	assertion	convey a proposition	“The moon is made of green cheese.”
Interrogative	question	request information	“Where are my keys?”
Imperative	order and request	cause others to carry to carry out actions	“Please pass the salt.”
Admonitive	warn	convey a warning	“You are heading for a fall.”

The class of performative verbs are used to perform specific speech acts overtly, e.g.,

I assert that the moon is made of green cheese.

I ask where are my keys.

I order you to please pass the salt.

I threaten you that if you say one more word you will be forced to leave.

I warn you to look out.

I advise you to check out the sale at Weaver’s.

The hereby test can be used to see if a verb is used to perform a speech act.

I hereby promise to look up the answer by Monday.

? John hereby promises to take me to the movies.

? I will hereby promise to look up the answer by Monday.

To perform a speech act correctly, it is necessary to satisfy the felicity conditions for the speech act. Obviously, the following sentence is infelicitous

I warn you to please pass the salt.

The felicity conditions for questions and requests are fairly straightforward:

Speaker questions Hearer about Proposition:

S does not know the truth about P.

S wants to know the truth about P.

S believes that H may be able to supply the information about P that S wants.

S requests H to do A:

S believes A has not been done.

S believes H is able to do A.

S believes that H is willing to do A for S.

S wants A to be done.

Indirect Speech Acts

Speech acts can be preformed directly by using performative verbs or indirectly by making use of contextual cues to the speaker’s intention. Compare the following direct and indirect questions and requests.

Questions

Direct:

Where are my car keys?

I ask you where are my car keys.

Indirect:

I don’t know where my car keys are.

I would like to know where my car keys are.

Can you tell me where my car keys are?

Requests

Direct:

Please open the window.

I request that you open the window.

Indirect:

Is it hot in here?

Can you open the window?

Would you mind opening the window?

I sure wish someone would open a window.

Rules of Conversation

We use our knowledge of everyday conversations to identify most speech acts. The philosopher H. P. Grice proposed the Cooperative Principle as the basis for all conversations. He argued that all participants in a conversation seek to be cooperative by contributing helpful information. Grice identified a number of conversational rules or maxims that embody the cooperative principle.

Maxims of Quality

Do not say what you believe to be false.

Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Maxim of Relation/Relevance

Be relevant.

Maxims of Quantity

Make your contribution as informative as is required.

Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Maxims of Manner

Avoid obscurity of expression.

Avoid ambiguity.

Be brief.

Be orderly.

Grice also observed that it is possible to violate or flout conversational rules, and that speakers do this frequently to communicate ideas indirectly. Grice dubbed such indirect messages a conversational implicature and studied the way speakers implicate messages by flouting maxims of conversation.

Assume you find the following entry in a ship’s log:

The first mate wasn’t drunk last night.

At first glance, this entry seems to violate the maxim of quantity. It tells us something that we would ordinarily take for granted. Because it violate the maxim of quantity, though, we can assume the captain is implicating the first mate was drunk the previous nights.

Conversational implicatures resemble semantic entailment in that you can construct a relation between two propositions that is either an entailment or an implicature. The main difference between implicature and entailment is that you can cancel an implicature, but not an entailment.

For example, suppose our ship’s log read:

The first mate wasn’t drunk last night, or any of the previous nights.

The added clause cancels the implicature that he was drunk the previous nights.

Compare this result to what happens when you try to cancel an entailment:

? Ian drives a Corvette, but he doesn’t drive a car.

We can state the rule for implicature more formally as:

X implicates Y if

i. X does not entail Y

ii. the hearer has reason to believe Y is true based on the use of X and the Maxims of Conversation.

It seems rather paradoxical to propose rules for conversation that everyone violates. Grice claims that his principles actually extend beyond conversation to other forms of human interaction. Sticking to conversational exchanges, can you think of any examples that clearly violate Grice’s Cooperative Principle?

Advertisers rely on implicature to make extravagant claims. How are Grice’s maxims exploited in the following claims?

Campbell’s Soup has one third less salt.

The Ford LTD is 700% quieter.

Maytags are built to last longer and need fewer repairs.

Mercedes-Benz are engineered like no other car in the world.

Chevy trucks are like a rock.

Discourse Structure

Deictic expressions are used to keep track of participants and events in discourse. Examine the following story from Robert Louis Stevenson (1911) ‘Treasure Island’, p. 40.

The supervisor stood up straight and stiff, and told his story like a lesson; and you should have seen how the two gentlemen leaned forward and looked at each other, and forgot to smoke in their surprise and interest. When they heard how my mother went back to the inn, Dr. Livesey fairly slapped his thigh, and the squire cried “Bravo”! and broke his long pipe against the grate. Long before it was done, Mr. Trelawney (that, you will remember, was the squire’s name) had got up from his seat, and was striding about the room, and the doctor, as if to hear the better, had taken off his powdered wig, and sat there, looking very strange indeed with his own close-cropped, black poll.

Argument Tracking: Who, what and where?

What are the arguments?

Participants Reference₁ Reference₂ Possessions Location

The supervisor his story = it

you

the two gentlemen each other they their interest

my mother the inn

Dr. Livesey the doctor his thigh, his wig, his poll

the squire Mr. Trelawney squire’s name his pipe the grate, his seat

the room

What would happen if pronouns were used throughout this paragraph?

He stood up straight and stiff, and told it like a lesson; and you should have seen how they leaned forward and looked at each other, and forgot to smoke in their surprise and interest. When they heard how she went back to the inn, he fairly slapped his thigh, and he cried “Bravo”! and broke his long pipe against the grate. Long before it was done, he (that, you will remember, was his name) had got up from his seat, and was striding about the room, and he, as if to hear the better, had taken off his powdered wig, and sat there, looking very strange indeed with his own close-cropped, black poll.

Event Structure: What Happened?

What are the events?

Participant Event₁ Event₂ Event₃ Event₄ Event₅

The supervisor stood up₁ told₂

you should have seen₂

two gentlemen leaned forward looked forgot to smoke heard

my mother went back

Dr. Livesey slapped to hear had taken off sat

the squire cried broke had got up was striding

his story was done

How are the events ordered?

Time₁ Time₂ Time₃ Time₄ Time₅ Time₆ Time₇

stood up told heard broke had got up was striding done

should have seen went back had taken off sat

leaned forward slapped to hear

looked cried

forgot to smoke

Metaphor

One of the most frequent violations of Grices conversational principles occurs when we use metaphor. Metaphors like ‘You’re the cream in my coffee’ obviously violate the Maxim of Quality since they state propositions that are not literally true.

Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors We Live By) observe that many metaphors observe common themes, e.g.,

Good is up

Examples:

I’m feeling up. That boosted my spirits. My spirits rose.

You’re in high spirits. I’m feeling down. I’m depressed.

Much of our language about language is structured by metaphor:

IDEAS (or meanings) are objects.

linguistic expressions are containers.

communication involves sending ideas in containers.

Examples:

It’s hard to get that idea across to him.

I gave you that idea.

It’s difficult to put my ideas into words.

His words carry little meaning.

The sentence is without meaning.

What difficulties does metaphor create for a theory of meaning that uses truth conditions?

Review

Examine the italicized sentences below, identify their literal meaning and discuss the additional meanings (explicature) that are added by context. What implicatures do the sentences have?

1. A group of friends are getting together to go out. Ian wanders off to check his email. Lucy comes to find him.

Lucy: Everyone’s waiting.

2. Morse: We know the documents were locked in that cabinet at four and found to be missing at six thirty when Donald Barrett needed them for the meeting. The secretary had the afternoon off and left at twelve, which leaves Barrett, Jeremy Lamb and Maria McLeay in the office at some time in the afternoon.

Lewis: Lamb doesn’t have a key.

References

Ariel, Mira. 2010. Defining Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carston, Robin. 1988. Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic semantics. In Ruth M. Kempson (ed.), Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality, pp. 33-51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Cole, Peter and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. III: Speech Acts, pp. 41-58. New York: Academic Press.

Hale, K. 1966. Kinship reflections in syntax. Word 22:318-324.

Heim, I. and Kratzer, A. 1998. Semantics in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kearns, Kate. 2000. Semantics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.