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123-594: Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature , speech acts , relevance and conversation , as well as nonverbal communication . Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics , which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence . In 1938, Charles Morris first distinguished pragmatics as an independent subfield within semiotics, alongside syntax and semantics. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in

246-784: A sign pointing to (or indexing ) some element in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical . The modern concept originates in the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce , in which indexicality is one of the three fundamental sign modalities by which a sign relates to its referent (the others being iconicity and symbolism ). Peirce's concept has been adopted and extended by several twentieth-century academic traditions, including those of linguistic pragmatics , linguistic anthropology , and Anglo-American philosophy of language. Words and expressions in language often derive some part of their referential meaning from indexicality. For example, I indexically refers to

369-446: A wager . Thus, concludes Silverstein, "[t]he problem set for us when we consider the actual broader uses of language is to describe the total meaning of constituent linguistic signs, only part of which is semantic." This broader study of linguistic signs relative to their general communicative functions is pragmatics , and these broader aspects of the meaning of utterances is pragmatic meaning . (From this point of view, semantic meaning

492-460: A boat yesterday" R-implicates that the boat wasn't the speaker's. Stephen Levinson 's approach is similar to Horn's. His Q-principle is basically the same, but its antagonist, the I-principle, only takes the place of the second quantity maxim. There is a separate M-principle more or less corresponding to the third and fourth manner maxims, as well as to Horn's division of pragmatic labor; but there

615-402: A certain "technical vocabulary" that are "metaphorical of prestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly horticulture ." Thus, a certain "lingo" is created for wine that indexically entails certain notions of prestigious social classes or genres. When "yuppies" use the lingo for wine flavors created by these critics in the actual context of drinking wine, Silverstein argues that they become

738-709: A certain macro-sociological elite identity and is, as such, an instance of higher-order indexicality. Philosophical work on language from the mid-20th century, such as that of J.L. Austin and the ordinary language philosophers , has provided much of the originary inspiration for the study of indexicality and related issues in linguistic pragmatics (generally under the rubric of the term deixis ), though linguists have appropriated concepts originating in philosophical work for purposes of empirical study, rather than for more strictly philosophical purposes. However, indexicality has remained an issue of interest to philosophers who work on language. In contemporary analytic philosophy ,

861-405: A computer determines when two objects are different or not, is one of the most important tasks of computational pragmatics. There has been a great amount of discussion on the boundary between semantics and pragmatics and there are many different formalizations of aspects of pragmatics linked to context dependence. Particularly interesting cases are the discussions on the semantics of indexicals and

984-480: A conventional implicature is "Donovan is poor but happy", where the word "but" implicates a sense of contrast between being poor and being happy. Later linguists introduced refined and different definitions of the term, leading to somewhat different ideas about which parts of the information conveyed by an utterance are actually implicatures and which are not. Grice was primarily concerned with conversational implicatures. Like all implicatures, these are part of what

1107-521: A cooperative, helpful way. The cooperative principle Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. The maxims of conversation The maxim of Quality try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically: (i) do not say what you believe to be false (ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence The maxim of Quantity (i) make your contribution as informative as

1230-546: A development of the Fregean idea of assertion sign as formal sign of the act of assertion. Over the past decade, many probabilistic and Bayesian methods have become very popular in the modelling of pragmatics, of which the most successful framework has been the Rational Speech Act framework developed by Noah Goodman and Michael C. Frank , which has already seen much use in the analysis of metaphor, hyperbole and politeness. In

1353-497: A first-order indexical sense that distinguishes between speaker/addressee interpersonal values of 'power' and 'solidarity' and 2) a second-order indexical sense that indexes an interlocutor's inherent "honor" or social merit in employing V forms over T forms in public contexts. Japanese provides an excellent case study of honorifics . Honorifics in Japanese can be divided into two categories: addressee honorifics, which index deference to

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1476-454: A model" for these other structuralisms, "is just the part that is functionally unique among the phenomena of culture." It is indexicality, not Saussurean grammar, which should be seen as the semiotic phenomenon which language has in common with the rest of culture. Silverstein argues that the Saussurean tradition of linguistic analysis, which includes the tradition of structural linguistics in

1599-534: A more formal, public nature such as distant acquaintances, business settings, or other formal settings. Japanese also contains a set of humble forms (Japanese kenjōgo 謙譲語) which are employed by the speaker to index their deference to someone else. There are also suppletive forms that can be used in lieu of regular honorific endings (for example, the subject honorific form of taberu ( 食べる , to eat) : meshiagaru ( 召し上がる ) . Verbs that involve human subjects must choose between distal or direct forms (towards

1722-425: A particular subclass of indexicality. The concept of indexicality was introduced into the literature of linguistic anthropology by Michael Silverstein in a foundational 1976 paper, "Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description". Silverstein draws on "the tradition extending from Peirce to Jakobson " of thought about sign phenomena to propose a comprehensive theoretical framework in which to understand

1845-422: A place where money is kept, or the edge of a river. To understand what the speaker is truly saying, it is a matter of context, which is why it is pragmatically ambiguous as well. Similarly, the sentence "Sherlock saw the man with binoculars" could mean that Sherlock observed the man by using binoculars, or it could mean that Sherlock observed a man who was holding binoculars ( syntactic ambiguity ). The meaning of

1968-438: A possible referent, (ii) salience of the referent in the context of discussion (iii) an effort for unity of the parties involved, and finally, (iv) a blatant presence of distance from the last referent. Referential expressions are a form of anaphora. They are also a means of connecting past and present thoughts together to create context for information at hand. Analyzing the context of a sentence and determining whether or not

2091-933: A reference game such that: L 1 : P L 1 ( s | u ) ∝ P S 1 ( u | s ) ⋅ P ( s ) S 1 : P S 1 ( u | s ) ∝ exp ⁡ ( α U S 1 ( u ; s ) ) L 0 : P L O ( s | u ) ∝ [ [ u ] ] ( s ) ⋅ P ( s ) {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}&L_{1}:P_{L_{1}}(s|u)\propto P_{S_{1}}(u|s)\cdot P(s)\\&S_{1}:P_{S_{1}}(u|s)\propto \exp(\alpha U_{S_{1}}(u;s))\\&L_{0}:P_{L_{O}}(s|u)\propto [\![u]\!](s)\cdot P(s)\end{aligned}}} Pragmatics (more specifically, Speech Act Theory's notion of

2214-510: A sentence. Lastly, they can be context dependent , as mentioned above. The cooperative principle and the maxims of conversation are not mandatory. A communicator can choose not to be cooperative; she can opt out of the cooperative principle by giving appropriate clues such as saying "My lips are sealed", or for example during a cross-examination at court. In such situations, no conversational implicatures arise. Various modifications to Grice's maxims have been proposed by other linguists,

2337-602: A sign consists of Peirce further proposed to classify sign phenomena along three different dimensions by means of three trichotomies , the second of which classifies signs into three categories according to the nature of the relationship between the sign-vehicle and the object it represents. As captioned by Silverstein, these are: Silverstein observes that multiple signs may share the same sign-vehicle. For instance, as mentioned, linguistic signs as traditionally understood are symbols, and analyzed in terms of their contribution to reference and predication, since they arbitrarily denote

2460-415: A similar systematic ambiguity with the word "definable". The referential uses of language are how signs are used to refer to certain items. A sign is the link or relationship between a signified and the signifier as defined by de Saussure and Jean-René Huguenin . The signified is some entity or concept in the world. The signifier represents the signified. An example would be: The relationship between

2583-639: A speaker indexes emotional states through different linguistic mechanisms. These indices become important when applied to other forms of non-referential indexicality, such as sex indices and social identity indices, because of the innate relationship between first-order indexicality and subsequent second-order (or higher) indexical forms. (See multiple indices section for Japanese example). Deference indices encode deference from one interlocutor to another (usually representing inequalities of status, rank, age, sex, etc.). Some examples of deference indices are: The T/V deference entitlement system of European languages

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2706-575: A speaker not only indexes their actual social class (via first-order indexicality) but also the insecurities about class constraints and subsequent linguistic effects that encourage hypercorrection in the first place (an incidence of second-order indexicality). William Labov and many others have also studied how hypercorrection in African American Vernacular English demonstrates similar social class non-referential indexicality. Multiple non-referential indices can be employed to index

2829-477: A speaker's register indexically signal their social class . Nonlinguistic signs may also display indexicality: for example, a pointing index finger may index (without referring to) some object in the direction of the line implied by the orientation of the finger, and smoke may index the presence of a fire. In linguistics and philosophy of language, the study of indexicality tends to focus specifically on deixis, while in semiotics and anthropology equal attention

2952-574: A speaker's attempts at self-correction in areas of perceived linguistic insufficiencies which denote their lower social standing and minimal social mobility. Donald Winford conducted a study that measured the phonological hypercorrection in creolization of English speakers in Trinidad. He claims that the ability to use prestigious norms goes "hand-in-hand" with knowledge of stigmatization afforded to use of "lesser" phonological variants. He concluded that sociologically "lesser" individuals would try to increase

3075-674: A speech event's context through linguistic variations. The degree of variation in non-referential indices is considerable and serves to infuse the speech event with, at times, multiple levels of pragmatic "meaning". Of particular note are: sex/gender indices, deference indices (including the affinal taboo index), affect indices, as well as the phenomena of phonological hypercorrection and social identity indexicality. Examples of non-referential forms of indexicality include sex/gender, affect, deference, social class, and social identity indices. Many scholars, notably Silverstein, argue that occurrences of non-referential indexicality entail not only

3198-412: A stronger one is implicated. Implicatures arising from this maxim enrich the information contained in the utterance: There is extensive literature, but no consensus on the question which of the two quantity maxims is in operation in which circumstances; i.e. why "I lost a book yesterday" implicates that the book was the speaker's, while "I slept on a boat yesterday" usually implicates that the boat wasn't

3321-571: A subdiscipline of linguistics , an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance , even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. The philosopher H. P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversation, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as "but" or "therefore". Take for example

3444-545: A system known as the affinal taboo index. Speakers of the language maintain two sets of lexical items: 1) an "everyday" or common interaction set of lexical items and 2) a "mother-in-law" set that is employed when the speaker is in the very distinct context of interaction with their mother-in-law. In this particular system of deference indices, speakers have developed an entirely separate lexicon (there are roughly four "everyday" lexical entries for every one "mother-in-law" lexical entry; 4:1) to index deference in contexts inclusive of

3567-412: A whole class of possible objects of reference by virtue of their semantic meanings. But in a trivial sense each linguistic sign token (word or expression spoken in an actual context of use) also functions iconically, since it is an icon of its type in the code (grammar) of the language. It also functions indexically, by indexing its symbol type, since its use in context presupposes that such a type exists in

3690-511: A woman is walking down the street in Manhattan and she stops to ask somebody where a McDonald's is. He responds to her talking in a heavy " Brooklyn " accent . She notices this accent and considers a set of possible personal characteristics that might be indexed by it (such as the man's intelligence, economic situation, and other non-linguistic aspects of his life). The power of language to encode these preconceived "stereotypes" based solely on accent

3813-403: Is a continuum from implicatures that are highly dependent on a specific situation which is unlikely to happen twice, to ones that occur very frequently. In her view, the distinction has no theoretical value since all implicatures are derived from the same principles. Indexical In semiotics , linguistics , anthropology , and philosophy of language , indexicality is the phenomenon of

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3936-475: Is a special subcategory of pragmatic meaning, that aspect of meaning which contributes to the communicative function of pure reference and predication.). Silverstein introduces some components of the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce as the basis for a pragmatics which, rather than assuming that reference and predication are the essential communicative functions of language with other nonreferential functions being mere addenda, instead attempts to capture

4059-449: Is an example of second-order indexicality (representative of a more complex and subtle system of indexical form than that of first-order indexicality). For demonstrations of higher (or rarefied) indexical orders, Michael Silverstein discusses the particularities of "life-style emblematization" or "convention-dependent-indexical iconicity" which, as he claims, is prototypical of a phenomenon he dubs " wine talk". Professional wine critics use

4182-420: Is because it is blocked under certain circumstances according to Levinson. Apart from the mentioned problem with the two opposing quantity maxims, several issues with Grice's conversational implicatures have been raised: While Grice described conversational implicatures as contrasting with entailments, there has since been dissent. Here, B implicates via the maxim of relation that he drove somewhere (as this

4305-429: Is communicated. In other words, conclusions the addressee draws from an utterance although they were not actively conveyed by the communicator are never implicatures. According to Grice, conversational implicatures arise because communicating people are expected by their addressees to obey the maxims of conversation and the overarching cooperative principle, which basically states that people are expected to communicate in

4428-535: Is considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics , since both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community. However, sociolinguists tend to be more interested in variations in language within such communities. Influences of philosophy and politics are also present in the field of pragmatics, as the dynamics of societies and oppression are expressed through language Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social phenomena; it thus pervades

4551-411: Is difficult to infer meaning without knowing the context, the identity of the speaker or the speaker's intent. For example, the sentence "You have a green light" is ambiguous, as without knowing the context, one could reasonably interpret it as meaning: Another example of an ambiguous sentence is, "I went to the bank." This is an example of lexical ambiguity, as the word bank can either be in reference to

4674-443: Is dubious. A well-known class of quantity implicatures are the scalar implicatures . Prototypical examples include words specifying quantities such as "some", "few", or "many": Here, the use of "some" semantically entails that more than one cookie was eaten. It does not entail, but implicates, that not every cookie was eaten, or at least that the speaker does not know whether any cookies are left. The reason for this implicature

4797-402: Is eating a cookie right now", describes events that are happening at the time the proposition is uttered. Semantic-referential meaning is also present in meta-semantical statements such as: If someone were to say that a tiger is a carnivorous animal in one context and a mammal in another, the definition of tiger would still be the same. The meaning of the sign tiger is describing some animal in

4920-417: Is generally given to nonreferential indexicality, including altogether nonlinguistic indexicality. In disciplinary linguistics, indexicality is studied in the subdiscipline of pragmatics . Specifically, pragmatics tends to focus on deictics —words and expressions of language that derive some part of their referential meaning from indexicality—since these are regarded as "[t]he single most obvious way in which

5043-437: Is heavily focused upon definite descriptions and referent accessibility. Theories have been presented for why direct referent descriptions occur in discourse. (In layman's terms: why reiteration of certain names, places, or individuals involved or as a topic of the conversation at hand are repeated more than one would think necessary.) Four factors are widely accepted for the use of referent language including (i) competition with

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5166-457: Is itself an utterance. That implies that a sentence, term, expression or word cannot symbolically represent a single true meaning; such meaning is underspecified (which cat sat on which mat?) and potentially ambiguous. By contrast, the meaning of an utterance can be inferred through knowledge of both its linguistic and non-linguistic contexts (which may or may not be sufficient to resolve ambiguity). In mathematics, with Berry's paradox , there arises

5289-483: Is no replacement for the maxim of relation. Levinson subsequently developed a theory of generalized conversational implicature (GCI) based on the Q-principle. He argues that GCIs are distinct from particularized conversational implicatures in that they are inferred via a specialized set of principles and rules that are always in force, independent of the context. If a GCI does not arise in some specific situations, this

5412-404: Is not made. If this is the strongest possible claim, it follows that the flag has no other features, because "The flag is green and some other colour" would be stronger. In other words, if it did contain other features, this utterance would not be informative enough. The second quantity maxim seems to work in the opposite direction as the first; the communicator makes a weaker claim, from which

5535-444: Is not necessary to evaluate the truth of an utterance's literal meaning in order to recognise a metaphor. An example of a metaphor that is also literally true is a chess player telling his opponent, in appropriate circumstances, Apparent counterexamples to the maxim "be orderly" have been found, such as this: Carston observes that particularized and generalized conversational implicatures are not separate categories; rather, there

5658-677: Is preferred in linguistic anthropology, which regards linguistic indexicality ( deixis ) as a special subcategory of indexicality in general, which is often nonlinguistic. Indexicals appear to represent an exception to, and thus a challenge for, the understanding of natural language as the grammatical coding of logical propositions ; they thus "raise interesting technical challenges for logicians seeking to provide formal models of correct reasoning in natural language." They are also studied in relation to fundamental issues in epistemology , self-consciousness , and metaphysics , for example asking whether indexical facts are facts that do not follow from

5781-405: Is required for the current purposes of the exchange (ii) do not make your contribution more informative than is required The maxim of Relation (or Relevance) make your contributions relevant The maxim of Manner be perspicuous, and specifically: (i) avoid obscurity (ii) avoid ambiguity (iii) be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity ) (iv) be orderly The simplest situation is where

5904-459: Is similar to Silverstein's discussion of " wine talk " in that it indexes "an identity-by-visible-consumption [here, employment ]" that is an inherent of a certain social register (i.e. social gender indexicality). Affective meaning is seen as "the encoding, or indexing of speakers emotions into speech events." The interlocutor of the event "decodes" these verbal messages of affect by giving "precedence to intentionality"; that is, by assuming that

6027-399: Is stronger than "not necessarily", and the implicature follows from the double negation "She will not [not possibly] get the job". Here are some further implicatures that can be classified as scalar: This is a common construction where the indefinite article indicates that the referent is not closely associated with the speaker, because the stronger claim "I slept on my boat yesterday"

6150-436: Is that saying "some" when one could say "all" would be less than informative enough in most circumstances. The general idea is that the communicator is expected to make the strongest possible claim, implicating the negation of any stronger claim. Lists of expressions that give rise to scalar implicatures, sorted from strong to weak, are known as Horn scales: Negation reverses these scales, as in this example: "Not possibly"

6273-533: Is that the student is no good, since the teacher has nothing better to say about him. B's answer in the following exchange does not seem to be relevant, so A concludes that B wanted to convey something else: This utterance is much more long-winded than "Miss Singer sang an aria from Rigoletto " and therefore flouts the maxim "Be brief": Conversational implicatures that arise only in specific contexts are called particularized , while those that are not or only slightly context dependent are generalized . Many of

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6396-440: Is the fitting answer to A's question), but this information is also entailed by his answer. At least some scalar and other quantity "implicatures" seem not to be implicatures at all but semantic enrichments of the utterance, what is variously described as an explicature or implic i ture in the literature. For example, Kent Bach argues that a sentence like "John ate some of the cookies" does not implicate "John didn't eat all of

6519-417: Is the key to understanding deixis, traditionally a difficult problem for semantic theory. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is defined as referential indexicality—that is, morphemes or strings of morphemes, generally organized into closed paradigmatic sets, which function to "individuate or single out objects of reference or address in terms of their relation to the current interactive context in which

6642-439: The performative ) underpins Judith Butler 's theory of gender performativity . In Gender Trouble , they claim that gender and sex are not natural categories, but socially constructed roles produced by "reiterative acting." In Excitable Speech they extend their theory of performativity to hate speech and censorship , arguing that censorship necessarily strengthens any discourse it tries to suppress and therefore, since

6765-501: The "well-bred, interesting (subtle, balanced, intriguing, winning, etc.) person" that is iconic of the metaphorical "fashion of speaking" employed by people of higher social registers, demanding notoriety as a result of this high level of connoisseurship. In other words, the wine drinker becomes a refined, gentlemanly critic and, in doing so, adopts a similar level of connoisseurship and social refinement. Silverstein defines this as an example of higher-order indexical "authorization" in which

6888-452: The 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice . Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics as outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure . In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected

7011-468: The Rational Speech Act, listeners and speakers both reason about the other's reasoning concerning the literal meaning of the utterances, and as such, the resulting interpretation depends, but is not necessarily determined by the literal truth conditional meaning of an utterance, and so it uses recursive reasoning to pursue a broadly Gricean co-operative ideal. In the most basic form of the Rational Speech Act, there are three levels of inference; Beginning from

7134-576: The United States founded by Leonard Bloomfield and including the work of Noam Chomsky and contemporary generative grammar , has been limited to identifying "the contribution of elements of utterances to the referential or denotative value of the whole", that is, the contribution made by some word, expression, or other linguistic element to the function of forming " propositions — predications descriptive of states of affairs". This study of reference and predication yields an understanding of one aspect of

7257-495: The addressee can draw conclusions from the assumption that the communicator obeys the maxims, as in the following examples. The symbol "+>" means "implicates". Moore's paradox , the observation that the sentence "It is raining, but I don't believe that it is raining" sounds contradictory although it is not from a strictly logical point of view, has been explained as a contradiction to this type of implicature. However, as implicatures can be cancelled (see below ), this explanation

7380-428: The addressee has to assume the utterance was meant to be metaphorical. Utterances that are not informative on the surface include tautologies . They have no logical content and hence no entailments, but can still be used to convey information via implicatures: Damning with faint praise also works by flouting the first quantity maxim. Consider the following testimonial for a philosophy student: The implicature here

7503-407: The addressee of the utterance; and referent honorifics, which index deference to the referent of the utterance. Cynthia Dunn claims that "almost every utterance in Japanese requires a choice between direct and distal forms of the predicate." The direct form indexes intimacy and "spontaneous self-expression" in contexts involving family and close friends. Contrarily, distal form index social contexts of

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7626-514: The addressee) as well as a distinguish between either no use of referent honorifics, use of subject honorific (for others), or use of humble form (for self). The Japanese model for non-referential indexicality demonstrates a very subtle and complicated system that encodes social context into almost every utterance. Dyirbal , a language of the Cairns rain forest in Northern Queensland , employs

7749-689: The affective form intentionally indexes emotional meaning. Some examples of affective forms are: diminutives (for example, diminutive affixes in Indo-European and Amerindian languages indicate sympathy, endearment, emotional closeness, or antipathy, condescension, and emotional distance); ideophones and onomatopoeias ; expletives , exclamations, interjections , curses, insults, and imprecations (said to be "dramatizations of actions or states"); intonation change (common in tone languages such as Japanese); address terms, kinship terms, and pronouns which often display clear affective dimensions (ranging from

7872-448: The classical scalar implicatures. The R-principle subsumes the second quantity maxim ("do not make your contribution more informative than is required"), the maxim of relation, and the remaining manner maxims ("be brief and orderly"), and serves the interests of the speaker, who wants to communicate with as little effort as possible. These two principles have opposite effects analogous to Grice's two maxims of quantity. To determine which of

7995-401: The communicator did in fact – perhaps on a deeper level – obey the maxims and the cooperative principle. Many figures of speech can be explained by this mechanism. Saying something that is obviously false can produce irony , meiosis , hyperbole and metaphor : As it is improbable that she really exploded, and it is highly unlikely that the speaker wanted to lie or was simply mistaken,

8118-468: The complex address-form systems found languages such a Javanese to inversions of vocative kin terms found in Rural Italy ); lexical processes such as synecdoche and metonymy involved in effect meaning manipulation; certain categories of meaning like evidentiality ; reduplication , quantifiers , and comparative structures; as well as inflectional morphology . Affective forms are a means by which

8241-548: The context-dependent variability of the speech event, but also increasingly subtle forms of indexical meaning (first, second, and higher-orders) as well. One common system of non-referential indexicality is sex/gender indices. These indices index the gender or "female/male" social status of the interlocutor. There are a multitude of linguistic variants that act to index sex and gender such as: Many instances of sex/gender indices incorporate multiple levels of indexicality (also referred to as indexical order ). In fact, some, such as

8364-457: The cookies" because the latter is not a claim separate from the first; rather, the speaker just has a single meaning in mind, namely "John ate some [but not all] of the cookies". Likewise, Robyn Carston considers cases like "He drank a bottle of vodka and [consequently] fell into a stupor" explicatures; however, she considers the question of classical scalar implicatures ("some, few, many") to be unsettled. As experimental evidence shows, it

8487-526: The entity that is speaking; now indexically refers to a time frame including the moment at which the word is spoken; and here indexically refers to a locational frame including the place where the word is spoken. Linguistic expressions that refer indexically are known as deictics , which thus form a particular subclass of indexical signs, though there is some terminological variation among scholarly traditions. Linguistic signs may also derive nonreferential meaning from indexicality, for example when features of

8610-503: The examples above rely on some context, making them particularized implicatures: thus, "War is war" can refer to different properties of war, or things expected to happen during war, depending on the situation in which it is uttered. Prototypical examples of generalized implicatures are the scalar implicatures. Particularized implicatures are by far the more common kind. Grice attributed a number of properties to conversational implicatures: They are defeasible (cancellable), meaning that

8733-429: The field of linguistic anthropology . Because pragmatics describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts. For example, the study of code switching directly relates to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force. According to Charles W. Morris , pragmatics tries to understand

8856-519: The first level of pragmatic meaning that is drawn from an utterance. For example, instances of deference indexicality, such as the variation between informal tu and formal vous in French, indicate a speaker/addressee communicative relationship built upon the values of power and solidarity possessed by the interlocutors. When a speaker addresses somebody using the V form instead of the T form, they index (via first-order indexicality) their understanding of

8979-432: The first maxim of quantity as it does not contain sufficient information to plan their route. But if B does not know the exact location, she cannot obey this maxim and also the maxim of quality; hence the implicature. The maxims can also be blatantly disobeyed or flouted , giving rise to another kind of conversational implicature. This is possible because addressees will go to great lengths in saving their assumption that

9102-430: The following exchange: Here, B does not say, but conversationally implicates , that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context. Conversational implicatures are classically seen as contrasting with entailments : they are not necessary or logical consequences of what is said, but are defeasible (cancellable). So, B could continue without contradiction: An example of

9225-645: The fourth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics"). They draw three conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative utterance does not communicate information about an act second-hand, but it is the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) There is no distinction between language and speech. This last conclusion attempts to refute Saussure's division between langue and parole and Chomsky's distinction between deep structure and surface structure simultaneously. Implicature In pragmatics ,

9348-470: The frequency of certain vowels that were frequent in the high prestige dialect , but they ended up using those vowels even more than their target dialect. This hypercorrection of vowels is an example of non-referential indexicality that indexes, by virtue of innate urges forcing lower class civilians to hypercorrect phonological variants, the actual social class of the speaker. As Silverstein claims, this also conveys an "Index of Linguistic insecurity " in which

9471-456: The further they stray from common expressions and topics, the wider the variations in interpretations. That suggests that sentences do not have intrinsic meaning, that there is no meaning associated with a sentence or word, and that either can represent an idea only symbolically. The cat sat on the mat is a sentence in English. If someone were to say to someone else, "The cat sat on the mat", the act

9594-424: The general information provided by the linguistic features and augment the pragmatic meaning of the utterance. In much of the research currently conducted upon various phenomena of non-referential indexicality, there is an increased interest in not only what is called first-order indexicality, but subsequent second-order as well as "higher-order" levels of indexical meaning. First-order indexicality can be defined as

9717-516: The hearer does not want a lot of information but just the relevant information; and the speaker is more interested in being understood than in having little work to do. Furthermore, as in Grice's theory, there is often no explanation for when which of the two principles is used, i.e. why "I lost a book yesterday" has the Q-implicature, or scalar implicature, that the book was the speaker's, while "I slept on

9840-644: The highest level, the pragmatic listener L 1 {\displaystyle L_{1}} will reason about the pragmatic speaker S 1 {\displaystyle S_{1}} , and will then infer the likely world state s {\displaystyle s} taking into account that S 1 {\displaystyle S_{1}} has deliberately chosen to produce utterance u {\displaystyle u} , while S 1 {\displaystyle S_{1}} chooses to produce utterance u {\displaystyle u} by reasoning about how

9963-406: The idea of the performative , a type of utterance that performs the very action it describes. Speech Act Theory's examination of Illocutionary Acts has many of the same goals as pragmatics, as outlined above . Computational Pragmatics, as defined by Victoria Fromkin , concerns how humans can communicate their intentions to computers with as little ambiguity as possible. That process, integral to

10086-421: The implicature may be cancelled by further information or context. Take the examples from above: They are usually non-detachable in the sense that they cannot be "detached" by rephrasing the utterance, as they are consequences of the meaning and not the wording. The obvious exception are implicatures following from the maxim of manner, which explicitly relies on the phrasing. Thus, the following utterances have

10209-429: The indexical aspect would be the person who is speaking (refer above for definitions of semantic-referential and indexical meaning). Another example would be: A pure indexical sign does not contribute to the meaning of the propositions at all. It is an example of a "non-referential use of language." A second way to define the signified and signifier relationship is C.S. Peirce 's Peircean Trichotomy . The components of

10332-593: The indexical order of this "wine talk" exists in a "complex, interlocking set of institutionally formed macro-sociological interests." A speaker of English metaphorically transfers him- or herself into the social structure of the "wine world" that is encoded by the oinoglossia of elite critics using a very particular "technical" terminology. The use of "wine talk" or similar "fine-cheeses talk", "perfume talk", "Hegelian-dialectics talk", "particle-physics talk", "DNA-sequencing talk", "semiotics talk" etc. confers upon an individual an identity-by-visible-consumption indexical of

10455-478: The latter is independent of the context (semantico-referential meaning), meaning the concept chair. Referring to things and people is a common feature of conversation, and conversants do so collaboratively . Individuals engaging in discourse utilize pragmatics. In addition, individuals within the scope of discourse cannot help but avoid intuitive use of certain utterances or word choices in an effort to create communicative success. The study of referential language

10578-465: The literal listener L 0 {\displaystyle L_{0}} will understand the literal meaning of u {\displaystyle u} and so will attempt to maximise the chances that L 0 {\displaystyle L_{0}} will correctly infer the world state s {\displaystyle s} . As such, a simple schema of the Rational Speech Act reasoning hierarchy can be formulated for use in

10701-467: The literature of linguistic anthropology since its introduction by Silverstein, but Silverstein himself adopted the term from the theory of sign phenomena , or semiotics, of Charles Sanders Peirce. As an implication of his general metaphysical theory of the three universal categories , Peirce proposed a model of the sign as a triadic relationship: a sign is "something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity." Thus, more technically,

10824-409: The meaning of utterances, their semantic meaning , and the subdiscipline of linguistics dedicated to studying this kind of linguistic meaning is semantics . Yet linguistic signs in contexts of use accomplish other functions than pure reference and predication—though they often do so simultaneously, as though the signs were functioning in multiple analytically distinct semiotic modalities at once. In

10947-474: The mother-in-law. Hypercorrection is defined by Wolfram as "the use of speech form on the basis of false analogy." DeCamp defines hypercorrection in a more precise fashion claiming that "hypercorrection is an incorrect analogy with a form in a prestige dialect which the speaker has imperfectly mastered." Many scholars argue that hypercorrection provides both an index of "social class" and an "Index of Linguistic insecurity ". The latter index can be defined as

11070-412: The need for deference to the addressee. In other words, they perceive or recognize an incongruence between their levels of power and/or solidarity and employ a more formal way of addressing that person to suit the contextual constraints of the speech event. Second-Order Indexicality is concerned with the connection between linguistic variables and the metapragmatic meanings that they encode. For example,

11193-513: The notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue . Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being. The field did not gain linguists' attention until the 1970s, when two different schools emerged: the Anglo-American pragmatic thought and the European continental pragmatic thought (also called the perspective view). Ambiguity refers to when it

11316-479: The older terminology of Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson , these forms were called shifters . Silverstein, by introducing the terminology of Peirce, was able to define them more specifically as referential indexicals. Non-referential indices or "pure" indices do not contribute to the semantico-referential value of a speech event yet "signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables." Non-referential indices encode certain metapragmatic elements of

11439-407: The philosophical literature, the most widely discussed examples are those identified by J.L. Austin as the performative functions of speech, for instance when a speaker says to an addressee "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow", and in so saying, in addition to simply making a proposition about a state of affairs, actually enters into a socially constituted type of agreement with the addressee,

11562-409: The preferred nominal form of the term is indexical (rather than index ), defined as "any expression whose content varies from one context of use to another ... [for instance] pronouns such as 'I', 'you', 'he', 'she', 'it', 'this', 'that', plus adverbs such as 'now', 'then', 'today', 'yesterday', 'here', and 'actually'. This exclusive focus on linguistic expressions represents a narrower construal than

11685-408: The prefix-affixation of o- in Japanese, demonstrate complex higher-order indexical forms. In this example, the first order indexes politeness and the second order indexes affiliation with a certain gender class. It is argued that there is an even higher level of indexical order evidenced by the fact that many jobs use the o- prefix to attract female applicants. This notion of higher-order indexicality

11808-436: The problem of referential descriptions, a topic developed after the theories of Keith Donnellan . A proper logical theory of formal pragmatics has been developed by Carlo Dalla Pozza , according to which it is possible to connect classical semantics (treating propositional contents as true or false) and intuitionistic semantics (dealing with illocutionary forces). The presentation of a formal treatment of pragmatics appears to be

11931-406: The proposition is describing that Santa Claus eats cookies. The meaning of the proposition does not rely on whether or not Santa Claus is eating cookies at the time of its utterance. Santa Claus could be eating cookies at any time and the meaning of the proposition would remain the same. The meaning is simply describing something that is the case in the world. In contrast, the proposition, "Santa Claus

12054-658: The relationship between language and culture , the object of study of modern sociocultural anthropology . This framework, while also drawing heavily on the tradition of structural linguistics founded by Ferdinand de Saussure , rejects the other theoretical approaches known as structuralism , which attempted to project the Saussurean method of linguistic analysis onto other realms of culture, such as kinship and marriage (see structural anthropology ), literature (see semiotic literary criticism ), music, film and others. Silverstein claims that "[t]hat aspect of language which has traditionally been analyzed by linguistics, and has served as

12177-412: The relationship between language and context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves" Indeed, in linguistics the terms deixis and indexicality are often treated as synonymous, the only distinction being that the former is more common in linguistics and the latter in philosophy of language. This usage stands in contrast with that of linguistic anthropology, which distinguishes deixis as

12300-423: The relationship between signs and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas to which a word refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships among signs or symbols. Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied meaning of the given idea. Speech Act Theory , pioneered by J.L. Austin and further developed by John Searle , centers around

12423-464: The relationship between the signified and the signifier. One way to define the relationship is by placing signs in two categories: referential indexical signs, also called "shifters", and pure indexical signs. Referential indexical signs are signs where the meaning shifts depending on the context hence the nickname "shifters." 'I' would be considered a referential indexical sign. The referential aspect of its meaning would be '1st person singular' while

12546-400: The same implicature as above: Conversational implicatures are calculable : they are supposed to be formally derivable from the literal meaning of the utterance in combination with the cooperative principle and the maxims, as well as contextual information and background knowledge. They are non-conventional , that is, they are not part of the "conventional" (lexical and logical) meaning of

12669-418: The science of natural language processing (seen as a sub-discipline of artificial intelligence ), involves providing a computer system with some database of knowledge related to a topic and a series of algorithms, which control how the system responds to incoming data, using contextual knowledge to more accurately approximate natural human language and information processing abilities. Reference resolution, how

12792-467: The semantico-referential grammar in use in the communicative situation (grammar is thus understood as an element of the context of communication). So icon, index and symbol are not mutually exclusive categories—indeed, Silverstein argues, they are to be understood as distinct modes of semiotic function, which may be overlaid on a single sign-vehicle. This entails that one sign-vehicle may function in multiple semiotic modes simultaneously. This observation

12915-612: The semantico-referential meaning of the utterances is unchanged from that of the other possible (but often impermissible) forms, but the pragmatic meaning is vastly different. J.L. Austin introduced the concept of the performative , contrasted in his writing with "constative" (i.e. descriptive) utterances. According to Austin's original formulation, a performative is a type of utterance characterized by two distinctive features: Examples: To be performative, an utterance must conform to various conditions involving what Austin calls felicity . These deal with things like appropriate context and

13038-437: The sentence depends on an understanding of the context and the speaker's intent. As defined in linguistics, a sentence is an abstract entity: a string of words divorced from non-linguistic context, as opposed to an utterance , which is a concrete example of a speech act in a specific context. The more closely conscious subjects stick to common words, idioms, phrasings, and topics, the more easily others can surmise their meaning;

13161-438: The so-called neo-Griceans. Laurence Horn 's approach keeps the maxims of quality and replaces the other maxims with just two principles: The Q-principle replaces the first quantity maxim ("make your contribution as informative as is required") and the first and second manner maxims ("avoid obscurity and ambiguity"), and is taken to serve the interests of the hearer, who wants as much information as possible. It thus gives rise to

13284-472: The social identity of a speaker. An example of how multiple indexes can constitute social identity is exemplified by Ochs discussion of copula deletion: "That Bad" in American English can index a speaker to be a child, foreigner, medical patient, or elderly person. Use of multiple non-referential indices at once (for example copula deletion and raising intonation), helps further index the social identity of

13407-535: The speaker as that of a child. Linguistic and non-linguistic indices are also an important ways of indexing social identity. For example, the Japanese utterance -wa in conjunction with raising intonation (indexical of increasing affect) by one person who "looks like a woman" and another who looks "like a man" may index different affective dispositions which, in turn, can index gender difference. Ochs and Schieffilen also claim that facial features, gestures, as well as other non-linguistic indices may actually help specify

13530-412: The speaker in an inferior position uses V. The 'solidarity semantic' indicates that speakers use T for close relationships and V for more formal relationships. These two principles conflict in categories 2 and 5, allowing either T or V in those cases: Brown and Gilman observed that as the solidarity semantic becomes more important than the power semantic in various cultures, the proportion of T to V use in

13653-412: The speaker's authority. For instance, when a couple has been arguing and the husband says to his wife that he accepts her apology even though she has offered nothing approaching an apology, his assertion is infelicitous: because she has made neither expression of regret nor request for forgiveness, there exists none to accept, and thus no act of accepting can possibly happen. Roman Jakobson , expanding on

13776-516: The speaker's. This statement taken by itself would be irrelevant in most situations, so the addressee concludes that the speaker had something more in mind. The introductory example also belongs here: Being orderly includes relating events in the order they occurred. Sometimes it is impossible to obey all maxims at once. Suppose that A and B are planning a holiday in France and A suggests they visit their old acquaintance Gérard: B's answer violates

13899-480: The state has sole power to define hate speech legally, it is the state that makes hate speech performative. Jacques Derrida remarked that some work done under Pragmatics aligned well with the program he outlined in his book Of Grammatology . Émile Benveniste argued that the pronouns "I" and "you" are fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject . Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in

14022-474: The total meaning of linguistic signs in terms of all of their communicative functions. From this perspective, the Peircean category of indexicality turns out to "give the key to the pragmatic description of language." This theoretical framework became an essential presupposition of work throughout the discipline in the 1980s and remains so in the present. The concept of indexicality has been greatly elaborated in

14145-421: The trichotomy are the following: These relationships allow signs to be used to convey intended meaning. If two people were in a room and one of them wanted to refer to a characteristic of a chair in the room he would say "this chair has four legs" instead of "a chair has four legs." The former relies on context (indexical and referential meaning) by referring to a chair specifically in the room at that moment while

14268-526: The two ambiguous categories changes accordingly. Silverstein comments that while exhibiting a basic level of first-order indexicality, the T/V system also employs second-order indexicality vis-à-vis 'enregistered honorification'. He cites that the V form can also function as an index of valued "public" register and the standards of good behavior that are entailed by use of V forms over T forms in public contexts. Therefore, people will use T/V deference entailment in 1)

14391-460: The two gives the sign meaning. The relationship can be explained further by considering what is meant by "meaning." In pragmatics, there are two different types of meaning to consider: semantic-referential meaning and indexical meaning. Semantic-referential meaning refers to the aspect of meaning, which describes events in the world that are independent of the circumstance they are uttered in. An example would be propositions such as: In this case,

14514-403: The two principles is used, Horn introduces the concept of division of pragmatic labor : unmarked (shorter, standard, more lexicalized ) phrasings tend to R-implicate a standard meaning, and marked (more wordy, unusual, less lexicalized) phrasings tend to Q-implicate a nonstandard meaning: Horn's account has been criticised for misrepresenting the speaker's and hearer's interests: realistically,

14637-594: The use of referent expression is necessary is highly reliant upon the author/speaker's digression- and is correlated strongly with the use of pragmatic competency. Michael Silverstein has argued that "nonreferential" or "pure" indices do not contribute to an utterance's referential meaning but instead "signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables." Although nonreferential indexes are devoid of semantico-referential meaning, they do encode "pragmatic" meaning. The sorts of contexts that such indexes can mark are varied. Examples include: In all of these cases,

14760-495: The utterance occurs". Deictic expressions are thus distinguished, on the one hand, from standard denotational categories such as common nouns , which potentially refer to any member of a whole class or category of entities: these display purely semantico-referential meaning, and in the Peircean terminology are known as symbols . On the other hand, deixis is distinguished as a particular subclass of indexicality in general, which may be nonreferential or altogether nonlinguistic. In

14883-521: The work of Karl Bühler , described six "constitutive factors" of a speech event , each of which represents the privileging of a corresponding function, and only one of which is the referential (which corresponds to the context of the speech event). The six constitutive factors and their corresponding functions are diagrammed below. The six constitutive factors of a speech event Addresser --------------------- Addressee The six functions of language Emotive ----------------------- Conative There

15006-402: The world, which does not change in either circumstance. Indexical meaning, on the other hand, is dependent on the context of the utterance and has rules of use. By rules of use, it is meant that indexicals can tell when they are used, but not what they actually mean. Whom "I" refers to, depends on the context and the person uttering it. As mentioned, these meanings are brought about through

15129-420: Was famously detailed by linguists Brown and Gilman. T/V deference entitlement is a system by which a speaker/addressee speech event is determined by perceived disparities of 'power' and 'solidarity' between interlocutors. Brown and Gilman organized the possible relationships between the speaker and the addressee into six categories: The 'power semantic' indicates that the speaker in a superior position uses T and

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