Pragmatics

Pragmatics studies the aspects of meaning not accounted for by compositional semantics. In this way, it's a sort of waste-baskety field, with odd bits and pieces of the study of meaning being all grouped under the term pragmatics. In part, pragmatics is the study of "how to do things with words" (the name of a well known book by the philosopher J.L. Austin), or perhaps "how people do things with words" (to be more descriptive about it).

Pragmatics starts from the observation that people use language to accomplish certain kinds of acts, broadly known as speech acts, and distinct from physical acts like drinking a glass of water, or mental acts like thinking about drinking a glass of water. Speech acts include asking for a glass of water, promising to drink a glass of water, threatening to drink a glass of water, ordering someone to drink a glass of water, and so on.

Most of these ought really to be called "communicative acts", since speech and even language are not strictly required. Thus someone can ask for a glass of water by pointing to a pitcher and miming the act of drinking.

It's common to divide speech acts into two categories: direct and indirect.

Direct Speech Acts

There are three basic types of direct speech acts, and they correspond to three special syntactic types that seem to occur in most of the world's languages. Examples are given in English, French and Buang (a Malayo-Polynesian language of Papua New Guinea

Speech Act	Sentence Type	Function	Examples
Assertion	Declarative.	conveys information; is true or false	"Jenny got an A on the test" "Les filles ont pris des photos."('The girls took photos') "Biak eko nos." ('Biak took the food')
Question	Interrogative	elicits information	" Did Jenny get an A on the test?" "Les filles ont-elles pris des photos?"('Did the girls take photos') "Biak eko nos me? "('Did Biak take the food')
Orders and Requests	Imperative	causes others to behave in certain ways	"Get an A on the test!" "Prenez des photos!"('Take some photos!') "Goko nos! "('Take the food!')

Although assertions, questions and orders are fairly universal, and most of the world's languages have separate syntactic constructions that distinguish them, other speech acts do not have a syntactic construction that is specific to them. Consider the English sentence,

(a) If you cross that line, I'll shoot you!

Most English speakers would have no trouble identifying such an utterance as a threat. However, English has no special sentence form for threats. The if-construction used in (a) is not specific to the speech act of threatening. Such a construction might also express a promise, as in:

(b) If you get all A's, I'll buy you a car!

or simply a cause and effect relationship between physical events:

(c) If you heat water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it will boil.

A consideration of the syntactic means available for expressing the various speech acts leads us to see that even for the three basic speech acts laid out in the table above, speakers may choose means of expression other than the basic syntactic type associated with the speech act in question.

To some extent, this just reflects the existence of a diversity of means of expression, but a more pervasive reason is that speakers may use indirect rather than direct speech acts.

Indirect Speech Acts

Returning to the speech act of questioning, we can easily come up with a number of alternate ways to ask the same question by using sentence types other than interrogative. Let's look again at the interrogative sentence:

(d1) Did Jenny get an A on the test?

A positive answer ("yes") to that question would give the questioner the actual answer she wanted, but now consider (d2)

(d2) Do you know if Jenny got an A on the test?

This is still in the form of a question, but it probably is not an inquiry about what you know. Most of the time, the answer "yes, I do" would be frustratingly uncooperative. The normal answer we would expect in real life would be "Yes, she did", or "No, she only got a B", or something of the sort. Here the reply is directed to the speech act meaning, not the literal meaning. A simple "yes" answer that responds to the literal meaning would usually be taken for an uncooperative answer in actual social life (for example "Yes, I do") would be heard as "Yes, I do, but I'm not necessarily going to tell you". So, (d2) functions as an indirect question.

Other indirect ways of asking the same question, using the declarative form, are listed in (d3) and (d4).

(d3) I'd like to know if Jenny got an A on the test.
(d4) I wonder whether Jenny got an A on the test.

In the case of the speech act of requesting or ordering, speakers can be even more indirect. As in the case of questions, conventional indirect requests may, taken literally, be questions about the addressee's knowledge or ability. Here is a direct request:

(e1)( Please) close the window.

Conventional indirect requests may be expressed as questions as in (e2) and (e3), or as assertions (e4). In context, (e5) and (e6) may also be immediately understood as a complaints, meant as an indirect request for action.

(e2) Could you close the window?
(e3) Would you mind closing the window?
(e4) I would like you to close the window.
(e5) The window is still open!
(e6) I must have asked you a hundred times to keep that window closed!

Felicity Conditions

In order to "do things with words", certain things must be true of the context in which speech acts are uttered. In other words, a sentence must not only be grammatical to be correctly performed, it must also be felicitous. There are generally considered to be three types of felicity conditions:

Preparatory conditions, such as that the person performing the speech act has the authority to do so, that the participants are in the correct state to have that act performed on them, and so on -- an utterance like (f) is not felicitous unless uttered by a person with the authority to marry people and directed at two people who are of age and are not already married:

(f) I now pronounce you man and wife.

Conditions on the manner of execution of the speech act, such as touching the new knight on both shoulders with the flat blade of a sword while intoning the words in (g) or pointing in the appropriate direction when uttering (h):

(g) I hereby dub thee Sir Galahad.
(h) He went thataway!

Sincerity conditions are obviously necessary in the case of verbs like apologize and promise. That is, you have to mean it, or at least be pretending that mean it, in order for an utterance involving such verbs to be felicitous.

Some of the felicity conditions on questions and requests as speech acts can be described as follows, where "S" = speaker; "H" = hearer; "P" = some state of affairs; and "A" = some action.

A. S questions H about P.

1. S does not know the truth about P.
2. S wants to know the truth about P.
3. S believes that H may be able to supply the information about P that S wants.

B. S orders H to do A (or requests that he do it).

1. S believes A has not yet been done.
2. S believes that H is able to do A.
3. S believes that H is willing to do A-type things for S.
4. S wants A to be done.

We can see what happens when some of these conditions are absent. In classrooms, for example, one reason that children may resent teachers' questions is that they know that there is a violation of A.1: the teacher already knows the answer. And a violation of B.2 can turn a request into a joke: "Would you please tell it to stop raining?"

Gricean Conversational Maxims

The work of H.P. Grice takes pragmatics farther than the study of speech acts. Grice's aim was to understand how "speaker's meaning" -- what someone uses an utterance to mean -- arises from "sentence meaning" -- the literal (form and) meaning of an utterance. Grice proposed that many aspects of "speaker's meaning" result from the assumption that the participants in a conversation are cooperating in an attempt to reach mutual goals -- or at least are pretending to do so!

He called this the Cooperative Principle. It has four sub-parts or maxims that cooperative conversationalists assume each other to be respecting:

(1) The maxim of quality. Speakers' contributions ought to be true.

(2) The maxim of quantity. Speakers' contributions should be as informative as required; not saying either too little or too much.

(3) The maxim of relevance. Contributions should relate to the purposes of the exchange.

(4) The maxim of manner. Contributions should be perspicuous -- in particular, they should be orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.

Grice was not acting as a prescriptivist when he enunciated these maxims, even though they may sound prescriptive. Rather, he was using observations of the difference between "what is said" and "what is meant" to show that people actually do follow these maxims in conversation. We can see how this works in considering the maxim of quantity at work in the following made-up exchange between parent and child:

Parent:	Did you finish your homework?
Child:	I finished my algebra.
Parent:	Well, get busy and finish your English, too!

The child did not say that her English homework is not done, nor did she imply it in a logical sense. Nevertheless the parent is entitled to draw this conclusion, based on the combination of what the child actually said and the cooperative principle.

In a similar way, if you were to hear someone described as having "one good leg", you would be justified in assuming the person's other leg was bad, even though nothing had been said about it at all, because otherwise the statement would violate the Maxim of relevance.

As another example, when answering the question "How was the party?", one might respond by saying "Not everyone showed up." The hearer assumes that the speaker is observing the Maxim of Quantity, so that if the speaker didn't say the stronger statement, namely "Noone showed up", it's because the stronger one isn't true. So, the hearer can safely assume that someone did show up.

The maxim of relevance is behind the suspicious implications of this letter of recommendation (a classic example).

The person reading this letter assumes that all the relevant information will be included; so the maxims of quantity and relevance lead one to suspect that this is the best that the professor can say.

Extremely often, particular non-literal meanings are conveyed by speakers violating in an obvious way, or "flouting" these maxims. Maxim flouting underlies the use of irony and sarcasm, for example. If Kim says "Oh, lovely!" when she sees dog crap on her carpet, her hearers are immediately aware that the Maxim of Quality has been violated. Together with the special intonation, this leads the hearers to conclude that the utterance was ironic, and that Kim has expressed annoyance and disgust. Metaphorical speech also exploits the Maxim of Quality (together with the Maxim of Relevance) to indicate that non-literal meaning is intended.

Further, if you go back and look at the indirect speech acts, you'll see that they are uncooperative according to their literal meaning; such uses also flout a maxim. The listener uses the apparent inappropriateness of an utterance as a clue that there must be a non-literal interpretation. For example, a question "Can you pass me the salt?" clearly violated the Maxim of Relevance - the speaker clearly knows that the hearer is perfectly capable of passing the salt. This then leads the hearer to conclude that an indirect speech act was intended, namely the request that the hearer utilise his abilities to pass the salt to the speaker.

Flouting the maxim of relevance is a good way to say, indirectly, that you don't want to talk about something.

Pat:	How's your work coming along?
Chris:	It sure is sunny outside.

The "be orderly" aspect of the maxim of manner is what causes us to interpret the following sentences differently, even though, in a literal sense, they convey the same information.

a.	Joe and Sue got married and had a baby.
b.	Bill and Sally had a baby and got married.

The felicitous ordering reports the events in the same order in which they occurred, unless there's some explicit indication of a difference, such as Bill and Sally had a baby after they got married.

Rhetorical coherence and the given/new distinction

In conveying a message, we have to consider more than just "who did what to whom." We also have to keep in mind what our listeners know, and how to lay the message out for them in an orderly and understandable way.

We have to be careful not to assume knowledge listeners don't have. If a stranger comes up to us on the street and says, out of nowhere, "what is the frequency?" we are likely to assume that he is crazy, or perhaps mistaking us for someone else. Young children make this sort of communicative mistake all the time, because their ability to model other people's knowledge and belief is not well developed.

Similarly, we have to be careful not to introduce familiar things as if they were new. Aside from being insulting, this can be confusing, since our listeners may try to find a new interpretation to match our implication of novelty. If your roommate says "there's a letter for you on the table", and it's the same old letter that both of you know has been there for several days, you may waste some time looking for an additional one.

There are many aspects of language that help to indicate whether a particular piece of information is "old" or "new", and to manage the amount of detail that we use in talking about it, and to make it more or less salient for our listeners or readers. For example, "old information" (part of the earlier content of a discourse, for instance) is frequently referred to using a pronoun, and generally occurs early in a sentence. What is "new" typically occurs as a noun, and occurs later in the sentence:

"When John appeared at the party, he was introduced to Pearl.
She had arrived with her friend Julie."

In this text fragment, John turns into 'he' when John is "known", and this pronoun occurs at the beginning of the clause that introduces Pearl as new. When Pearl becomes known, she also gets converted to the pronoun 'she' in the next sentence, occupying a slot at the beginning of the next sentence, which in turn introduces the new character, Julie, in the typical sentence-final position.

Here's a more realistic example, taken from a transcript of conversation about fashions that took place in 1991 (sw4746):

B.72 :	[Sniffing] One thing I've noticed is come back here are clogs.
A.73 :	Really?
B.74 :	Yeah. They're starting to make a comeback. You see them in the stores more and more and I said I didn't think I'd ever see those again. [laughter]

The new information "clogs" is put at the end of the phrase that introduces it, and then referred to with a pronoun at the start of the next full sentence that discusses it. Consider how odd it would be to do the opposite, switching the structures of the first and second of B's sentences::

B.72 :	[Sniffing] Clogs're starting to make a comeback..
A.73:	Really?
B.74:	Yeah. One thing I've noticed is come back here are them. You see them in the stores more and more and I said I didn't think I'd ever see those again. [laughter]

In fact, it is usually concerns like this that regulate word order in languages that don't use word order to distinguish subjects from objects. Consider two Latin examples with different orders, but the same basic meaning, "the cat saw the dog":

(i) Felis canem vidit.
(j) Canem vidit felis.

The first sentence might be appropriate out of the blue, perhaps in answer to the question "what happened". Or it would also be felicitous if the conversation up to this point has been about a certain cat patrolling through its territory, and now it comes across an intruding dog. In such an instance we might translate it as "the cat saw a dog."

The second would not be felicitous in answer to the question "what happened", but it could work as an answer to "what happened to the dog?" It would also be natural if we had been talking about a certain dog taking a walk through the neighborhood, and now it passes by a store window where a cat is perched watching the action on the street. We might then translate it as "the dog was spied by a cat."

The alternate English translations given for these Latin examples demonstrates that, in addition to givenness versus newness, it is also relevant whether a noun phrase is indefinite or definite ("a man" or "some people" vs. "the man" or "those people"). Here's a real example from another transcribed conversation (sw4787) , this one about family reunions (overlapping speech is marking with #...#):

B.52:	And well they elect officers every year and #they have a#
A.53:	#You're kidding.# I have never heard of this. [laughter]
B.54:	Yeah, they have a,- they have a- a president. Usually they try to elect a family and inside that family, there'll be the president and- or the chairman or whatever and then each person has an assignment to- to you know, carry out one part of the thing.

Here speaker B starts out by saying "they have a president", and then, in adding more information, switches to "the president". The same sort of switch from indefinite to definite occurs in saying "usually they try to elect a family and inside that family, there'll be..." As this switch occurs, nothing is changed about the nature of the concepts that the phrases are naming -- the only thing that changes is the listener's familiarity with them.

Another way to study how we organize and package information according to the communicative context is to look at the usage of different sentence forms with very similar meaning.

(k) I need a nickel.
(l) It's me that needs a nickel.
(m) What I need is a nickel.
(n) A nickel is what I need.

Now, imagine yourself standing next to a phone booth fishing for change. Someone trying to be helpful might say:

(o) What are you looking for?
(p) Here's a dime.

Which of (k)-(n) are appropriate responses to each of these?

What would be appropriate contexts for the others?

Studying such potention question and answer pairs shows us that sentences can express the same semantic content and still have different pragmatic circumstances of appropriate usage. This is because language has many devices for indicating what is given and what is new, and questions (explicit or implicit) set up expectations that are respected in the answers.

Coherence and pronouns

In this part of the lecture, I will present to you the basics of one theory that uses formal, logical framework to explain patterns in data. The data we're going to look at concern the interaction of discourse coherence and interpretation of pronouns.

Linguists and others have been using the word topic to mean, vaguely, "what the sentence/utterance/speech/text is about". Of course, this notion is so vague that it is completely useless - the sentence is usually "about" whatever is mentioned in it. In the early eighties, however, a bunch of people at the intersection of linguistics, logic, and computer science at Penn decided to make this notion more precise, and to use it to talk about coherence in text or speech. Their idea was very simple - within a small piece of discourse (roughly like a paragraph of text), we can find, for each utterance (roughly, a sentence) a single discourse entity that this utterance is "about" - the center of attention for this utterance, the utterance topic. These central entities, of course, change as we go from sentence to sentence. Depending on how much the topic changes, we get a smoother or a rougher transition between the utterances.

Centering Theory

Every discourse entity mentioned in an utterance is a potential topic for future discourse. The list of all the discourse entities in an utterance is called the list of Forward-looking centers.

The potential topics in the Forward-looking center list are ranked by how prominent they are - in English, the subject is more prominent than object, which is, in turn, more prominent than other things.
The highest-ranked entity is called the Preferred Center of this utterance. This is the entity that's most likely going to be the topic of a future utterance.

The highest-ranked entity from the previous utterance that actually occurs in the current utterance is the topic of the current utterance, called the Backward-looking center.

For example, here is an analysis of a short discourse:

John went to school with Mary. She did his homework for him.
Utterance 1: John = subject = Preferred Center; John, Mary = forward-looking centers; no backward-looking center since this is the first utterance.
Utterance 2: She=Mary = subject = Preferred Center; Mary, John = forward-looking centers; John is the backward-looking center since this is the Preferred Center of the previous utterance.

We only hypothesize what the actual backward-looking center is, since there are many factors affecting the ranking, besides subject-object-other. There is, however, a way of telling exactly what the backward-looking center is, by using the Pronoun Rule:

Pronoun Rule: If there are pronouns in an utterance, the backward-looking center of this utterance is one of them.

This rule allows us to know exactly what the backward-looking center is when an utterance contains only one pronoun. This makes sense - since the backward-looking center is our topic, it's very salient in everyone's mind, so we don't need to mention the full NP to make the listeners think about this entity - a pronoun will do just fine.

There are four types of transitions between utterances, depending on how the topic is managed. The four transitions are, from smoothest to roughest:

Continue The backward-looking center of the current utterance is the same as the backward-looking center of the previous utterance, and the same as the Preferred Center of the current utterance.

Retain The backward-looking centers of the current and previous utterances are the same, but the preferred center of the current utterance is different.

Smooth-Shift The backward looking center of the current utterance is different from the backward-looking center of the previous utterance, but it is the same as the preferred center of the current utterance.

Rough-Shift The backward-looking centers of the current and previous utterances are different, and the backward-looking center of the current utterance is different from the preferred center.

The Rough-shift indicates a complete breakdown in coherence. In discourse, smoother transitions are preferred over rougher ones.

As the last exercise in midterm review indicates, the Pronoun rule, together with the preference for smoother transitions can explain how we interpret pronouns in certain discourses. That is, when we have a choice, we prefer to interpret a pronoun in such a way as to create a smoother transition.

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If you're curious about Centering Theory and its applications, here are some additional readings.

The article that started Centering Theory by Barbara Grosz, Aravind Joshi, and Scott Weinstein.

A book that contains a number of seminal papers in Centerin Theory, with an introduction by the theory's originators, and a number of applications to various phenomena in various languages is Marilyn A. Walker, Aravind K. Joshi, and Ellen F. Prince, editors, Centering in Discourse. Oxford University Press.

Of course, I can't resist the temptation: my own article (in PostScript format), applying Centering Theory to Russian word order.

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