Pragmatic Principles

Why This Matters

Pragmatics sits at the heart of how language actually works in the real world—it's the bridge between what we literally say and what we actually mean. You're being tested on your ability to explain why "Can you pass the salt?" functions as a request rather than a question about ability, or how a simple "Nice weather we're having" during a thunderstorm communicates sarcasm. These principles reveal the cognitive mechanisms, social negotiations, and contextual dependencies that make human communication possible.

Understanding pragmatic principles means grasping the invisible rules that govern every conversation you've ever had. Whether you're analyzing how speakers manage social face, why certain assumptions go unspoken, or how listeners draw inferences from minimal cues, you're demonstrating mastery of meaning beyond the sentence level. Don't just memorize definitions—know what each principle explains about the gap between linguistic form and communicative function.

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Foundational Frameworks: The Rules of the Game

These principles establish the basic assumptions that make cooperative communication possible. They describe the implicit contract speakers and listeners enter when they engage in conversation.

Cooperative Principle

• H.P. Grice's foundational claim—conversational participants work together toward mutual understanding, assuming shared communicative goals
• Underlies all implicature; when speakers appear to violate cooperation, listeners search for alternative interpretations rather than assuming nonsense
• Framework for analysis—provides the theoretical basis for explaining how meaning exceeds literal content in systematic, predictable ways

Grice's Maxims (Quantity, Quality, Relevance, Manner)

• Four conversational guidelines—Quantity (give enough information, not too much), Quality (be truthful), Relevance (stay on topic), Manner (be clear and orderly)
• Violations generate implicatures; flouting a maxim signals that additional meaning should be inferred (e.g., obvious irrelevance triggers a search for hidden relevance)
• Exam essential—be prepared to identify which maxim is violated in any given example and explain the resulting implicature

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Implicit Meaning: What's Said vs. What's Communicated

These concepts explain how listeners extract meaning that speakers never explicitly stated. The mechanism involves inference based on context, shared knowledge, and conversational norms.

Implicature

• Meaning suggested but not stated—what a speaker communicates beyond the literal semantic content of their words
• Context-dependent inference; listeners use situational knowledge and conversational expectations to derive implied meaning
• Distinguishes semantics from pragmatics—the literal/implied distinction is central to understanding how pragmatics expands linguistic analysis

Conversational Implicature

• Implicature arising from maxim exploitation—specifically generated through adherence to or flouting of Grice's Maxims within dialogue
• Calculable and cancellable; listeners can work out the inference step-by-step, and speakers can explicitly deny the implicature without contradiction
• Key test property—if you can add "but I don't mean to imply X" without contradiction, X was a conversational implicature, not part of literal meaning

Presupposition

• Background assumptions taken as given—information that must be true for an utterance to be felicitous, triggered by specific linguistic forms
• Survives negation; "The king of France is not bald" still presupposes France has a king (presupposition triggers include definite descriptions, factive verbs, change-of-state verbs)
• Distinct from implicature—presuppositions are tied to linguistic form and project under embedding, while implicatures are context-dependent and cancellable

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Context and Reference: Anchoring Language to Situations

These principles address how utterances connect to the physical, temporal, and social context of communication. Meaning is incomplete without situational grounding.

Deixis

• Context-dependent reference—expressions like "I," "here," "now," and "this" require knowledge of the speech situation to interpret
• Categories include person deixis (I/you), spatial deixis (here/there), temporal deixis (now/then), and discourse deixis (the following/the above)
• Demonstrates context dependency—the same sentence can refer to entirely different entities depending on who speaks it and when

Context Dependency

• Meaning shaped by situation—interpretation relies on physical setting, cultural background, conversational history, and shared knowledge between participants
• Operates at multiple levels; affects reference resolution, speech act interpretation, implicature calculation, and disambiguation
• Central pragmatic insight—sentences don't have fixed meanings; utterances in contexts do

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Actions and Intentions: Language as Doing

Speech act theory reframes language as a form of action, focusing on what speakers accomplish through their utterances. The mechanism involves recognizing speaker intentions and conventional functions.

Speech Acts

• Utterances as actions—speaking performs functions like requesting, promising, apologizing, or declaring, not just conveying information
• Three levels of analysis: locutionary (what is said), illocutionary (what is done in saying it), perlocutionary (effects on the hearer)
• Classification system—assertives (stating), directives (requesting), commissives (promising), expressives (thanking), declarations (pronouncing)—each with distinct felicity conditions

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Social Dimensions: Managing Relationships Through Language

These frameworks explain how speakers navigate interpersonal dynamics and social expectations. Communication involves not just information transfer but relationship maintenance.

Politeness Theory

• Brown and Levinson's face management—speakers strategically protect their own and others' face (public self-image) during interaction
• Positive vs. negative face: positive face involves the desire to be liked and approved; negative face involves the desire for autonomy and non-imposition
• Face-threatening acts require mitigation strategies—indirectness, hedging, apologies, or formality reduce potential offense when making requests or criticisms

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Cognitive Approaches: Processing and Relevance

These theories emphasize the mental processes underlying pragmatic interpretation. The mechanism involves cognitive efficiency and the search for optimal relevance.

Relevance Theory

• Sperber and Wilson's cognitive framework—communication is governed by the search for optimal relevance, balancing cognitive effort against informational payoff
• Challenges Gricean maxims; replaces multiple maxims with a single principle: hearers assume speakers aim for maximum relevance with minimum processing cost
• Explains interpretation selection—among possible meanings, listeners choose the one requiring least effort while yielding adequate cognitive effects

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Quick Reference Table

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Self-Check Questions

1. What distinguishes conversational implicature from presupposition, and how would you test which type of implicit meaning is present in a given utterance?

2. If a speaker says "I'm not saying she's unqualified, but she did just graduate," which of Grice's Maxims is being flouted, and what implicature is generated?

3. Compare Gricean pragmatics and Relevance Theory: what do they share as explanatory goals, and how do their mechanisms differ?

4. How does Politeness Theory explain why a speaker might use an indirect speech act (like "Would you mind closing the window?") rather than a direct command?

5. Given the utterance "I'll meet you here tomorrow," identify all deictic expressions and explain what contextual information a listener would need to interpret each one.