Fundamentos de Semántica y Pragmática: Conceptos Clave en Lingüística

Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences. In semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words conventionally mean, rather than on what an individual speaker means. This technical approach is concerned with objective or general meaning and avoids trying to account for subjective or local meaning. Linguistic semantics deals with the conventional meaning conveyed by the use of words, phrases, and sentences of a language.

Pragmatics: It is the study of what speakers mean or “speaker meaning”. Communication depends not only on recognizing the meaning of words in an utterance, but also on recognizing what speakers mean by their utterances.

Invisible Meaning: It is how we can recognize what is meant even when it isn’t said or written. In this picture, we can recognize an advertisement for a sale of clothes for babies and toddlers. The word “clothes” doesn’t appear, but we can bring that idea to our interpretation of the message as we work out what the advertiser intended us to understand.

Context

There are different kinds of context:

1. Linguistic context (or co-text): The surrounding co-text has a strong effect on what we think the word probably means. For example: “The bank is made of wood” versus “I have to go to the bank to pay my bills”. We have no problem deciding which type of bank is meant, because we know from the linguistic context which type of bank is intended.
2. Physical context: If you see the same word “bank” on the wall of a building in a city, the physical location will influence our interpretation. Our understanding of much of what we read and hear is tied to this processing of aspects of the physical context, particularly the time and place in which we encounter linguistic expressions.

Deixis

In our language, there are a lot of very common words that can’t be interpreted and we can only understand in terms of the speaker’s intended meaning.

• Person Deixis: Used to point to things (it, this, these pencils) and people (him, them, those).
• Spatial Deixis: Words and phrases used to point to a location (here, there, near).
• Temporal Deixis: Used to point to a time (now, then, last week).

All these deictic expressions have to be interpreted in terms of which person, place, or time the speaker has in mind.

Physical context: If you see the same word “bank” on the wall of a building in a city, the physical location will influence our interpretation. Our understanding of much of what we read and hear is tied to this processing of aspects of the physical context, particularly the time and place in which we encounter linguistic expressions.

Reference and Inference

Reference is an act by which a speaker or writer uses language to enable a listener or reader to identify something. To perform a reference, we can use proper nouns (Charles, Chomsky), other nouns in phrases (my friend, your cat), or pronouns (he, she, it).

Inference is additional information used by the listener to create a connection between what is said and what must be meant. In a restaurant, one waiter can ask another, “Where’s the lettuce salad sitting?” and receive the reply, “He is sitting by the door.”

Anaphora

Anaphora can be defined as subsequent reference to an already introduced entity. Mostly, we use anaphora in texts to maintain reference.

“We saw a funny home video about a boy washing a puppy in a bath. The puppy started shaking and the boy got really wet. When he let go, it jumped out of the bath and ran away.”

• In this type of referential relationship, the second (or subsequent) referring expression is an example of anaphora (referring back), and the first mention is called the antecedent.
• The connection between an antecedent and an anaphoric expression is created by the use of a pronoun (it), or repetition of the noun with the definite article (the puppy).

Presupposition

In “Your sister is waiting in the garden”, there is an obvious presupposition that you have a sister. What a speaker or writer assumes is true or known by a listener or reader can be described as a presupposition.

In “My car is a wreck”, or the negative version, “My car is not a wreck”, the underlying presupposition (I have a car) remains true despite the fact that the two sentences have opposite meanings. This property is called “constancy under negation”.

Speech Acts

A speech act is the action performed by a speaker with an utterance. We use this term to describe actions such as “requesting”, “commanding”, “questioning”, or “informing”.

• A direct speech act is used with the function of a question: Did you eat the pizza?
• An indirect speech act is used with the function of a request: Can you pass the salt? It can also appear in a declarative structure to make a request: You left the door open?

The main reason we use indirect speech acts seems to be that actions such as requests presented in an indirect way (e.g., “Could you open that door for me?”) are considered more polite than direct acts (e.g., “Open that door for me!”).

Politeness

The most relevant concept in politeness is “face”, because face is your public self-image. This is the emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize. Politeness can be defined as showing awareness of and consideration for another person’s face.

A face-threatening act occurs when you say something that represents a threat to another person’s self-image. For example: “Give me that pencil!” Here, you are behaving as if you have more social power than the other person. If you do not have that social power, you should use an indirect speech act, saying: “Could you pass me that pencil?”

We have both a negative and a positive face (“negative” does not mean bad; it is simply the opposite of “positive”):

• Negative face: The need to be independent and free from imposition.
• Positive face: The need to be connected, to belong, or to be a member of a group.