Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in interpersonal pragmatics?

This paper discusses a particular strand of interpersonal pragmatics that may be known as ‘discursive’ pragmatics and attempts to delineate what is entailed in such an approach. Some scholars may characterise it as placing emphasis on participant evaluations, others may foreground the analysis of contextualised and sequential texts, while still others consider it to include both of these. In general, though, discursive pragmatics often seems to involve a reaction to, and a contrast with, so-called Gricean intention-based approaches. In this paper I argue that, far from discarding the insights of Grice, Austin and others, a discursive approach to interpersonal pragmatics should embrace those aspects of non-discursive pragmatics that provide us with a ‘tool-kit’ and a vocabulary for examining talk-in-interaction. At the same time, I will argue that the shortcomings of the speaker-based, intention- focused pragmatics can be compensated for, not by privileging hearer evaluations of meaning, but by taking an ethnographic and, to some extent, ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of naturally-occurring discourse data. By providing a critique of Locher and Watts’ (2005) paradigmatic example of a discursive approach to politeness and then a sample analysis of interactional data, I demonstrate how a combination of insights from Gricean pragmatics and from ethnomethodology allows the analyst to comment on the construction and negotiation of meaning in discourse, without having recourse to notions of either intention or evaluation

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BANYUMASAN CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES

To mean what you say is sometimes problematic in daily conversation, moreover in some indigenous dialects. It requires comprehensive context to achieve the core of communication. So does in Banyumasan. Banyumasan or Banyumas dialect is a variant which is found along the flow of Serayu river. The river flows from Sindoro-Sumbing Mountains (Koentjaraningrat, 1984:23). Banyumas dialect is one of some variants of Javanese language. Banyumasan has some differences compared to standard Javanese spoken in Jogjakarta, Surakarta and Semarang. Those differences are also reflected in the characteristics of conversational implicatures found in this dialect. Conversational implicaure is a proposition that is implied by the utterance of sentence in a context even though that proposition is not a part of nor an entailment of what was actually said (Grice, 1975; Gazdar, 1979). The characteristics of conversational implicatures are calculability, cancellability, non-detachability, non-conventionality, and indeterminacy. (Grice, 1975; Levinson, 1983; Thomas, 1996; dan Cruse, 2004). A dialect has different characteristics compared to other dialects of the same language and so does the characteristic o

Anticipated versus inferred politeness

A number of researchers have recently argued that politeness is not always inferred in the form of an implicature as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1987), but rather can be anticipated by addressees when it involves expected behaviour. The distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness is thus an important area for further development of politeness theory. In this paper, the way in which the notion of ‘expectations’ is related to politeness is first considered, before outlining the distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness in some detail. It is then argued that discourse politeness theory (Usami, 1998, 2001a, b, 2002) shows greater promise for deepening our understanding of this distinction than the proposals made thus far by relevance theorists. It is concluded that any investigation of the distinction between anticipating and inferring politeness must ultimately be grounded in empirical studies of politeness phenomena

A CONCEPT OF GENERAL MEANING: SELECTED THEORIES IN COMPARISON TO SELECTED SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC THEORIES

The paper discusses a concept of general meaning with reference to various relevant semantic and pragmatic theories. It includes references to Slavic axiological semantics (e.g. Krzeszowski (1997); Puzynina (1992)), Wierzbicka’s (e.g. 1980, 1987) atomic expressions and classical pragmatics theories, such as speech acts, Gricean theory of conversational implicature, politeness theory and and relevance theory

Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

It is said that pragmatics and discourse analysis are closely interrelated and that there is a considerable overlap between them to the extent that they can be regarded as sister disciplines. The current study aims at investigating the relationship between them highlighting their similarities and detecting their differences. In order to fulfill the objectives of the study, a number of procedures will be followed: (1)  Surveying the relevant literature about the two fields in question, (2) conducting a comparison between them and (3) drawing some conclusions grounded on the findings of the study. Key words: pragmatics, discourse analysis, context, discourse pragmatics, and critical discourse analysi

POLITENESS STRATEGIES

People usually tend to use some politeness strategies in order to make the communication process between speaker and hearer going smoothly without any sense hurting each others. This paper is only focused on describing about Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies. According to Brown and Levinson, there are four politeness strategies, namely: bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record and fifteen substrategies of positive politeness and ten substrategies of negative politeness. It is important that during the communication which happens among the participants use a polite language. Being polite to the hearer is generally more important to do than being polite toward the speaker itself, because if the speaker uses the polite language to the hearer in fact he does not only respect the hearer but also he maintains his own dignity

THE IMPLICATURE AND VIOLATION OF MAXIMS IN INDONESIAN ADVERTISEMENTS

We all know that advertising is a business in which language is used to persuade people to do things (e.g., buy some product) and / or believe things (believing that the value of the product is trustworthy or a good one). The phenomenon, however, is that we tend to doubtthe truth conditions of the advertisements. In other words, we do not take those ads seriously. We are not very affected emotionally yet we are just amused and regard them as entertaining fallacies (e.g. the “AXE” male perfume). Some reasons might verify this fact. However, this paper is just concerned with the language phenomenon existing in theadvertisement world. A common shared perspective on the advertisement language within Indonesian ads is, among others, bombastic, hyperbolic, and many times, irrational. Not the least, most of the ads have a similar tendency to “violate” the language as long as theproduct sells. Apparently, Indonesian ads are apt to employ indirect language(‘implicature’) in their emulating their own product and devaluing their competitor’s product (e.g. the then Yahama’s “Yang Lain Makin Ketinggalan”). Upon these intriguing facts, this paper attempts to highlight general features of Indonesian advertisements in termsof (1) the violation of Grice’s conversational maxims (rules and norms) and (2) implicature(extended meaning). Alternating a more ‘acceptable’ model of ads could be a by-product ofthis paper

Pragmatics

Abstracs:This paper aims to explain the importance of pragmatic areas to be studied in the development of teaching materials, the teaching of linguistics. To that end, I began this paper with a discussion of the linguistics understanding, pragmatics understanding, briefly explain topics development, and, by looking at the difference in studies with another fields in linguistics, showing the importance of pragmatics.The experts define the term pragmatics differently. Pragmatics grows from four trends or tradition, namely: (1) the tendency of insyntaxsism, (2) socio-critical tendencies, (3) the philosophical tradition, and (4) ethnometodology tradition. Topics include discussion of the pragmatics; they are speech acts theory, cooperative principles, implicature, relevance theory, and the theory of politeness. In conclusion, I see the importance of pragmatics in linguistics at least two things: first, pragmatics is the only level in linguistics which studies language by taking into account also users and secondly, relates to the inability of syntax and semantics to explain the phenomenon of the use of everyday language, I concluded that semantics and pragmatics look at the position as two complement each other. Furthermore, with regard to the teaching of language, pragmatics plays a role in the development of communicative competence. Key words: Teaching Materials Development, Pragmatics, Linguistic