ENG 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Tacit Assumption, Pragmatics, Implicature
Document Summary
The study of language use in context. Preliminaries: sentence, utterance, effect of context on meaning, linguistic, situational, social, felicity & appropriateness of utterances. Thoughts can be shared thanks to a common code. Utterances mean more than the literal meaning of the words. There is a gap between sentence meaning & speaker"s meaning. Human communication is first & foremost a matter of inference. We are able to infer and represent other people"s intentions and beliefs from their behavior (meta-representations) Interpreting an utterance is ultimately a matter of guesswork, or (to use a more dignified term) hypothesis formation . We communicate more than the literal meaning of words. Conversation is a cooperative endeavor coordination of interpretive strategies. We search for & calculate implied meaning (implicature) based on: Semantic/conventional meaning, linguistic and situational context, common knowledge, knowledge of the world, of context, of participants, etc. The assumption that speakers are acting cooperatively.
