Results of the written exam, July 24th
Here are the results of the written exam that took place two weeks ago:
Klausurergebnisse Introduction to English Linguistics 2008 (PDF)
Congratulations to those of you who have passed. To those who haven’t: don’t despair. Failing a test is something that happens to almost everyone at some point. Register for the Nachschreibklausur (see below for instructions) as soon as possible and prepare yourself as extensively as you can. If you have any questions about the exam, do not hesitate to get in touch with me via email ( cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de) to make an appointment for a talk. I will post the hours for my Feriensprechstunde in a moment, but in case those hours don’t work for you we can still schedule a separate appointment. Most importantly, don’t let an initial failure demotivate you. If at first you don’t succeed…
To register for the Nachschreibklausur, first sign up here in the HISLSF. Next, download the Anmeldeformular, print it out and drop it off at my office (you can either give it to me personally or throw it into the mailbox in front of the Anglistik 3 Sektretariat at any time). The Nachschreibklausur will take place on Tuesday, September 16th, at 10.00am in Hörsaal 3H. The deadline for registration is August 14th!
I wish all of you a good semester break, whether productive or relaxing. All the best for your future endeavors and maybe we’ll meet again in one of the more advanced classes.
Take care,
Cornelius Puschmann
Final exam next week
Here is some information about the time and place of the exam, as the Geschaeftszimmer confirmed it yesterday:
Der schriftliche Teil Ihrer Prüfung findet am 24.7.2008 von 14.30 - 16.00 Uhr in Hörsaal 3 H, 23.21 statt. Bitte stellen Sie unbedingt sicher, dass Sie spätestens um 14.00 Uhr am genannten Hörsaal sind und Ihren Lichtbildausweis mitbringen.
Zu den Arbeitsplätzen dürfen nur Schreibmaterial (kein Papier!!!) und ein wenig Proviant mitgenommen werden. Taschen, Jacken etc. sowie elektronische Geräte aller Art müssen bei der Anmeldung im Klausurraum abgegeben werden.
Sollten Sie den Termin ohne zwingenden Grund (durch Attest nachzuweisen) nicht wahrnehmen, so gilt die Klausur als nicht bestanden.
Für ein ärztliches Attest muss das auf den Internetseiten des Anglistischen Instituts verfügbare Krankmeldeformular (http://www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/ang/pruefungen/bachelor/basismodul-ii-sprachwissenschaft/) Ihrem Arzt vorgelegt und innerhalb von 4 Tagen im Akademischen Prüfungsamt (Frau Hendrich, Geb. 16.11., Eb. 04.49) eingereicht werden. Davon unabhängig sollte eine Mitteilung, telefonisch oder per E-Mail, an die Prüfungsbeauftragten erfolgen.
I wish all of you success and a dose of luck. Provided you didn’t find linguistics entirely terrible, our paths may cross again in one of the more advanced modules. :-)
Break a leg,
Cornelius Puschmann
Test exam
You can download the test exam that we used to practice for the finals next week here. To check your answers, download the answer key here.
Summary Pragmatics
Pragmatics
Note: you can also download a PDF version of this summary optimized for printing here.
When humans communicate, much of what goes on is not simply about conveying information to others. One problem regarding the way in which semantics describes meaning is that anything that goes beyond the content of the linguistic sign itself is outside the scope of description. Social and affective meaning are not covered by semantics (which focuses on conventional/conceptual meaning only), but virtually any real-life communicative situation contains countless signs which are used to express something about the speakers and their social relationships.
Pragmatics is concerned with how people use language within a context, in real-life situations. While semantics (and virtually all units we have covered before) was concerned with words, phrases and sentences, the unit of analysis in pragmatics (and in the units we will cover later) is the utterance. In pragmatics we study how factors such as time, place and the social relationship between speaker and hearer affect the ways in which language is used to perform different functions. Language is action, in the words of J.L. Austin, and much of the interaction between human beings is based on verbal action, for example when we request, promise, swear, apologize etc.
The difference viewpoints of semantics and pragmatics can best be illustrated by looking at a single utterance. Imagine you are shopping downtown with a friend. As you pass a well-known pizza place, your friend longingly stares to the people outside eating pepperoni pizza and remarks “Boy, I am really hungry!”. What would be your reaction?
Taken out of context, your friend has simply provided a piece of information - that he is feeling hungry. In terms of the meaning he wants to communicate, however, it is likely he intends to get something else across. You might interpret him remark as a request to make a food stop and respond by saying “Me too - let’s get some pizza”. Note that in this case your interpretation of what your friend means goes beyond what he has literally said.
Inference and presupposition
How do we get from message to meaning? We infer the ‘total meaning’ of an utterance based on all information we have available in the moment we hear it. This includes past experiences, our knowledge about the person we are communicating with, about the situation, about what was previously said, what is deemed culturally appropriate and countless other factors.
To illustrate this, consider the following two examples:
(1)
Your are having a chat with a friend. With a big grin on her face she says: “Okay, listen to this one. A man and a panda bear walk into a bar…”
With the contextual information available - casual conversation, her facial expression, the introduction she provided (”listen to this”) - and the specific devices used, you can tell she is about to tell a joke.
Imagine the exact same words are uttered by a policeman who stops you for running a red light, by a priest at a wedding or a politician holding an official speech. Would that change the effect of the message on you as a listener?
(2)
You ask a friend how English literature class was. She rolls her eyes, shrugs emphatically and responds “Literature? Oh, you know, it was fan-tastic!”
It is obvious that your friend is being ironic - saying the opposite of what she actually means. But how do we figure this out? Apparently there are clues in the prosody of utterances and in the facial expressions of speakers which allow us to notice irony. These clues are not contained in the words themselves - they are in the context.
In every-day communication, speakers have a number of presuppositions about the world-knowledge of hearers. When I address you and say “Did you know that John and Mary split up?” I have the presupposition that you know John and Mary and were aware of the fact that they were previously a couple. Our presuppositions lead us to formulate utterances whose meaning we assume can be inferred by listeners - in other words, that can be deducted by those we communicate with. After all, we all want to be understood.
Pragmatic implicature and entailment
If inference is what listeners do to interpret the meaning of utterances, implicature is the process through which speakers include meaning beyond the literal message in an utterance.
Bob: Are you coming to the party?
Jane: You know, I’m really busy.
Jane’s response pragmatically implicates her intention (that she won’t come to the party), which Bob can infer via his past experience from countless other conversations. Pragmatic implicatures are characterized by the fact that usually several alternative interpretations are possible. For example, the dialogue above could also go like this:
Bob: Are you coming to the party?
Jane: You know, I’m really busy, but I’ll come.
With the remark but I’ll come Jane effectively cancels the implicature that she won’t come to the party.
Entailment is a related but distinct phenomenon and it belongs into the realm of semantics, because it is not affected by the context. If one proposition entails another, this works in the same way as a logical condition of the form IF X THEN Y. For example:
The president was assassinated
entails
The president is dead
If the first utterance is true, the second one is automatically also true - one proposition logically entails the other one.
Illocution and perlocution
We use the terms illocution and perlocution to describe the meaning a speaker wants to convey with an utterance and the interpretation that a hearer forms when hearing it.
- locution = the content of the utterance itself
- illocution = the meaning intended by the speaker (S)
- perlocution = the interpretation of the message by the hearer (H)
Mismatches between illocution and perlocution are what we generally describe as misunderstandings.
Speech Acts
When language is used by human beings in real-life situations, there are generally communicative goals associated with every utterance. Speakers express their emotions, ask questions, make requests, commit themselves to actions - they do things with words.
In linguistic pragmatics, we use the term speech act to describe such language actions. A wide range of utterances can qualify as speech acts.
Common Speech Acts
| Speech act | Function |
| Assertion | conveys information |
| Question | elicits information |
| Request | (politely) elicits action |
| Order | demands action |
| Promise | commits the speaker to an action |
| Threat | intimidates the hearer |
There exist several special syntactic structures (sentence forms) which are typically used to mark some speech acts.
| Sentence form | Example |
| Declarative | He is cooking the chicken |
| Interrogative | Is he cooking the chicken? |
| Imperative | Cook the chicken! |
Consequently there are typical association between Sentence Form and Speech Act.
| Sentence Form | Speech Act |
| Declarative |
Assertion |
| Interrogative | Question |
| Imperative | Order or Request |
Note that the above association are typical, but do not always hold.
Performative speech acts and performative verbs
Performative speech acts are in many ways the most prototypical speech acts, because they make it evident that we are ‘doing something’ verbally when we perform them. They make explicit that language can be used to perform actions - something underlined by the following examples.
I declare the session closed
I pronounce you husband and wife
We hereby sentence you to 10 years in prison
We herewith declare war on the French
Many rituals (in the widest sense of the words) include performatives of some shape and many performative speech acts require the speaker to fulfill certain criteria (be a sworn judge, member of parliament, university professor…) in order to work.
Performative verbs are used in performative speech acts to make explicit what kind of action is performed. Verbs like declare and pronounce, which semantically describe the act of speaking, are often performative verbs.
I order you to shut up
A convenient way of testing the status of a speech act verb is by inserting hereby before the verb.
I hereby order you to shut up
Note that this does not work in the examples below. Apparently certain conditions need to be met in order for a speech act to function.
#I am hereby very happy
#He hereby declares you husband and wife
(I’ve used the pound sign here to indicate pragmatic anomaly, in the same way that a star indicates syntactic malformedness.)
The first example is strange because making an observation about a state usually does not qualify as a performative speech act. The second example is strange because a performative must be performed by the speaker himself - reporting someone else’s action does not work.
Direct and indirect speech acts
In everyday situations, we often do not directly express what we intend, but instead formulate our utterances in ways which appear more polite to hearers. Compare the examples below
Pass me the salt!
Could you pass me the salt?
Both examples are in effect requests, but the first one, phrased as an imperative, has a different connotation than the second, which uses the form of a question. It’s obvious to us from experience that Could you pass me the salt is not actually a question about the ability of the addressee to pass the salt, but a prompt to action, and responding to this prompt simply by saying Yes, I could and not acting would not be a polite reaction.
Therefore Could you pass me the salt? has two pragmatic levels. One the surface level it is a question, but underlying this is a request. It therefore qualifies as an indirect speech act, whereas Pass me the salt! is a direct speech act.
Felicity Conditions
Speech acts (whether direct or indirect) can be classified according to their felicity. Speech acts are infelicitous (meaning they are don’t work as intended) when certain essential requirements are not met. When is a speech act infelicitous?
…when the utterance is illogical: I promise to call you last year
…when certain requirements aren’t met: I will buy you a Porsche, honey
…when the speaker is lying: I really like your new jacket
Note that there is a subtle difference between the three examples. The first one can never ‘work’ (i.e. be felicitous), because it is inherently illogical. The second one may work or not, depending on whether the speaker can afford to buy her partner a Porsche - something she might not know for sure herself at the time of making the utterance. The third one is a flat-out lie in (in this example) - the speaker does not like the listener’s new jacket. Felicity conditions are determined by context and especially performative speech acts often require a number of contextual conditions in order to be felicitous.
Context and co-text
Pragmatics enables us not only to describe verbal actions (speech acts) plausibly, but it also allows us to account for language phenomena which exemplify the close connection between linguistic signs and the settings they are used in. The term context can be broken down into two categories for that purpose
- the world around us, the situation in which a piece of discourse happens (context)
- the surrounding discourse - in other worlds, what was previously said (co-text)
Deixis and anaphora
The following two examples illustrate the distinction between context and co-text using two closely related linguistic phenomena, deixis and anaphora.
I played tennis. Then I went to the beach.
Mary and Lisa played tennis. Then they went to the beach.
Each of the utterances above consists of two sentences. Think about the first utterance for a moment and ask yourself who the subject of both sentences is. You’ll probably come to the conclusion that it is the same person (‘I’) in both sentences, but it is not possible to determine who exactly I refers to outside of an actual speech situation. When someone uses I in a real-life chat, you can see and hear that person, and therefore you are able to resolve who the word refers to. But outside of a real discourse situation, this is no longer possible. Words like I, which carry a meaning that can only be retrieved with access to the situation they are used in, are called deictic expressions and the phenomenon of expressions pointing to things in the context is known as deixis.
Now consider the second example. The pronoun they in the second sentence does not seem to point to the context. Instead, it effectively replaces the full noun phrase Mary and Lisa, saving us the time and breath that would be needed to repeat it (think about how much shorter they is). This phenomenon is called anaphora and the term that the anaphoric expression (they) replaces is known as the antecendent.
Types of deixis
Central types of deixis include
- person e.g. I, you
- place e.g. here, there, near, far, left, right, come, go
- time e.g. now, soon, then, today, yesterday, tomorrow, next, last
Non-central types of deixis are
- social e.g. Sir, Madam, Mr. President, Your Honor
- manner and degree e.g. this (big), so (fat), like this, etc. (accompanied by gestures)
- discourse e.g. this story, as mentioned above, this chapter, therefore
Key terms
- social and affective meaning vs. conventional/conceptual meaning
- language in context (pragmatics) vs. language independent from context (semantics)
- inference
- presupposition
- locution, illocution, perlocution
- pragmatic implicatures
- entailment
- speech acts
- examples:
- assertion
- question
- request
- order
- promise
- threat
- direct vs. indirect
- felicity conditions
- examples:
- context vs co-text
- deixis
- central
- person
- place
- time
- non-central
- social
- manner/degree
- discourse
- social
- central
- anaphora
- antecedents
- antecedents
Presentation for Session 2-11
The slides for today’s session can be downloaded below:
Session 11 - The History of English
Repetition Sociolinguistics
We’ll start tomorrow’s session by discussing a series of questions about sociolinguistics. You can download the questions beforehand here if you like. Note that we’ll only discuss the answers during the session - I will not post them here separately.
Presentation for Session 2-9
You can download yesterday’s slides below.
Session 9 - Types of variety and variation
WICHTIG: Klausuranmeldung
Liebe Kursteilnehmer,
hier noch einmal zur Erinnerung: bis Montag müssen sich *ALLE* Bachelor-Studenten aus meinem Kurs für die Abschlussprüfung im Basismodul Englische Sprachwissenschaft angemeldet haben.
Das funktioniert in zwei Schritten, wie hier beschrieben:
http://introling.ynada.com
Sie können das Anmeldeformular noch bis Montag, 13.00 Uhr, im Sekretariat der Anglistik 3 (23.21, Etage 1, Raum 66) abgeben oder in meinen Briefkasten dort werfen.
Bitte beachten Sie, dass Sie, wie in der Anleitung beschrieben, im HISLSF UND per Anmeldeformular angemeldet sein müssen!
Take care & enjoy your weekend,
Cornelius Puschmann
Presentation for Session 2-8
You can download today’s slides below.
Session 8 - Register, Genre and Style
And, in case you need them for whatever reason, you can download the text samples we discussed in class today here.
Paper copies of the course reader
For those interested, a paper version of the course reader will be available for a small fee (6 Euros) in class tomorrow. Please bring exact change if possible. More copies will be made in case the demand can’t be met.
