Main Theories in Pragmatics and How They Differ
Main Theories in Pragmatics and How They Differ
Communication sometimes can be somehow tricky and disconcerting since language itself sometimes can confuse the participants of a conversation since the meaning of the conversation can be confusing sometimes. In the linguistic field the term ‘meaning’ and what it implicates have been studied from different points of view. In semantics when they try to understand the meaning of something in a conversation, they focus just on the word and what does it mean and how its syntactical structure accompanies the real connotation of the word; whereas in pragmatics they study how the context of the conversation have influence on the real meaning of the utterance employed depending on the localization where the dialogue is occurring, whether the speaker is giving a background connotation to the utterance or the relationship between the participants of the conversation among other things. Linguists had been studying the different connotations pragmatics have given to communication and language since many years ago and as a consequence of this, there are several theories about meaning in this field which have provided some different points of views about this topic. Despite having different important theories in pragmatics, as the relevant theory and others, this essay is going to focus on Speech-Act Theory by Austin and Searle, Conversational Implicatures by Grice, Politeness Principle by Leech and the Face Theory by Browning and Levinson and how they differ between each other.
John Langshawn Austin was the one who created one of the main theories of this topic, calling his theory the ‘Speech Act Theory’, since in contrast with old suppositions, he believed that utterances not only express statements, but they are in fact acts of communication and some of them express actions. The development of this theory carried a lot of years of study and a path which would lead to the ‘Speech Act Theory’ as it is known full of different
Communication sometimes can be somehow tricky and disconcerting since language itself sometimes can confuse the participants of a conversation since the meaning of the conversation can be confusing sometimes. In the linguistic field the term ‘meaning’ and what it implicates have been studied from different points of view. In semantics when they try to understand the meaning of something in a conversation, they focus just on the word and what does it mean and how its syntactical structure accompanies the real connotation of the word; whereas in pragmatics they study how the context of the conversation have influence on the real meaning of the utterance employed depending on the localization where the dialogue is occurring, whether the speaker is giving a background connotation to the utterance or the relationship between the participants of the conversation among other things. Linguists had been studying the different connotations pragmatics have given to communication and language since many years ago and as a consequence of this, there are several theories about meaning in this field which have provided some different points of views about this topic. Despite having different important theories in pragmatics, as the relevant theory and others, this essay is going to focus on Speech-Act Theory by Austin and Searle, Conversational Implicatures by Grice, Politeness Principle by Leech and the Face Theory by Browning and Levinson and how they differ between each other.
John Langshawn Austin was the one who created one of the main theories of this topic, calling his theory the ‘Speech Act Theory’, since in contrast with old suppositions, he believed that utterances not only express statements, but they are in fact acts of communication and some of them express actions. The development of this theory carried a lot of years of study and a path which would lead to the ‘Speech Act Theory’ as it is known full of different
References: Cherry, Christopher. 1973. Regulative Rules and Constitutive Rules. The Philosophical Quarterly (pp. 301-3015). London: Oxford University Press. Cohen, Jonathan L. 1970. Searle’s Theory of Speech Acts. In Jonathan L. Cohen (Ed.), The Philosophical Review (pp. 545-557). North Carolina: Duke University Press. Korta, Kepa & Perry, John. Pragmatics (2012). In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/ Sassen, Claudia. 2005. Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.