Social Language Use (Pragmatics)

You have invited your friend over for dinner. Your child sees your friend reach for some cookies and says, "Better not take
those, or you'll get even bigger." You're embarrassed that your child could speak so rudely. However, you should consider that
your child may may not know how to use language appropriately in social situations and did not mean harm by the comment.

An individual may say words clearly and use long, complex sentences with correct grammar, but still have a communication
problem - if he or she has not mastered the rules for social language known as pragmatics. Adults may also have difficulty with
pragmatics, for example, as a result of a brain injury or stroke.

Pragmatics involve three major communication skills:

• Using language for different purposes, such as

o greeting (e.g., hello, goodbye)
o informing (e.g., I'm going to get a cookie)
o demanding (e.g., Give me a cookie)
o promising (e.g., I'm going to get you a cookie)
o requesting (e.g., I would like a cookie, please)
• Changing language according to the needs of a listener or situation, such as
o talking differently to a baby than to an adult
o giving background information to an unfamiliar listener
o speaking differently in a classroom than on a playground
• Following rules for conversations and storytelling, such as
o taking turns in conversation
o introducing topics of conversation
o staying on topic
o rephrasing when misunderstood
o how to use verbal and noverbal signals
o how close to stand to someone when speaking
o how to use facial expressions and eye contact

These rules may vary across cultures and within cultures. It is important to understand the rules of your communication
partner.

An individual with pragmatic problems may:

• say inappropriate or unrelated things during conversations

• tell stories in a disorganized way
• have little variety in language use

It is not unusual for children to have pragmatic problems in only a few situations. However, if problems in social language use
occur often and seem inappropriate considering the child's age, a pragmatic disorder may exist. Pragmatic disorders often
coexist with other language problems such as vocabulary development or grammar. Pragmatic problems can lower social
acceptance. Peers may avoid having conversations with an individual with a pragmatic disorder.

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Chinese Pragmatic Markers

This article is a discussion of the semantics and pragmatics of pragmatic markers in modern
Chinese. This class of linguistic expressions has not yet received attention they deserve in Chinese,
although much research has been done in English and some other languages.
We first make a tentative distinction between pragmatic markers and discourse markers with the latter
subsumed under the former. From a discourse point of view, the crucial difference between the two lies in
the fact that discourse markers are semantic links specifying or highlighting the semantic relationship
between discourse segments, while other pragmatic markers are only used to present the speaker's
comment on or attitude towards the proposition expressed by an utterance.
We then point out that all pragmatic markers are non-truth-conditional. That is, they do not
contribute to the truth condition of the proposition of the utterance to which the pragmatic marker
attaches, but some of them encode conceptual meanings, which can be true or false in their own right. We
conclude that pragmatic markers are all speaker-oriented and subjective in nature. Discourse markers
encode a speaker's personal beliefs about the relationship between discourse segments, while other
pragmatic markers express a speaker's personal comment on or attitude towards the proposition expressed
by an utterance.

Beverly S. Exaure
BSAH 1-2D
Surprising language abilities in children with autism

What began as an informal presentation by a clinical linguist to a group of philosophers, has led to
some surprising discoveries about the communicative language abilities of people with autism.

Several years back, Robert Stainton, now a philosophy professor at The University of Western Ontario, attended a
presentation by his long-time friend Jessica de Villiers, a clinical linguist now at the University of British
Columbia. The topic was Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). De Villiers explained that many individuals with ASD
have significant difficulties with what linguists call "pragmatics." That is, people with ASD often have difficulty
using language appropriately in social situations. They do not make appropriate use of context or knowledge of
what it would be "reasonable to say." Most glaringly, many speakers with ASD have immense trouble
understanding metaphor, irony, sarcasm, and what might be intimated or presumed, but not stated.

Drawing on his philosophical training, however, Stainton noticed less-than-obvious pragmatic abilities at work in
de Villiers' examples, which were drawn from transcripts of conversations with 42 speakers with ASD - abilities
that had been missed by clinicians.

Thus began research to more clearly understand and define the conversational abilities and challenges of people
with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Stainton and de Villiers' research, in collaboration with Peter Szatmari, a
clinical psychiatrist at McMaster University, has shown that indeed, many individuals with ASD do have "a rich
array of pragmatic abilities."

These researchers do not contest the well-established claim that people with ASD have difficulty with non-literal
pragmatics, such as metaphors ("Juliet is the sun") or irony/sarcasm ("Boy, is that a good idea"). They have,
however, found that many speakers with ASD do not show the same difficulty with literal pragmatics. An example
is the phrase, "I took the subway north" from a transcript of a conversation with a research participant with ASD.
The use of the word "the" could indicate there is only one subway in existence going north. "The subway" could
also be referring to a subway car, a subway system or a subway tunnel. Taking account of the context and the
listener's expectations, however, the individual using the phrase was able to convey the specific meaning he
intended. That is, he used pragmatics effectively.

In short, Stainton and his colleagues produced surprising evidence to show that speakers with ASD use and
understand pragmatics in cases of literal talk, as in the subway example.

Stainton, who is also Acting Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Western, says, "It
is especially gratifying and encouraging, because this is an Arts and Humanities contribution to clinical research.
Without a philosophical perspective, this discovery might not have been made."

Related research allowed de Villiers and Szatmari to develop a rating scale of pragmatic abilities that can be used in
the clinical assessment of people with ASD. Stainton says, "In the short term, their new tool will help identify
where an individual fits on that spectrum. In the longer term, however, by making use of recent results in
philosophy of language, it may contribute to our theoretical understanding of the boundary between knowledge of
the meanings of words, and non-linguistic abilities - specifically pragmatics."

Stainton believes that both clinicians who work with people with ASD, and language theorists who are interested in
pragmatics for philosophical reasons, will find these results striking.

http://www.uwo.ca/
Beverly S. Exaure
BSAH 1-2D