Overview of the lecture Pragmatics and sociolinguistics

1. Pragmatics: deixis, speech acts, politeness, interlanguage pragmatics 2. Sociolinguistics: varieties of language, bilingualism, language and culture, language and gender, language planning and policy

1. What is pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of language from a functional perspective, that is, it attempts to explain facets of linguistic structure by reference to non-linguistic causes (Levinson, 1983). According to a more recent definition, "pragmatics is the societally necessary and consciously interactive dimension of the study of language" (Mey, 1993, p. 315). Pragmalinguistics is the study of "particular resources which a given language provides for conveying illocutions" (linguistic actions) (Leech, 1983, p. 11). Sociopragmatics investigates "the social perceptions underlying participants' performance and interpretation of linguistic action" (Leech, 1983, p. 10).

Areas of study
Conversational structure Conversational implicature Deixis Speech acts Politeness

2. Deixis
The word 'Deixis' (and the adjective/noun 'deictic') is borrowed from Greek, meaning "pointing" or "indicating". 'Deixis' is "any referring expression which has the same logical properties as the bodily gesture in question is, by virtue of that fact, deictic" (Lyons, 1995, p. 303). The deictics are linguistically realised as personal pronouns, (e.g. I, you) demonstrative pronouns (e.g. this, that) place adverbs (e.g. here, there) time adverbs (e.g. now, then) verbs of motion (e.g. come, go) and tenses.

3. Speech acts (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969

Types of speech acts directives (e.g. Could you please switch on the light) commissives (e.g. I promise, I'll do it tomorrow) representatives (e.g. I saw an interesting film yesterday) declaratives (e.g. I now pronounce you wife and husband) expressives (e.g. Oh, that's wonderful). Speech acts can be direct (e.g. Please, close the window) and indirect (It's rather cold in here).

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

5. Interlanguage pragmatics

Write an example for a direct and indirect speech act.

Interlanguage pragmatics is the study of non-native speakers' comprehension, production and acquisition of linguistic action in L2. Comprehension: L2 learners often fail to understand the nonliteral meaning of utterances and their assessment of politeness is frequently influenced by their native culture. Production: how L2 learners perform various speech acts such as requests, apologies, refusals, etc. Findings show that: - L2 learners often use different strategies to realise certain speech acts than native speakers do. - Learners might perform certain speech acts more or less directly - might opt for different politeness strategies and might be less or more verbose than native-speakers. Acquisition: even L2 learners with high level of grammatical or linguistic competence attain only a relatively low level of pragmatic competence.

Pragmatic transfer: the influence of L1 on the production and comprehension of linguistic action in L2. Pragmatic transfer can be positive and negative. Pragmalinguistic failure (Thomas, 1983): the pragmatic force of the L2 speaker's message is misunderstood or the L2 speaker does not understand the pragmatic force of the L1 speaker's message. Socio-pragmatic failure (Thomas, 1983): the L2 learner violates pragmatic norms because he/she does not know what can be said to whom in particular situations. The major problem of interlanguage pragmatics is the issue of native-speaker norm (Kasper & Schmidt, 1997): sociolinguistic variation within the target language ; no such thing as 'ideal native speaker'; L2 learners might not want to conform to L2 pragmatic norms because it might mean giving up their 'cultural identity'. The solution might be the establishment of 'multilingual' or 'bilingual pragmatic norms'.

Write an example for pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure. It can be a common Hungarian pragmatic error, a pragmatic error in another language you speak, or a pragmatic error you have committed.

Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics "examines the relationship between language use and the social world" (Silberstein, 2001, p. 100). Sociolinguists examine speech communities with specific social characteristics such as age, gender, class, profession, ethnicity, etc. Sociolinguistics is often sub-divided into two branches: micro-sociolinguistics, which focuses on linguistic phenomena e.g. conversation analysis, pragmatics and critical discourse analysis macro-sociolinguistics, which studies the behaviour of speech communities.

1. Language variation
Accent: refers to features of pronunciation Dialect: variety of language used by a group of people Regional dialects: varieties of language spoken in a particular geographical area Social variation can be due to age, social class, race or ethnicity and gender Register: set of language items associated with discrete occupational or social groups (e.g. pilots, surgeons, jazz fans, etc.)

2. Bilingualism/multilingualism
2.1. Key terms
Lingua franca: a language which is used to facilitate communication between speakers of different mother tongues Pidgin: pidgin is no one's first language, it is a contact language. Pidgin has a simple grammatical system, vocabulary and has considerable phonological variation (e.g Tok Pisin between speakers of different languages in Papua New Guinea). Creole: a pidgin that has become the first language of a generation of speakers (e.g. French-based Haitian Creole in Haiti). Creolisation involves expansion of morphology and syntax, regularisation of phonology.

Bilingualism or multilingualism is "the knowledge or the use of more than one language by an individual or a community" (Sridhar, 1996, p. 47). Bilingualism can be an individual phenomenon (e.g. how languages are learnt by children, how they are represented in the mind etc.). Bilingualism as a societal phenomenon concerns the status and roles of languages in society, attitudes towards language etc. Speech community: "a community that shares the knowledge of the rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech" (Sridhar, 1996, p. 49). Verbal repertoire: "total range of linguistic resources available to an individual or community" (Sridhar, 1996, p. 48). Multilingual people have several verbal repertoires.

2.2. Language choice

Language use domains: the family, the playground and the street, the school, the church, literature, the press, the military, the court and governmental administration. Not all languages in a multilingual community have equal prestige, power and vitality. Generally, the higher the social and economic benefits are one gain by speaking the particular language, the higher the prestige of the language is. Diglossia: specialisation of two varieties of the same language Code switching: switching from one language to the other. - Situational code-switching - Metaphorical code-switching Code-mixing: switching of languages within sentences and can involve every level of lexical and syntactic structure.

What language do you use in the following domains: the family, the street, the university, reading literature, reading the press, the court and governmental administration. Do you ever do code-switching? In what situations?

3. Language and culture

Linguistic relativity: people speak differently because speech is determined by thought, and thoughts are inherently influenced by culture. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claims that the structure of one's native language determines the way one thinks and behaves. In the weak version, which has gained empirical support, language influences one's thoughts, but does not determine them.

4. Language and gender

In many languages there is a phonological difference between the speech of men and women. In these languages women pronounce certain sounds differently from men. In many languages certain words tend to be used more frequently by men than by women (e.g. in English charming, lovely, and sweet are commonly used by women, but not by men) The intonation patterns of men and women are different. Women and men might use different body language. The two main inter-related causes of the difference seem to be the different upbringing and the different roles men and women have in society.

5. Language planning and policy

"Language planning includes the formation and implementation of a policy designed to prescribe or influence, the language(s) and varieties of language that will be used and the purposes for which they will be used" (Wiley, 1996, pp. 108109). Language planning has three distinct components: 1. corpus planning: includes creation or modification of the spoken or written language code (e.g. spelling reform); 2. status planning: the decisions of authorities concerning the status of various languages; (e.g. decisions on the languages to be used in schools, courts); 3. language acquisition planning: is concerned with the teaching and learning of languages.

Language planning can be explicit (official political decisions) and implicit (institutional practices). There are three basic orientations in language planning (Ruz, 1982): 1. language as a problem: language planners are concerned with the identification of language problems (e.g. social problems that arise because of a minority's linguistic problems); 2. language as right: language use is related to social rights, therefore language planning also needs to address social issues; 3. language as resource: the aim of language planning is to raise the status of minority languages and resolve conflicts between the majority and minority communities. The goals of language planning can be the following: language related goals: language shift policy, language maintenance policy, language enrichment policy; political goals: promoting national unification; economic goals: promoting international trade, increasing productivity etc.

Revision
Do you know of any political decisions concerning language planning and language in general in the past few years? What goals did these decisions serve?
What is pragmatics? What is deixis and what are the main types of deixis? What are the main types of speech acts? What is politeness? What types of politeness strategies are there? What are some significant aspects of interlanguage pragmatics? How might L2 learners' production and comprehension of speech acts differ from that of native speakers? What is socio-pragmatic and pragmalinguistic failure?

What is sociolinguistics and what are its two main branches? What types of language variation are there? What is bilingualism/multilingualism? What is a speech community? What characterises the verbal repertoire of multilingual people? What are the most important factors that determine language choice? What is the diglossia? What is the difference between code-switching and code-mixing? What is language planning? What are the basic components of language planning?