English Material: PRAGMATICS

PRAGMATICS

1. As we know that pragmatic is the sense knowledge, so pragmatic allows the language users to say anything and even do anything, because intonation and gesture sometimes influence the meaning of the language users’ language, it is contextual meaning that depends on so many conditions as long as we are able to get the meaning.
2. Pragmatics acts tells us how to say the communicative language which is not outspoken, too clear, vulgar and even taboo. Therefore, it is often realized by politeness sentences.

Example: ‘Come into my parlour (or cocktail bar)’ (Such an invitation would be too obvious or too vulgar to be effective).

The advertisement is an effort to ‘sell’ something: a cocktail bar, a particular environment, a particular customer, a promise of good times, and so on. And the advertisement invites us in, so to speak. But it doesn’t do that by saying;

A parlour (it makes sense that there is a place where the customers can come in to have some yummy cocktails implicitly meaning).

Here are some notes in pragmatic acts:

·         No explicit denial takes place (performative utterance)

·         Solely the user’s context

3. What the language users learn in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantic or any linguistic studies can not be studied ‘scientifically’ because the sentence structure is not complete. So pragmatics comes to solve their problems. In other words, pragmatics is the space for the language users to pour out their problems which they can not do in other linguistic studies.
4. Among the most common pragmatic acts are those of ‘implicit denial’.

Example: When somebody had got AIDS, the speaker’s meaning is not to blame the patient by saying ‘how many times you have free sex, what kind of drugs you consumed, or other reasons’. In other words we should treat the disease not condemn the patient.

Then we can say that implicit denial talks around not only what many peoples have known and something that’s not suitable to be exposed. But also the politeness, indecency and any taboo things.

5. Pragmatics is needed if we want what we mean to be fuller, deeper and more reasonable. And even to prevent the ambiguous language happen in the conversation, in order for we do not need to speculate the hidden meaning until the end of dialogue.
6. There are many uses of pragmatics actually, but the most important use of pragmatics is to save the language itself. It means the language has been in danger of disappearing (linguist call: endangered language) right now. So that the linguists try to protect the language by creating the new study of ‘alphabetizing’, and do hard to protect the language structure and the natives (mother tongue language speakers).

Bibliography:

Mey, Jacob L., Pragmatics an Introduction, Blackwell Publisher, Oxford, 1994