PRAGMATICS ACTS
Pragmatics
starts out from an active conception of language when it is being used.
Pragmatics is where the action is; but what is the action? Clearly, the above
advertisement is an effort to ‘sell’ something: a cocktail bar, a particular environment,
a particular customer, a promise of good times, and so on.
The
advertisement invites us in, so to speak. But it doesn’t do that by saying;
‘Come into my parlour (or cocktail bar)’ (Such an invitation would be too
obvious or too vulgar to be effective).
A parlour (it makes
sense that there is a place where the customers can come in to have some yummy
cocktails implicitly meaning).
Among the most
common pragmatic acts are those of ‘implicit denial’.
Example:
When somebody had got cancer, the speaker’s meaning is not to blame the patient
by saying ‘how many packs of cigarette you have smoked’. In other words we
should treat the disease not condemn the patient.
Implicit
denial talks about politeness, indecency and any taboo things.
Here
are some notes in pragmatic acts:
·
No
explicit denial takes place (performative utterance)
·
Solely
the user’s context
e.g.
A reporter said ‘Mrs. X had contracted the disease from her former husband’,
not; ‘Mrs. X who allegedly had contracted the disease’… or; ‘Mrs. X, who said…
that she had contracted the disease…’
Bibliography:
Mey, Jacob L., Pragmatics an Introduction,
Blackwell Publisher, Oxford,
1994
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