Pragmatics and Discourse Structure Relationships

In this article we shall be examining the relationships between Pragmatics and Discourse Structure or some other ways speakers and writers encode meaning using some grammatical elements in discourse. Discourse (as we shall see in detail later), is the actual use of language in specific situations or what you may call a demonstration of language in action. Pragmatic meaning is expressed in discourse and this we have so far tried to prove in this study.

In an attempt to provide a detailed account of pragmatic strategies in a particular discourse context, it is important to examine how the discourse is structured, the various grammatical elements or discourse markers in the expression, how coherent the discourse is and of course how the overall content of the utterance is presented to convey certain semantic or pragmatic meanings.

Discourse Markers

Discourse Marker (DM) generally refers to “a syntactically heterogeneous class of expressions which are distinguished by their function in discourse and the kind of meaning they encode” (Blakemore 2006:221). There has not been a consensus among linguists as to what they are and how many they are in English. Some scholars have used such terms as pragmatic marker, discourse connectives or discourse particle to describe a discourse marker and again it is difficult to conclude that they all refer to the same thing. Using Blakemore’s model, we shall give examples of Discourse markers (DMs) in English as:

To call the above items ‘discourse markers’ is probably intended to explain the fact that they must be described at the level of discourse rather than sentence. The term ‘marker’ is to reflect the fact that their meanings must be analysed in terms of what they indicate or mark rather than what they describe (Blakemore 2006). But one thing is clear and it is that DMs function as markers of relationships between units of discourse. They are important to pragmatic research because they are expressions that often contribute to non-truth-conditional sentence meaning distinguished from other expressions by their roles in indicating relationship of the basic message to the foregoing discourse (Fraser, 1996).

Bearing in mind that pragmatics is viewed as meaning minus truth condition (while semantic is the study of truth-conditional meaning), DMs fall to pragmatics because they do not contribute to truth-conditional content of the utterance that contains them. Look at the following example:

A. You’re likely to go for your lunch earlier today, right?

B. Well, I haven’t thought of that

A. I forgot to tell you that Okey left this morning but forgot this laptop

B. Poor him.

You will agree that B’s use of ‘well’ does not contribute to the meaning of his response which basically is that he hadn’t thought of going for lunch earlier. The same thing happens in A’s second statement. Although the suggestion of contrast in the use of ‘but’ is noted, it still does not contribute to the meaning of the statement which is that

(i) Okey had travelled

(ii) He forgot his laptop. Some linguistics have argued that DMs do not contribute to truth-conditions representation truth and that truth condition itself is a property of mental representation rather the representation truth-conditions. This we see clearly in the above examples. The natural question that arises now is: if DMs do not contribute to truth-condition meaning what do they contribute to?

It is important to note here that DMs are not the only examples of non­truth conditional meaning. Fraser (1990, 1996) gave four examples of ‘pragmatic markers’ that express non-truth conditional meaning:

(i) Basic Markers (e.g. please!)which indicate the force of the intended message

(ii) Commentary Marker,which comment on the basic message (e.g. frankly)

(iii) Parallel Marker (e.g. damn), which encode an entire message.. .separate and additional to the basic and/or commentary message

(iv) Discourse Marker (e.g. after all, but and as a result) which in contrast to commentary markers do not contribute to ‘representational meaning’ but only have ‘procedural meaning, signalling how the basic message relates to the prior discourse (Blakemore 2006).

You will recall that Grice (1957) had earlier pointed out how implicature represents meaning above some truth-condition meaning. He later pointed out that while some utterances communicate information about the ‘central or ground-floor’ speech act, DMs like but or so communicate information about a ‘non-central or higher level’ speech act.

In the example above A performs a ground floor statement that Okey has travelled and has forgotten his laptop and at the same time a non-central speech act by indicating that he is drawing a contrast between the two parts of the statement. The function of but is to signal the performance of this act and hence it does not affect the truth value of the utterance. Those aspects of linguistic meaning that contribute to the content of the ground-floor statement are said to contribute to what is said, while those aspects of meaning which signal information about the performance of a non-central act are said to contribute to what is conventionally implicated.

Pragmatics of Non-sentences

In his “pragmatics of non-sentences,” Stainton (2006) points out that while interactants communicate with words such as ‘Lagos’ (as an answer to a question like ‘where do you live?’) or a noun phrase like ‘my father’ in answering a question like ‘who pays your school fees?’ they also do utter fully grammatical expressions “which happen to be less-than-sentential nouns and Nps, adjectives and AdjPs, as well as PPs, VPs, and so on.” In order words, “speakers routinely utter bare words and phrases not syntactically embedded in any sentences, and they thereby perform speech acts like asserting, asking, commanding and so on” (2006:266).

While we may not be concerned with theoretical issues raised by Stainton here, we must acknowledge the fact that both oral and written communications demonstrate the various ways language users perform acts, since they do not always have to speak or write in what theoretical grammarians may classify as “correct sentences.” An expression such as “the head of department” uttered by one of your friends at seeing a car driving in from the gate, is not a sentence but a noun phrase and the function of asserting which it performs is not from a prior linguistic context, rather a non-linguistic context. Similarly, if you say: “playing too careful” as you watch the Super Eagles, you appear to utter a verb phrase, but you have definitely made a point.

Statements that are not necessarily sentences appear in newspaper headlines, book titles, labels, adverts or other marketing communications. These appear as single words or phrases and interestingly readers are able to recognise their illocutionary force or the kind of speech acts they perform. Some linguists however believe that whenever a non-sentence is uttered, producing some speech act, the speaker actually uses a sentence. They think that non-sentence expressions may in fact be described as elliptical sentences. The term ellipsis is when certain items in a sentence are understandably elided, e.g. he has left the room,may just be ‘he has left.’ Stainton argues that this kind of explanation may be explaining away the existence of genuinely non-sentence speech acts.

Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretations

I have borrowed the term “Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretations” from Nunberg (2006) to explain further the fact that we often use expressions to refer to something that is not part of the denotational sense of that expression. In Unit 7 where we examined the term ‘reference’ in details, we noted that the natural language system enables us to use one thing to refer to another with which it has some close association. In the context of deference, Nunberg (2006) points out that figurative expressions such as metaphor, metonymy, polysemy etc. are cases of deferred interpretations.

Although many linguists or language users generally have considered, figuration as a mere play of language use with some stylistic effects, Nunberg argues that metaphors for instance are marked by background assumptions with cultural interests and that what creates the stylistic effect of say: wigs for judges, is “not the mechanism that generates it, but the marked assumptions that license it…the playful presupposition that certain (professionals) are better classified by their attire than by their function” (2006:344). If you will recall, Grice (1967) treats metaphors and other figures of speech as some kind of implicature, involving the violations of some truth conditions.

Nunberg however argues that deferred uses of expressions operate through a process of “meaning transfer” which is purely a pragmatic process. “Meaning transfer is the process that allows us to use an expression that denotes one property as the name of another property, provided there is a salient functional relation between the two” (p.346). So where there is a correspondence between the properties of one thing and the properties of another, the name of the first property is often used to refer to the properties of the other.

So examples of metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche are in fact cases of meaning transfer. If I say “we need more hands to finish the work” (synecdoche) where “hand” represents “men” there is a correspondence between the assumed properties of hands and that of men (hands being part of a man’s body) which in turn correspond with work (For a full detailed discussion see Geoffrey Nunberg: “The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation” in The Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell, 2006)

Pragmatics of Language Performance

Clark (2006) observes that traditional pragmatics had concentrated so much on “pre-planned, non-interactive” language, like that of novels, newspapers, broadcasting etc, without sufficient attention to interactive language performance in real life situations.

In his paper “pragmatics of language performance” he insists that in order to fully appreciate how language users interact, we must pay attention to “spontaneous, interactive language” of canteens, classrooms, offices, kitchens or football fields. In real life communicative context, speakers decide what to say and how to say it. For instance speakers will naturally apply discourse strategies such as repetitions, hesitations, fillers or even speech errors to communicate effectively. The language of conversation according to Clark is the best form of language in use that must be of interest to modern pragmatics.

The interactive language of conversation is performed through “communicative acts” and such interactive language has its origin in joint activities. “When people do things together in cafes, classrooms, and offices, they need to coordinate their individual actions, and they use a variety of communicative acts to achieve that coordination.. .communicative acts are themselves joint actions that require coordinating, and people have a special class of communicative acts for this coordination”. Communicative acts include (i) Signal made up of ‘content’ and ‘performance’ (ii) display made up of indicating (or pointing). For example:

Jide: I lost my grandmother last week; did I tell you?

Obinna: Oh no!

Jide utters a sentence as a signal to Obinna. Notice that a signal here is the action by which Jide meanssomething to Obinna. Jide performs his utterance by asking him a question in order to gain his approval to tell him a story. The choice of what to say i.e. the choice that Jide makes to use a question to seek Obinna’s permission is known as content. The choice of using his voice and perhaps a nod, or gestures to designate himself as the speaker while Obinna is the hearer is called performance. Content is the what, while performance is the how. If after the story of his grandmother’s death Jide asks Obinna, “which is your Dad’s car?” and he points, the act of pointing becomes the Display. Display in this context is referred to as communicative act of indicating.

The act of pointing is an index to the car. Speakers “perform what they say in a particular time, place and manner, constituting the right moment, for the right duration, originating from and directed to the right locations, at the right amplitude, with the right gestures. They display their signals to others in order to designate such things as the speaker, addressee, time, place and content of their signals” (p. 366-7). All these are crucial to the full understanding of pragmatics as the study of language in context of speakers and situations. (For details on Pragmatics of Language Performance, see Herbert Clark in The Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell, 2006)

CONCLUSION

The relationship between pragmatics and discourse analysis is such that one presumes the other. Up till now some scholars still believe that the two are more or less the same, but it is safer to state that discourse analysis presumes pragmatics i.e. a good discourse analysis of a text is likely to take into account issues that are of interest to pragmatics.It is quite clear however that most pragmatic studies have been carried out on utterances or text that may be describe as discourse. As we can see, discourse markers, non-sentence expressions, deferred interpretations and interactive language performances are various areas of discourse that have significant pragmatic implications.