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Tetyana Popovych
Pragmatics of
Echo-Utterances
Pragmatics, as a
sub-discipline of linguistics, can be said to thematise
the relationships between language use and the language user in a situational
context (cf. the adjective "pragmatic" refers to the capacity of a
social actor to adjust to situational circumstances). Initially, pragmatics was
mainly bracketed by analytical
philosophy, as the first themes it developed
were indeed speech act
theory and the study of principles of information exchange.
Since, however, a number of further thematic strands have been added, with a
certain amount of import from sociology:
– the study of presuppositions: the pragmatic interest in the implicit meaning
dimensions of language use has been extended to include meanings which are
logically entailed by the use of a particular structure. Presuppositions are
implicit meanings which are subsumed by a particular wording in the sense that
the interpretation of the latter is conditional upon the tacit acceptance of
these implicit meanings;
– face
and politeness phenomena: the pragmatic interest in the
communication of speech acts, in particular, as well as the interest in the
social-relational aspects of and situational constraints on information
exchange, more generally, are at the basis of an interest
in face and politeness phenomena;
– the study
of reference is essentially a
pragmatic theme: the focus is on how speakers establish various types of
linkage between their utterances and elements in a situational context (e.g.
objects, persons, etc.) [3,
p.83-91].
Pragmatics distinguishes two intents or meanings in
each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the
informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other – the communicative
intent or the speaker's meaning (D.Sperber and W.Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and produce a
communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence which often includes
one's knowledge about the social distance, social status between the speakers
involved, the cultural knowledge such as politeness, and the linguistic
knowledge, both explicit and implicit.
Pragmaticians
are also keen on exploring why interlocutors can successfully converse with one another in a
conversation. A basic idea is that interlocutors obey certain principles in
their participation so as to sustain the conversation. One such principle is
the Cooperative Principle which assumes that interactants
cooperate in the conversation by contributing to the ongoing speech event (H.P.Grice, 1975). Another assumption is the Politeness
Principle (D.Leech, 1983) that maintains
interlocutors behave politely to one another, since people respect each other's
face (R.H.Brown, 1978). A cognitive explanation to
social interactive speech events was provided by D.Sperber
and W.Wilson (1986) who hold that in verbal
communication people try to be relevant to what they intend to say and to whom
an utterance is intended [5, p.179-198].
One more basic definition, a speech act, is an utterance which serves as a
functional unit in communication. Three distinct levels of
speech act are distinguished: the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, and what one does by
saying it, and dubs these the “locutionary”, the
“illocutionary” and the “perlocutionary” act,
respectively [1, p.19-39].
Speech acts aims to do justice to the fact that even
though words (phrases, sentences) encode information, people do more things
with words than convey information, and that when
people do convey information, they often convey more than their words encode.
Another useful distinction is that of a speech act set,
which may be defined as the set of functional strategies typically used by
native speakers of the target language to perform a given speech act (Cohen,
1983). Any of the speech act-specific strategies in a speech act set might be
recognized as constituting the speech act in question, depending on the
situation and the cultural group involved [4, p.39-42].
Fortunately,
descriptions of speech acts keep improving, as more empirical work continues to
appear. Despite some reservations about the broad terms used to describe speech
act distinctions (L.Beebe, H.Warner,
2001), speech acts have been described in terms of their sociopragmatic
and pragmalinguistic nature. In other words,
researchers have collected empirical evidence as to the appropriateness of
performing speech acts in certain contexts — the sociopragmatic aspect (e.g.,
whether/when you could ask a colleague how much he makes a month), and also
just what language forms are appropriate for performing these speech acts — the
pragmalinguistic aspect [2, p.32-34].
This amount of
information permits to infer that the impact of pragmatics is essential and
multifaceted. The study of speech acts, for instance, provided illuminating
explanation into sociolinguistic conduct. The findings of the cooperative
principle and politeness principle also provided insights into person-to-person
interactions. The choice of different linguistic means for a communicative act
and the various interpretations for the same speech act elucidate human
mentality in the relevance principle which contributes to the study of
communication in particular and cognition in general.
Echo-utterances which have the form of elliptical
utterances relate to a previous utterance, and are similar to it in form; they
inform the interlocutor that the speaker has misperceived part of the previous
utterance or refuses to accept it, reveal a great
abundance of feelings, the author's inner world and highlight misunderstanding
and all obscure passages.
Echo-utterances are fundamentally different from other
grammatical constructions. They are derived as a result of certain
transformations affecting a syntactical form of a sentence.
From the syntactic point of view
the majority of echo-utterances represent elliptical sentences correlated with
the certain components of a previous utterance, where they serve as: subject, predicate,
object, attribute, adverbial modifier predicative or the
compound verbal predicate.
Echo-utterances
have the following typical characteristics: they relate to a previous
utterance, and are similar to it in form and meaning (the relation between the
echo and the preceding utterance with which it correlates has to be one of
“pragmatic” or contextual entailment). Echo-utterances inform the addressee has
misperceived part of the previous utterance or refuses to accept it. They also
reflect emotional diversity and reveal misunderstanding. Basic messages of
echo-utterances highlight the addressee’s perception and attitude to situation.
Context isn’t sufficiently enough to determine locutionary,
illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Very rarely perlocutionary act intended by addresser implies
communicative intention. Correlation between locution, illocution and perlocution takes place very seldom. More frequently there
are contradictions between them.
In oral communication interpretation of echo-utterances is facilitated by
the availability of prosodic characteristics of speech and paralinguistic means
of communication. In written discourse these elements are missing and in
absence of corresponding punctuation marks and additional lexical markers the
interpretation of basic message becomes ambiguous.
Alongside with the above-mentioned observations, utterances serve the
function, that is questioning or objecting to part of the interlocutor’s
utterance, and as far as we can tell they are pretty much interchangeable: they
are pragmatically appropriate in the same contexts. They also seek to ascertain
what had just been asked or intended, or express surprise, amazement or other
feelings and emotions.
Bibliography:
1.
Austin J.L. How To Do Things With Words. The
William – Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975. –
72p.
2.
Beebe L. M. and Waring H. Z. Sociopragmatic
vs. Pragmalinguistic Failure: How Useful is the Distinction? Paper presented
at the NYSTESOL Applied Linguistics Winter Conference, Feb. 3, 2001. – Pp.22-34.
3.
Cohen A. D. and Lassegard J. P. A Students' Guide to Strategies
for Language and Culture Learning and Use. Minneapolis, 2004. – Pð.83-91.
4.
Cohen A.D. and Shively R. L. Measuring Speech Acts with Multiple Rejoinder DCT's //
Language
Testing Update, Amsterdam. – 2003. – Pp.39-42.
5.
Sperber
L. and Wilson D. Relevance. Communicative Cognition. –Cambridge. 1986. – Pp.179-198.