Wednesday, May 2, 2012

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction: What It Is?

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is easier to apply than to explain. Explaining it is complicated by the fact that many conflicting formulations have been proposed over the past sixty years. This might suggest that there is no one way of drawing the distinction and that how to draw it is merely a terminological question, a matter of arbitrary stipulation. In my view, though, these diverse formulations, despite their conflicts, all shed light on the distinction as it is commonly applied, in both linguistics and philosophy.
Although it is generally clear what is at issue when people apply the distinction to specific linguistic phenomena, what is less clear, in some cases anyway, is whether a given phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic, or both. Fortunately, there are other phenomena that are uncontroversially semantic or, as the case may be, uncontroversially pragmatic. Their example will help us get clear on what the semantics-pragmatics distinction is.
Linguistic Background
In linguistics the category of pragmatics has served mainly as a bin for disposing of phenomena that would otherwise be the business of semantics (as part of grammar) to explain. Relegating such phenomena to pragmatics freed linguistic theory, already becoming more and more complex, of numerous additional complications. A notable exception to this strategy was the systematic attempt by generative semanticists, in their campaign to undermine the autonomy of syntax, to empty the "pragmatic wastebasket," so-called by Bar-Hillel, who wisely advised linguists "to first bring some order into the contents of this wastebasket" (1971, p. 401). Many defied his advice and included everything but the kitchen sink in semantics. The performative hypothesis was the most prominent example (for a brief history see Sadock 1988). Historically, generative semantics is best remembered for generating the "linguistics wars" which have been chronicled in detail by Harris (1993).
In a more positive vein, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics has served to separate strictly linguistic facts about utterances from those that involve the actions, intentions, and inferences of language users (speaker-hearers).
These facts can all be accommodated on the supposition that semantic information pertains to linguistic expressions, whereas pragmatic information pertains to utterances and facts surrounding them. Semantic information about sentences is part of sentence grammar, and it includes information about expressions whose meanings are relevant to use rather than to truth conditions. Linguistically encoded information can pertain to how the present utterance relates to the previous, to the topic of the present utterance, or to what the speaker is doing. That there are these sorts of linguistically encoded information shows that the business of sentence semantics cannot be confined to giving the proposition it expresses. Sentences can do more than express propositions. Also, as we have seen, there are sentences which do less than express propositions, because they are semantically incomplete.
Pragmatic information concerns facts relevant to making sense of a speaker's utterance of a sentence (or other expression). The hearer thereby seeks to identify the speaker's intention in making the utterance. In effect the hearer seeks to explain the fact that the speaker said what he said, in the way he said it. Because the intention is communicative, the hearer's task of identifying it is driven partly by the assumption that the speaker intends him to do this. The speaker succeeds in communicating if the hearer identifies his intention in this way, for communicative intentions are intentions whose "fulfillment consists in their recognition" (Bach and Harnish 1979, p. 15). Pragmatics is concerned with whatever information is relevant, over and above the linguistic properties of a sentence, to understanding its utterance.
Consider some examples involving pronouns. There is no semantic basis for interpreting the pronouns one way in
Ann told Betty that she wanted to borrow her car.
and the opposite way in
Ann told Betty that she could not borrow her car.
The hearer relies on extralinguistic information to interpret one utterance one way and the other in the opposite way. The so-called "E-type" pronoun in
Most philosophers who have written a book think it is brilliant.
is interpreted as going proxy for the description 'the book he wrote,' and the "pronoun of laziness" in
John carried his luggage but everyone else checked it in.
is also interpreted descriptively- 'it' is not taken as being used to refer to John's luggage (see Bach 1987a, pp. 258-261, and Neale 1990, pp. 180-191). In none of these cases is there any semantic requirement that the pronoun be interpreted in a certain way. The explanation for the preferred interpretation is pragmatic.
As part of linguistics and philosophy of language, pragmatics does not provide detailed explanations of how interpretation works in actual practice. This is a problem for cognitive and social psychology. For this reason it seems futile for linguists to seek a formal pragmatics. The task of explaining how utterances change context, for example, or how they exploit context, is not a job for linguistic theory by itself. The task is impossible without introducing general considerations about human reasoning and rational communication. Similarly, it is unreasonable to complain that theories like Grice's account of conversational implicature provide no algorithm for conversational inference, so that, when applied to particular cases they simply pull implicatures out of a hat (see Sperber and Wilson 1986, Kempson 1988, Davies 1996). This is not just a problem for Grice's theory.
At any rate, whereas semantic information is grammatically associated with the linguistic material uttered, pragmatic information arises only in relation to the act of uttering that material. (In fact, a stony silence can impart pragmatic information and thereby communicate something.) Whereas semantic information is encoded in what is uttered, pragmatic information is generated by the act of uttering it. No sentence encodes the fact that it is being uttered. Even the sentence 'I am speaking' is not analytic. The act of producing the utterance exploits the information encoded but by its very performance creates new information. That information, combined with the information encoded, provides the basis for the hearer's identification of the speaker's communicative intention. Contextual information is relevant to the hearer's inference only insofar as it can reasonably be taken as intended to be taken into account, and that requires the supposition that the speaker is producing the utterance with the intention that it be taken into account. In contrast, the encoded information provides the input to the hearer's inference in any context.
 
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1 comment:

  1. What Is Semantics?
    Semantics refers to the meaning of words in a language and the meaning within the sentence.

    Semantics considers the meaning of the sentence without the context. The field of semantics focuses on three basic things: “the relations of words to the objects denoted by them, the relations of words to the interpreters of them, and, in symbolic logic, the formal relations of signs to one another (syntax)" [1]. Semantics is just the meaning that the grammar and vocabulary impart, it does not account for any implied meaning.

    In this sense, there's a focus on the general 'rules' of language usage.

    Pragmatic Word Usage
    Pragmatic meaning looks at the same words and grammar used semantically, except within context. In each situation, the various listeners in the conversation define the ultimate meaning of the words, based on other clues that lend subtext to the meaning

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