What we say and what we mean: an introduction to pragmatics

If you've ever been in a conversation with a pedant, you're probably familiar with this exchange:

Person trying to communicate: Ambiguous, vague, loose or metaphorical sentence
Pedant: Ah, I shall take that literally.
Communicator: You know what I mean.
Pedant: But you didn't say it!

You may well be the pedant in this exchange. I have been, often enough, and it's taken me a couple of years of linguistics courses to see why this is a silly position to take. (Alas, the preceding decades of Life were apparently insufficient for the lesson "Don't make other people's lives difficult for no reason".)

The answer to the pedant is, of course, that you did say it. If what mattered was certain choices of vocabulary and grammar, then speaking in flawless, metaphor-free Latin would give pedants no cause to complain - but no communication would have taken place. (Probably. If your pedant has a working knowledge of Latin, chat away.) If your words are sufficient for an exchange of meaning, then they have served their purpose. Language is not for grammar books, it is for communicating.

Now, whilst this is the view of pretty much everyone working in modern linguistics - and the de facto position of almost all humans - historically, philosophers disagreed, and their misconceptions led indirectly to modern pedantry.

Let us begin, as is often the case, with Aristotle, father of modern thought, wrong about almost everything. In this case, human communication.

His view goes like this: You have a thought. You put that thought into words. You speak the words. The listener hears the words. She converts the words into thoughts. You have successfully transmitted thoughts from your head into hers. Language, therefore, is just a code. At this point, obsession with the details of this code makes sense: if you say "Can you pass me the water?" instead of "May you pass me the water?", you have transmitted a different thought. You have failed to communicate.

But very clearly, this is not the be-all and end-all of human communication. What if you say "Can you pass me that?" and point? What if you don't say anything, but gesture frantically at the the jug whilst fanning your mouth?

Language is a code; it does assign meaning to otherwise arbitrary combinations of sounds or signs; but that code is a very sophisticated tool that we wield to help us with our underlying strategy: guessing what other people are thinking.

So whilst linguistics as a field does tend to be focused on how syntax (grammar), phonology (pronunciation) and semantics (meaning) work, there is a growing consensus that even with a complete understanding of language in its Ideal form, we won't truly understand it until we know how people use it. And that, ladies and gentleman, is pragmatics: the difference between an ideal sentence, and an utterance in its context.

Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (Part 4 of 4)

Part 4 of my notes on Historical Linguistics: An introduction by Lyle Campbell. ISBN: 9780262531597  (Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here.)

Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (Part 3 of 4)

Part 3 of my notes on Historical Linguistics: An introduction by Lyle Campbell. ISBN: 9780262531597  (Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here. Read Part 4 here.)

Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (Part 2 of 4)

Part 2 of my notes on Historical Linguistics: An introduction by Lyle Campbell. ISBN: 9780262531597  (Read Part 1 here. Read Part 3 here, Part 4 here.)

Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (Part 1 of 4)

This week's reading is Historical Linguistics: An introduction by Lyle Campbell. ISBN: 9780262531597  (Read Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here.)

Historical linguistics is basically what everyone thinks linguists do. Actually, that's not quite true. People who have heard of linguistics as a field of study, think that it involves historical linguistics. Most people, on hearing "I'm a linguist", immediately ask which languages you speak. Which, let's be fair, is a valid question even when linguist means studier-of-languages, not student-of-languages; we are perhaps more likely than the average English speaker to be interested in other languages.

However! There is an idea that the study of language involves figuring out where words come from, how languages are related to one another, and how they've changed. This is, indeed, what linguistics historically involved, though it is no longer the exclusive, or even main, field of study. But it is very interesting, and more accessible than any other facet of the subject - except perhaps infant language acquisition.

Here are my notes on the first three chapters of the book.

The International Phonetic Alphabet


In order to write sensibly about phonemes and allophones, we need a phonetic writing system - one where each symbol stands for a single sound, and each sound has its own symbol. Most commonly used is the International Phonetic Alphabet (though frequently with some personalisation).

Phonetics and phonology

If you have ever seen Pygmalion, or more likely My Fair Lady, then you may be familiar with the Professor of Phonetics. The study of human speech sounds is nowadays split into two fields: phonetics and phonology.

Phonetics is the study of acoustics and articulation: How, physically, are various sounds made? How do we recognise which are which? Which sounds are easier to make? Do people aim for individual sounds, or for whole phrases? What is 'stress'? Is it the same in every language?

Phonology is the study of the human perception of speech sounds.
A phoneme is what speakers perceive to be a sound of their language. I would say "it's a letter", but no writing system actually uses one-letter-per-phoneme (except the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed for this purpose). Still, it's close enough: /l/, /t/, /i/, and /n/ are all phonemes.

Introduction

Hello!

I'm Ollyver. Welcome to my ramblings on linguistics.

I am a graduate student of linguistics in the UK. This involves a lot of reading. Reading happens to be a favourite hobby of mine, but alas! papers and textbooks tend not to sweep you along in the same way as a good novel, and my undergraduate studies did not prepare me to read anything not written in algebra.

As I crawled through a (very interesting) introduction to the dialects of English, making notes to give myself a sense of accomplishment, it occured to me that other people might be interested in the short-notes version of many of these books and papers. Especially having spent my undergraduate years complaining about the appalling state of science reporting, which makes it impossible to find out what serious research is going on without a journal subscription and a degree in the relevant subject.

So here, I hope, is a layman's guide to current linguistic thought. I intend to write some posts to give you an overview of the whole field, but the bulk of it will probably focus on my current reading. Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately), linguistic theory is not yet so complex that it requires more than a brief overview to make research papers legible. Perhaps, unlike the physical sciences, it may stay that way. But that, I think, is a discussion for another time.