Walter Bickmann HS: Semantics SS 2001 Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Chr. Küper

Beyond the sentence

Semantics in context –a pragmatic approach

1.Introduction:

Ain`t what ya say, tis how ya say it...(american song) and when ya say what (added)

As the song indicates, this paper shall mainly be con- cerned with the importance of context in which utter- ances are made. It shall be concerned with the prag- matic aspects of utterances and argue that one-sided linguistic theories (e.g. the referential theory) are insufficient to cover all possible meanings that an ut- terance may have in any circumstance.

Furthermore it shall be concerned with the differences between the linguistic disciplines Semantics and Prag- matics which are equally important and which both con- tribute to an overall understanding of meaning.

“ As things are now, Semantics would be lost in confu- sion if it tried to fit into an orderly pattern the welter of possible ways that forms, with their meanings may be used in particular contexts;...” (Connor Ferris, 1983:16)

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1.1. The development of modern linguistics:

The history of modern linguistics reveals a shift from almost exclusive concern with phonological and morpho- logical units, with structural aspects of various lan- guages to increased attention to words, phrases, sen- tences and discourses.

Similarly, there has been an extension from considera- tions of the forms of linguistic expressions alone to considerations of their meaning, and finally their ac- tual use in communicative situations.

Since Ferdinand de Saussure 1 , who is regarded as one of

the initiators of modern (structural) linguistics, dis- tinguished between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, the former referring more or less to structural aspects of a lan- guage, the latter more to the actual use of language, linguists have long been primarily concerned with for- mal aspects. (Burger/Imkalsky,1978:21ff.)

However, the past decades have seen a lot of research being undertaken towards an understanding of language and communication in its actual use. Nowadays, Communi- cation is of interest not only to linguists, but also

1 Interestingly, de Saussure’s ever cited distinction

between Signifiant and signifié dates back to Classical Greece where a similar distinction between ‘semainon’ and ‘semainomenon’ was made (Januschek, 1976: 262ff.) Quite a few topics that are of interest to modern lin- guists have already been explored by the ancient Greek, anyway.

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to other disciplines such as sociology or psychology etc. (Watzlawick (“Man kann nicht, nicht kommunizie- ren”), von Thun etc.)

2. Pragmatics vs, Semantics

Within linguistics there neither seems to be a clear- cut distinction as to where semantics ends and pragmat- ics begins; nor does it seem to be easy to detect whether something is looked at from a pragmatic or a socio/psycholinguistic point of view.

2.1.Pragmatics- a definition?

The term ‘Pragmatic’ is often used nowadays, usually in contrast to ‘Semantic’. The development of the distinc- tion can best be associated with Charles Morris (1946- Semiotics (Syntax/semantics/pragmatics) who said: “Semantics deals with the signification of signs in all modes of signifying” while “Pragmatics deals with the origin, uses, and effects of signs within the behaviour in which they occur.”

This would suggest that pragmatics is a broader subject of which semantics is merely a part, and in fact some do look at it this way. Others would use the term for the purely behavioural aspects of communication -what is left when we substract semantics from the total com- plex of behaviour.

It is difficult to draw a dividing line even in theory between the study of words and their meanings on the one hand, and on the other the way in which humans use those words and their meanings.(Connor Ferris, 1 983: 38f.)

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3. Terminological problems:

Many linguists have fairly different approaches towards linguistics and not seldom apply different terminology or use terms in quite different senses.

“Examples of terms that need clarification with respect to the range of things to which they apply are ‘con- text’, ‘belief of speaker’, and ‘pragmatic’. Does ‘con- text’ include speaker intention or not? ... The term ‘pragmatic’ has been used to cover a wide range of phe- nomena. Is it indeed proper to include all of them in the set of things to which the single term ‘pragmatic‘ applies?” (Sanders/Wirth,1985:11)

However, two general argumentation-lines and linguistic interests may be distinguished.

The first still seems to be primarily concerned with the structural aspects of languages, the second more with pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects, with the actual use of language in various situations. Although the different disciplines of linguistics may overlap in many cases, they all contribute to an over- all understanding of languages and their meanings and are more or less equally important.

3. Languages in motion

Languages are constantly changing, they are in constant motion. When, fifty years ago, somebody had said My mouse is out of order, nobody would have understood what he/she was talking about; nowadays the statement can easily be related to

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the computer-mouse which might be in need of repair.

Words disappear, new ones are being created (made-up neologisms; e.g. wellness), some words loose their original connotation (e.g. geil) and others are being replaced (e.g. siech- krank).

Similarities may be seen when it comes to utterances. As the basic connotations of words may change overtime, so too, do their meanings when used in different situa- tions.

4.Utterance-bound information/Pragmatics

Particular contexts and use may change the original, basic connotations that are semantically affiliated with expressions. The use of words with a negative con- notation can in particular contexts well mean something positive as the following example shows.

4.1. Examples:

When somebody utters this sentence which admittedly might seem a little bit adventurous:

Ich habe mich in Scheiße geschmissen he/she would be understood in the right way by only few Germans.

The expression is used by people in some parts of Northrhine-Westphalia to say that they have dressed up to go out for lunch or to a concert etc.

When one was not familiar with the particular meaning of the expression in that context, one might well be a little bit disturbed when confronted with such a state- ment.

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As said earlier, this paper shall be concerned with meaning that is not included in the actual linguistic forms being used but is revealed when utterances are produced on certain occasions.

The sentence

The tree is about to fall expresses a certain meaning regardless of the context in which it is uttered. If uttered by a speaker in a particular context however, the sentence has a determi- nate communicative or illocutionary force.

Depending on the context it can be uttered either to just inform somebody that the tree is coming down or as an attempt to warn the addressee.

“Thus three distinct aspects of linguistic structure are to be distinguished:

(1) the linguistic forms themselves; (2) the semantic characteristics of those forms, which are identifiable independently of the context of use; and (3) the prag- matic characteristics of those forms that are only identifiable with reference to the context of use.” (Sanders/Wirth,1985: 3)

In many cases some of the information conveyed by an utterance is based on particular situations.

When Caesar said

et tu Brute?

he meant “are you also in the conspiracy to kill me?” When one was not familiar with the context in which

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Caesar made that particular utterance, one would hardly get an idea of what he was talking about.

However, it is not always easy to decide whether some- thing which is likely to be understood in context should actually count as a part of the basic meaning or not. The question Can you pass the salt?

does not become a request because of the situation in which it is used; speakers of English know that the standard use of such an utterance is a request. (basic connotation)

The Question

Can you reach the window?

on the other hand does not make clear what the speaker wants. Depending on the context it may either be a re- quest to open the window in case that it is closed, or to close it as it might be cold outside.

When somebody says

It is hot in here it can, again depending on context, be regarded as a request to open the window or it may just be a state- ment.

4.2.‘Oberflächenstruktur’ vs ‘Tiefenstruktur’ The philosopher L. Wittgenstein believes that one does only know the meaning of words and sentences when one knows how they are being used in various situations. (Use-theory) Additionally he is convinced that language consists of a so called “Oberflächenstruktur” which is based on

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lexical and syntactical factors and a “Tiefenstruktur” which can vary and determine the meaning of an expres- sion in different situations.

(Wittgenstein,1967:128ff.)

Maybe (hopefully) the following example is somehow re- lated to what Wittgenstein meant.

When a German wants to drop out of his job and apply for a new one he/she will normally get a certificate in which the former employer says if and how well they “behaved”. Due to an agreement that nothing bad must be said about the person who wants to apply for a new job in these certificates, the employers have invented cer- tain formulae which make it obvious if the former em- ployee has done a good job or not.

The formula Herr Manfred hat seine Arbeiten stets zu unserer vollsten Zufriedenheit erledigt, means that he is very suitable for the new employer The formula Herr Manta war stets bemüht, seine Arbeiten zu unserer Zufriedenheit zu erledigen, on the other hand means that he is not suitable for the job.

On a scale from 1 to 6, Herr Manfred would have achieved the 1, whereas Herr Manta would have failed and received the 6.

The “Oberflächenstruktur” of both formulae is positive, yet the “Tiefenstruktur” of the latter is negative. Out of context the two statements would be regarded as not differing much in their semantic content.

Again it is the (pragmatic) context in which they are used that makes all the difference.

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5. Utterances in Context

J. Austin who was influenced by Wittgenstein was also convinced that the grammatical and lexical elements of a sentence often do not bear meaning that is completely independent of context.

Siegfried J. Schmidt has a similar opinion: “ Wer sich etwa in Fragen der Referenztheorie und Se- mantik..., bei der Beschreibung der Negation...,nicht mit unzureichenden syntaktischen Antworten zufrieden geben wollte, mußte Texte-in-Funktion, also Sprechakte in einbettenden Kommunikationssituationen entsprechend mit berücksichtigen;

ma.W.: er mußte von einer Textlinguistik zu einer

Textpragmatik übergehen.” (Schmidt, 1973:23)

Utterance meaning goes beyond what is actually said: it also includes what is implied (or presupposed).

5.1. Examples:

Thus it is context dependent when an Austrian says: Ich habe mir den Fuß gebrochen.

Germans would necessarily think that the concerned fel- low had really broken his foot. However, as the Austri- ans do not distinguish between Fuß and Bein, it would depend on the context whether the person had broken his foot or his leg; obviously it would rather be the leg than the foot.

Likewise it would be context-dependent when an Austrian says:

Ich muß noch meine Doschn (Taschen) holen. He/she may come back with one bag or with more than one, as the

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form of the utterance remains the same regardless if the person was talking about one or more bags.

However,Leonard Bloomfield`s sample expression I`m hungry maybe a bit more concise and convincing here. It would normally be regarded as the expression of a speaker being in demand of some sort of nourishment; yet there is one type of situation where it means some- thing quite different; uttered by a child around bed- time it can also mean “I do not want to go to bed yet”. (Connor Fer- ris,1983:16)

Thus, in many cases information is not bound to the ac- tual words being used, but to specific contexts and in- dividual situations in which words or sentences are used.

“...the utterance of a linguistic form on a given occa- sion carries information or significance beyond the literal interpretation of the form assigned by the grammatical rules of the language” (Sanders/ Wirth, 1985:4) Utterance-bound information will be understood only by people who know both the language of the utterance and the particular situation where the utterance takes place.

When somebody says:

I meet you at the bank tomorrow.

one would need to know who the speaker was, whom he was addressing, what sort of bank he was talking about and what date he was referring to.

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All this information is not given in the actual words that are used but can only be understood in the par- ticular context in which they are uttered.

In the following example the speaker does not only state the fact that he/she has taken an aspirin, but also communicates the implicated interpretation that he/she does not feel any better yet. This information, again, is not part of the actual words that are used.

Question: Do you feel any better?

Response: I've just taken another aspirin.

5. Non-cognitive meanings/ Parameaning

Speakers of a language do not only convey cognitive in- formation when using words or sentences. “A host of other values are conveyed by words apart from their cognitive meaning.” (Connor Ferris, 1983:16)

The different ways that speakers of English may say `um` or `er` in hesitating (phatic communication?) do not have any cognitive meaning but are mere noises that people make when trying to think of the next word to say.

Yet any hearer who is familiar with the language may get an idea whether the speaker is a child or an adult, whether a man or a woman; they may well give a clue as to what part of the country the speaker comes from. Given longer utterances, one is often able to tell whether the speaker is happy or angry, whether he is polite or rude and so on. These factors certainly have

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an impact on the meaning of an utterance and may even be contradictory to what is being said. (e.g. irony)

Cognitive meaning is tied to the use of language, whereas parameaning is often conveyed by movements or facial expressions.

For example, it is quite possible that a man who wins an argument does so not because of using the right words but because the quality of his voice and the ex- pression on his face are those of a confident man.

When, after the Lewinsky-affair people looked again at the videos that had been taken of former U.S. president Bill Clinton who had long denied to have had a rela- tionship with Miss Lewinsky, they found quite a few contradictory facial expressions/eye movements, signal- ling that the president had indeed been lying.

“There are many possible ways to classify parameanings; here we group them into three main classes. Some may be regarded as tied to the linguistic forms used, irre- spective of who is using them; some involve information about the speaker as a member of various social group- ings; and others tell us something about the speaker as an individual:” (Connor Ferris,1983: 19)

Other factors that accompany and influence meaning of utterances are voice quality and intonation/pitch, non- verbal factors (body language), occupational or class dialects or the level of formality being applied.

Intonation contour and stress-pattern are technically referred to as prosodic features. The various forms of

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body-language (gestures, posture, eye movements, facial expressions) are technically called paralinguistic fea- tures. Paralinguistic features are also meaningful and serve to modulate or punctuate the utterances which they accompany.(Lyons,1977:14)

Paralinguistic features alongside with prosodic fea- tures contribute to the overall meaning of an utter- ance. One could possibly say that they carry ‘paramean- ing’, the term being used by D.Connor Ferris.

Mental state parameanings are mostly expressed through aspects of pronunciation.

The utterance

Did you do this?

may put a smile on a child´s face when pronounced in one way. When pronounced differently it may well lead it to leave everything behind and take off.

5.1. Differences

The sex of a speaker can often be distinguished when looking at utterances. Women tend to express themselves quite differently from men by using words or sentence constructions that men would hardly use.

“It would be fairly unusual to hear a man say I do so love those teeny posies because whatever other properties the sentence may have it is strongly imbued with the parameaning female.” (Connor Ferris,1983:22)

Women on the other hand would hardly make use of the following expression which tough Australian men use.

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Good on you mate. Here, the parameaning male is strongly imbued with the utterance.

As remarked earlier, cognitive (lexical) meaning and the various sorts of parameaning are all part of the information that speakers convey when they talk.

Another kind of extra-semantic significance that can be conveyed by the utterance of a sentence in context is identification of the topic-comment structure of the sentence.

Different topics are signalled by the formal differ- ences between the two sentences This sonata is easy to play on this violin and This violin is easy to play this sonata on, which have the same meaning and illocutionary

force.(connor Ferris, 1983:5) Again it depends on the actual context which sentence is used.

6. Speech acts

The attempt towards general theories of meaning and communication for a long time have been dominated by two general assumptions commonly agreed on by lin- guists: firstly, that communication could be suffi- ciently described in terms of encoding and decoding signals, a model which dates back as far as to Aris- totle, and secondly, that the meaning of a sentence would be determined by its truth conditions.

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Austin (1957), was the first to remark that utterances do more than just giving statements which can be de- scribed as being either true or false.

He pointed out that some linguistic utterances consti- tuted what he called performative speech acts.

A good example sentence is:

I hereby name this ship Fred Olsen.

The act of naming the ship is performed coherently by uttering such a formula.

When somebody says:

I hereby swim the act of swimming cannot be performed by just saying it.

Other performative acts are warning, promising and for- bidding.

The verbs used in the appropriate formulae are often called performative verbs.

Austin distinguished locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts.

“ The way to define these three has not always been wholly clear, but the first seems to have been intended by Austin to cover the production of the utterance as a form; the second will then be his term for the non- linguistic act done in the process of saying something- e.g. a promise or a warning...; and the third can be described as the effect produced by the utterance.” (Connor Ferris, 1983:123)

Felicity conditions:

Austin also said that the values true and false, which

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are commonly applied to statements , do not fit perfor- mative utterances in the same way.

“Suppose you are just about to name the ship, you have been appointed to name it, and you are just about to bang the bottle against the stem; but at that very mo- ment some low type comes up, snatches the bottle out of your hand, breaks it on the stem, shouts out `I name this ship the Generallissimo Stalin`, and then for good measure kicks away the chocks. (Austin, 1961) In this case, what the low type does, is not so much false as unjustified, and a failure as an act of nam- ing. If it were to be regarded as an ordinary consta- tive utterance describing what he was doing then it would be false, but this is not so- it purports to be carrying out the ceremony, yet is simply not done in accordance with the accepted proprieties.

These conventional requirements for each of the possi- ble illocutionary acts are called the felicity condi- tions.”(connor Ferris, 1983: 124)

Although the given example may well be a bit far fetched, there are others that are more obvious. Sincerity is one of the felicity conditions that is fairly common in speech acts.

A promise, for instance, can hardly be said to have been made properly, when the person giving it has no intention of keeping it.

Authorisation is another point. When a person, claiming to be a priest but not actually being one, carries out a marriage, the sentence I hereby pronounce you man and wife would fail to achieve marriage.

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It was observed, that performative utterances in most cases have typical forms which distinguish them from constative utterances.

This form starts with the first-person pronoun I, and goes on with a verb appropriate to a performative act, in the present simple form; if the performance is meant to be fully explicit it may contain the verb `hereby`, thus giving something like I hereby promise.(Connor Ferris, 1983: 124)

Certainly could every utterance be more or less r e- garded as a speech act. A question certainly would be an act of questioning. A demand would be an act of de- manding something.

However, what Austin primarily seems to have had in mind are those utterances that are closely affiliated with performative verbs.(exception: I hereby ask

you...- in court)

7.Grice and his maxims

With his theory of meaning, built on the observation that an utterance communicates much more information than just its semantic content, Grice discovered a whole new area of meaning, which cannot be accounted for in terms of structural and truth-conditional seman- tics.

By distinguishing sentence meaning from utterer's mean- ing, and by showing that the latter can be analysed in terms of audience-directed intentions, which do not

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presuppose the notion of linguistic meaning, Grice proved that there is a whole aspect of meaning which cannot be described in terms of truth conditions.

Grice assumed a general principle which participants in a conversation are expected to observe.

7.1. The ‘Co-operative Principle’:

"Make your conversational contribution such as is re- quired, at the stage at which it occurs, by the ac- cepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."

To this he added four maxims of conversation:

1. The maxim of Quality:

- Do not say what you believe to be false!

- Do not say something for which you lack adequate evi- dence! 2. The maxim of Quantity:

- Make your contribution as informative as is required!

- Do not make your contribution more informative than is required! 3. The maxim of relation

- Be relevant 4. The maxim of manner

- avoid obscurity of expression!

- Avoid ambiguity!

- Be brief!

- Be orderly!

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Although utterances may often be based on the above cited “maxims”, Grice’s theory is absolutely not con- vincing. What did Grice really want to express by them?

Due to the fact that Grice applies the misleading im- perative form (whatfor?) they often have been mistaken as rules how to communicate effectively. In that regard they would at least make some sense and one could re- late them to classical rhetoric models such as the one’s Cicero established in (“De Oratore”).

Although Grice may have had the right intention when developing his model, too many problems are being con- nected with it. Language can often not be analysed in terms of his maxims as utterances are often simply not based on them. (e.g. political speech)

8.Conclusion:

In order to fully understand an utterance one has to consider a lot of various factors. Similar expressions do not always convey the same meaning. Contexts as well as various non-linguistic features play an important role when it comes to an overall understanding of an expression.

Tis when ya say what, how

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Bibliography:

Burger H.; Imkalsky,B.: Formen sprachlicher Kommunika- tion. München 1978 Connor Ferris, D.: Understanding Semantics. Exeter 1983 Heringer, H.J.: Practical Semantics. The Hague 1978 Januschek,F.: Sprache als Objekt Lyons, J.: Linguistic Semantics. Cambridge 1995 (1977) Sanders,G.; Wirth,J.: Discourse and Sentential form. Karoma 1985 Schmidt, Siegfried J.: Das kommunikative Handlungsspiel als Kategorie der Wirklichkeitskonstitution. München

1973 Wittgenstein,L.: Philosophische Untersuchungen. Frank- furt 1967

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