Semiotics – general philosophical theory (study) of signs and symbols and comprises syntax, semantics, pragmaticsSyntax and Semantics (as parts of the grammar) give an account of language structure, Pragmatics gives an account of language usePragmatics is not only concerned with linguistic performance but also with pragmatic competence, that is with the speaker’s knowledge of how to use language.Pragmatic competence should roughly be understood as communicative competence which may also include the speaker’s stylistic or rhetoric competence, his textual competence, linguistic competence in a broad sense appears to include linguistic competence proper (grammatical competence), conceptual competence (intimately related to the speaker’s knowledge of the world), and finally communicative competenceLinguistic pragmatics – the study of the ability of language users to pair sentences with the context in which they would be appropriate – Charles William Morris

Lieb (1976) attempts a more precise specification of the domain of pragmatics. He starts from the apparent truism that the subject matter of linguistics consists of the semiotic properties of natural language and of communication in natural language. A natural language is a special kind of communicative complex, which, in its turn, is a set of means of communication. Any means of communication is a means of communication for somebody during a certain time.As examples of pragmatic properties Lieb mentions any relation between communicative means (that is, linguistic structures), users (that is, human organisms) and some space-time portion. The introduction of the specification „and some space-time portion” is highly relevant. It points out to the importance of the concept of context in pragmatics. Thus, the study of the determination of meaning in context is a matter of pragmatics.

Utterances have – same referential meaning, but the pragmatic meaning is different, as they are used in different contexts (speech acts)Speech acts – things people DO through language (apologizing, instructing, menacing, explaining)Descriptive fallacy refers to reasoning which treats a speech act as a logical proposition, which would be mistaken when the meaning of the statement is not based on its truth condition. It was suggested by the British philosopher of language John Langshaw Austin in 1955 in the lectures now known as How to Do Things With Words. Austin argued that performative utterances are not meaningfully evaluated as true or false but rather by other measures, which would hold that a statement such as "thank you" is not meant to describe a fact and to interpret it as such would be to commit the descriptive fallacySpeech act – coined by philosopher John Langshaw Austin, developed by John Rogers SearleJohn Austin – gave the first full-fledged account of speech acts in his book entitled ‘How to do things with words’. Showed some utterances are actions not statements or questions. He reached his conclusions via an analysis of the so called ‘performative verbs’. These verbs require felicity conditions for their action success.Searle proposed a detailed taxonomy of speech acts:Declarations – The acts of declaratives are approving, betting, blessing, christening, confirming, cursing, declaring, disapproving, dismissing, naming, resigning: I pronounce you man and wife; you’re fired; I quit from this job – resigningRepresentatives – Speech acts that state what the speaker believes to be the case or not. Include: arguing, asserting, boasting, claiming, complaining, criticizing, denying, describing, informing, insisting, reporting, suggesting, swearing, acknowledging: it was a worm sunny day; john is a liar; I met your parents yesterday – informingExpressives – Speech acts that state what the speakers feel. The acts are: apologizing, complimenting, condoling, congratulating, deploring, praising, regretting, thanking: I’m really sorry; happy birthday! (statements of pleasure, joy, sorrow); I like your house very much - praising

Directives – Speech acts that the speakers use to get someone else to do something. The acts are: advising, asking, begging, challenging, daring, demanding, forbidding, insisting, inviting, ordering, permitting, recommending, requesting, suggesting: don’t touch that (commands, orders, suggestions): don’t go to the party! – forbiddingCommissives – Speech acts that the speakers use to commit themselves to some future action. The acts are: committing, guaranteeing, offering, promising, refusing, threatening, volunteering, vowing: I’ll be back (promises, threats, pledges – what we intend to do); I will be there at 5 o’clock – promisingPresupposition - A background belief, relating to an utterance, that:

must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context;

generally will remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question;

can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance

The utterance John regrets that he stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge has the following presuppositions:

There is someone uniquely identifiable to speaker and addressee as John John stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge John was doing linguistics before he left Cambridge John left Cambridge John had been at Cambridge

Herbert Paul Grice (1913–1988) was the first to systematically study cases in which what a speaker means/says (the logical cognitive content) differs from what the sentence used by the speaker means (the implicatures). Consider the following dialogue:Alan: Are you going to Paul's party? Barb: I have to workThe sentence uttered by Barb does not mean that she’s not going to Paul’s party. Hence Barb did not say she’s not going, she implied it. Grice introduced the term implicate and implicature for the case in which what the speaker said is distinct from what the speaker thereby meant (implied or suggested). Implicating is what Searle called an indirect speech act. Barb performed one speech act (meaning that she is not going) by performing another (saying that she has to work). This implicature is conversational.Grice contrasted conversational with conventional implicature, one that is part of the meaning of the sentenced used:

A) He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave. B) His being an Englishman implies that he is brave.

Conventional implicatures are inferences made possible by the meaning of particular lexical items: too, however, moreover, well, still, although, so, therefore or syntactic constructions.Use of A) while disbelieving B) would be misleading, but not a lie. Barb sentence can be used with its conventional meaning without implicating what she did. A) cannot be used with its conventional meaning without implicating B). The meaning of ‘therefore’ carries this implicature.Conversational implicatures are determined not only by the conventional content of the utterance, but also by the conversational context of the sentence and owe their existence to the fact that participants in a conversation obey a cooperative principle (are constrained by the common goal of communication to be cooperative).Based on cooperative principle, Grice formulates certain specific maxims of conversation, falling under the general categories of quantity, quality, relation and manner.

Maxim of quantity – relates to the quantity of information as is required for the current purpose of the exchange; under it there fall the following submaxims:

Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange

Do not make your contribution more informative than is requiredUttering of tautologies – redundant, true by virtue of logical form alone. They can convey a great deal of meaning:War is war; informative inference: terrible things always happen in war, that’s its nature and it’s no good lamenting that particular disasterEither John will come or he won’t; informative inference: calm down, there is no point in worrying about whether he is going to come because there is nothing we can do about itIf he does it, he does it; informative inference: it’s no concern of oursSince the maxim requires that speakers be informative, the asserting of tautologies blatantly violates it. Therefore, if the assumption that the speaker is actually cooperating is to be preserved, some informative inference must be done.Maxim of quality – try to make your contribution, one that is true. This has two more specific submaxims:

Do not say what you believe to be false Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

May be flouted in the following exchange:A: What if Russia blockades the Golf and all the oil?B: Oh come now, Britain rules the seas!The only way in which the assumption that B is cooperating can be maintained is if we take B to mean something rather different from what he actually said. In fact he conveys the opposite of what he literally said – namely that Britain does not rule the seas. It suggest that there is nothing that Britain could do. Hence, Grice claims, ironies arise and are successfully decoded.Queen Victoria was made of iron – an example of metaphor. Said by an admirer it may be a commendation, conveying the property of toughness; said by a detractor it may be taken as a denigration, conveying her lack of flexibility, emotional impassivity or belligerenceMaxim of relation – this is simply ‘be relevant’. Maxims to flout this is difficult to find as they must be interpreted as irrelevant. Grice provides the following example:A: I do think Mrs Jenkins is an old windbag, don’t you?B: Huh, lovely weather for March, isn’t it? – this might implicate, given appropriate circumstances ‘hey, watch out, her nephew is standing right behind you’.Johnny: Hey Sally, let’s play marblesMother: How is your homework getting along Johnny? – where Johnny’s mother can remind him that he may not yet be free to play.Maxim of manner – this has to do with how things are said. The supermaxim is ‘be perspicuous’ and the submaxims are:

Avoid obscurity Avoid ambiguity Be brief Be orderly.

Specify how to converse in a maximally efficient, rational, cooperative way; the participants should speak sincerely, relevantly and clearly, while providing sufficient information.

Suppose we find in a review of a musical performance something like a) below where we might have expected b):a) Miss Singer produced a series of sounds corresponding closely to the score of an aria from Rigoletto.b) Miss Singer sang an aria from Rigoletto.By the flagrant avoidance of the simple b) in favour of the prolix a) (and the consequent violation of the sub-maxim ‘be brief’), the reviewer implicates that there was in fact some considerable difference between Miss Singer’s performance and that to which the term singing is usually applied.But what is the source of these maxims of conversational behaviour? Are they conventional rules that we learn as, say, table manners? Grice suggests that the maxims are in fact not arbitrary conventions, but rather describe rational means for conducting cooperative exchanges. If this is so, we would expect them to govern aspects of non-linguistic behaviour too, and indeed they seem to do so.To presuppose something is not to attempt to communicate it or to give it to be understood. A presupposition is something that the speaker is taking to be understood. Presuppositions are believed or assumed to be true, they cannot be false in a context.A potential presupposition is a presupposition that is triggered by some part of an utterance (such as a subordinate clause) taken in isolation, but that may or may not be a presupposition of the whole utterance: John says that the king of France is bald has two potential presuppositions:There is someone identified as John: actual presuppositionsThere is a king of France: potential presuppositions (because it is reported, subordinate clause)We assume that pragmatic presuppositions are induced either by some lexical item or by some syntactic constructions which are said to be presupposition carriers. In the examples below we start from the core of presuppositional cases (existential and factive presuppositions) and move to more controversial cases.Proper names, definite descriptions - presuppose existence of their referents (and uniqueness); this is the oldest case, discussed by Frege:The King of Buganda / John washed his handsThere is a King of BugandaJohn exists

Factive verbs. They presuppose the truth of their complement proposition.From the present perspective, what is more interesting is that there are degrees of factivity. One may distinguish fully factive verbs (e.g. regret, resent, desire, be tragic, be odd) and semi-factive verbs (e.g. realize, discover). Semi-factives lose factivity in certain enviromnents, for instance, if-clauses. Thus, regret is factive (sentence c), realize is semi-factive:Bill resents / does not resent (it) that people are always comparing him with his brother.People are always comparing Bill with his brotherJohn realized / *claimed that the earth is flat. (claim is not factive)The earth is round.If I later regret that I did not tell the truth, I’ll apologizeI did not tell the truthIf I later realize that I did not tell the truth, I’ll apologizeI did not tell the truth.

Syntactic constructions. We present one syntactic construction that has proved to be presuppositional:Temporal clauses (first discussed by Frege (1892)):Before Strawson was even born, Frege noticed / did not notice presuppositions.Strawson was born.As John was getting up, he slipped

John was getting upTherefore, temporal clauses introduced by when, after, as, before, during etc. presuppose the truth of the time clausePresupposition is concerned with the existing knowledge that the speaker presupposes in the addressee and therefore does not need to assert. This presupposed knowledge is then taken, together with the entailed meaning of the utterance and the addressee's knowledge of the world.Presupposition as shared assumptions. When someone says something to us, we make all sorts of assumptions about the background of the utterance which we presume to be mutually known before the utterance occurred. If someone says: Tell George I’m at lunchthere would be no point in saying this unless the speaker expected George to turn up in the near future and assumed the hearer knew who George was and was willing to pass the message on. Unless these conditions are met, there is something wrong with saying sentence (1). We can assume that these conditions on saying (1) are presupposed. We shall call this sort of background assumption a pragmatic presupposition, because it is clearly non-linguistic in nature.Shared assumptions: definite descriptions, iteratives, questions There is a further presupposition which is not related to the context of utterance: namely, there is such a person as ‘George’. In fact, whenever a proper name like George or a definite description is used, the existence of some referent that matches the description is presupposed. For the moment, let us call this kind of presupposition a conventional presupposition (= associated with words and syntactic structures).The special theory - Constatative vs. Performative UtterancesAustin’s first important contribution is his distinction between constatativeutterances (1) and performative utterances (2):(1) a. The cat is on the matb. It’s raining(2) a. I do (cf. take this woman to be my lawful wife, as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony).b. I name this ship Queen Elizabeth (as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stern)c. I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrowExamples (1) are constatative utterances. To utter a constatative sentence is to describe a certain pre-existent state of affairs; the utterer intends to give information on a given state of the world. The description may or may not agree with the facts. Thus, constatative utterances are naturally evaluated as true or false. Examples (2) are performative utterances. To utter a performative (= PF) sentence is not to convey information, to state something or to describe a pre-existing state of affairs. To utter a performative sentence is to do something, ‘to do things with words’. Thus, when one says I do in (2a), one is doing something, namely marring, rather than reporting something, namely that he is marring. The uttering of a PF sentence constitutes, or is part of, the doing of a action (marring, christening etc.). Since PF sentences are not used to say or state something, they are not true or false.To successfully perform the act specified by the PF sentence the context should satisfy certain conditions - the so-called felicity (happiness) conditions of the speech act. Austin gives a detailed presentation of these conditions which he established by checking what can go wrong with a PF utterance, i.e. in what way it can be infelicitous.

Felicity conditions: a) there must exist an accepted conventional procedure, having a certain conventional effect, a procedure which includes the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. If one of these conditions is violated, the act is misinvoked. For instance, in the course of time certain practices may be changed or abandoned, e.g. the code of honour involving duelling. Thus, a challenge may be issued by saying: My seconds will call on you and the interlocutor may simply shrug it off. This was a case of misinvocation.

On the explicit performative sentences [EPFS]. EPFSs have the property of realizing the acts that they denote, that is they verify the schema:(10) The speaker says: „I (hereby) V" The S Vs.

Thus, sentences (11), which verify the schema, are PFs, while (12) are not. In (11) we have also indicated the three characteristic syntactic patterns of EPFs (I V that, I V to, I V).(11) a. I promise that I will be thereb. I order you to be therec. I appoint you president.(12) a. I believe that I will be thereb. I know that I will be there

EPF utterances are typically voiced in the first person of the simple present tense, in the active voice (examples (11)). Yet also characteristic is the use of a passive sentence with second person subjects (sometimes this is the only acceptable construction, e.g. (13b)):(13) a. You are hereby requested to leave the city at onceb. You are fired (?? I fire you)Hence, it is customary to add adverbials like hereby, here and now etc. as unambiguous markers of performativity. Such adverbs are normally used only in formal style.It is often (not always) requested that EPFSs do not employ the continuous present which is descriptive, while the simple form is or may be performative:(14) a. I promise to come He is promising to come (performative)

(constatative, description of what he is doing)b. I refuse to go He is shaking his head, he is refusing to goAustin notices an important asymmetry in the use of the PF verbs: used in the first person of the simple present these verbs are (or may be ) performative; used in other persons or tenses they are descriptive: 'I betted' and 'he bets' are not PF, but describe actions on my and his part, respectively. However, this is not always true: there are certain propositional attitude verbs such as believe, think, imagine, suppose that are ambiguous between a descriptive reading (as in I believe God is love) and a weak reading which chiefly occurs in the first person and in which the main assertion is made in the complement clause (as in I believe he's over thirty).PF utterances are felicitous or infelicitous, constatative utterances are true or false.Constatatives are primary performatives having the illocutionary force (= IF) of statements.Consequently, Austin proposes that communication involves the performance of utterance acts or speech acts. Any utterance act or SA is a complex act including the following:1) a locutionary act (=LA) - this is an act of saying something to an audience, an act of uttering a sentence with meaning (sense and reference).2) an illocutionary act (=IA) - this is an act of doing something, it is what the utterance counts as.3) a perlocutionary act (=PA) - the speaker’s utterance affects the audience in a certain way, it has a certain intended or unintended effect on the hearer.

Communicative Presumption: This is the mutual belief that whenever a member S says something in language L to another member H, he is doing so with some recognizable intention.In interpreting the notion of uptake, it will be useful to make a distinction between communicative IAs (stating, requesting, asking, promising etc.) which involve intentions of S and conventional IAs (acts like voting, resigning, marring, baptizing, arresting, acquitting etc.) which involve extralinguistic conventions. In the case of conventional acts the utterance is embodied in some ceremonial act constituting part of it:(16) a. I baptize you in the name of the Holy Father, of the Son and the Holy Spirit.b. I sware to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.c. I pass (while playing bridge).Acts like those in (16) are conventional. They exist only with respect to an extralinguistic institution and their performance is governed by the conventions of that institution. Communicative IAs are successful if uptake is secured through the mechanisms of intentions. Communicative IAs are acts expressing attitudes. To express an attitude is S's intention for his utterance to be taken as reason to think that he has a certain attitude (belief, desire, etc.). Thus, communicative IAs are transactions which introduce new interaction conditions among S and H (e.g. H's obligation to fulfill a command, S's commitment to fulfill a promise) while

conventional acts bring about institutional changes. To give Austin's example if „I name the ship Queen Elizabeth”, this has the effect of naming or christening the ship; then certain subsequent acts such as referring to it as Generalissimo Stalin will be out of order”.

deixis borrowed from the Greek word for pointing or indicating, and has as prototypical exemplars the use of demonstratives, first and second personal pronouns, tense and specific time and place adverbsDeixis is organized in an egocentric way. Deictic expressions are anchored to specific points in the communicative event which constitute the deictic centre:(i) the central person is the speaker.(ii) the central time is the time at which the speaker produces theutterance.(iii) the central place is the speaker’s location at speech time.(iv) the discourse centre is the point which the speaker is currently atin the production of the utteranceThe most important linguistic works in the topic are due to Fillmore (1966)and Lyons (1968). The traditional categories of deixis are person, place and time.Person deixis concerns the encoding of the role of participants in the speech event: the category first person is the grammaticalization of the speaker’s reference to himself, second person the encoding of the speaker’s reference to one or more addressees, and third person the encoding of reference to persons and entities which are neither speakers nor addressees. It is important to note that third person is quite unlike first or second person in that it does not correspond to anyspecific participant-role in the speech event: it is negatively defined with respect to the other two participant-roles. Third person participant-roles are not deictic words.Participant-roles are encoded in language by pronouns and their associated predicate agreements.A further point to be noticed in connection with person deixis is that where face-to-face contact is lost, languages often enforce a distinct mode of selfintroduction. Thus, whereas in a face-to-face meeting I can say „I’m John”, on the phone I must say „This is John” or „John is speaking” with third person verb agreement; in contrast in Romanian (and other languages) we use the first person agreement: „Sunt Ion”.

Time deixis concerns the encoding of temporal points and spans relative to the time at which an utterance was spoken (or a message was written). Time deixis is commonly grammaticalized in deictic adverbs of time (like English now, then, yesterday, this year) but above all in tense.Time deixis is relevant to various other deictic elements in a language. Thus, greetings are usually time-restricted, so that ‘good morning’ and ‘good evening’ can only be used in the morning or in the evening, respectively. Curiously, while the above can only be used as greetings, ‘good night’ can only be used as a parting, and not as a greeting.

Place or space deixis concerns the encoding of spatial locations relative to the location of the participants in the speech event. Most languages grammaticalize at least a distinction between proximal (close to speaker) and distal (or non-proximal, sometimes close to the addressee) deixis.Lyons (1977) argues that there seem to be two basic ways of referring to objects: by describing or naming them on the one hand, and by locating them on the other hand. As far as the latter way of referring to objects, locations can be specified relative to other objects or fixed reference points:(8) The station is two hundred yards from the cathedral.(9) Kabul lies at latitude 34 degrees, longitude 70 degrees.Alternatively, objects can be deictically specified relative to the location of participants at the time of speaking as in(10) It’s two hundred yards away.(11) Kabul is four hundred miles West of here.

Besides demonstratives and deictic advebs of place, there are some motion verbs that have built-in deictic components. English come vs. go / bring and take make a distinction between the direction of motion relative to participants in the speech event. Thus,(12) He’s comingseems to gloss ‘he is moving towards the speaker’s location at CT’ while(13) He’s goingglosses as ‘he is moving away from the speaker’s location at CT’. In contrast(14) I’m comingcannot mean ‘the speaker is moving towards the location of the speaker’, but rather means ‘the speaker is moving towards the location of the addressee at CT’.Further complexities in place deixis arise if the speaker is in motion - it then becomes possible to use temporal terms in order to refer to deictic locations, as in:(17) I first heard that ominous rattle ten miles ago.(18) There is a good fast food joint just ten minutes from hereThe deictic use of language has two properties:a) it picks out a referentb) it relates that referent to a kind of common ground that exists between speaker and addressee

Person DeixisYou can be used both deictically (when the context is required to determine the reference) and non-deictically (when the reference is general rather than particular).

Place deixis- Consider the following utterance:You just have to read this chapterThe reference of the demonstrative description this chapter can only be determined if the context indicates which of several chapters of a book is picked out. This makes it different from non-deictic descriptions like the second chapter. Other place deictics include: here, there, where, left, right, up, down, above, below, in front, behind, come, go, bring, take.Is somewhere else deictic? Somewhere is clearly non-deictic because there is no context to check in order to determine the place referred to. Somewhere else is also non-deictic as it indicates that no speaker-determined place is being picked out.

Time deixisHere is a list of some of the deictic items whose reference can only be determined in relation to the time of the utterance in which they occur:this/last/next Monday/week/month/year.The use of time deictics is not always straightforward.If I say to my son at the beginning of September:I hope you are going to do well this yearhe knows that this year refers to (the school year)If I say the same thing on 1st January, it refers to (the calendar year)If I say it on 20th October, his birthday, it refers (to the year up his nextbirthday).- A related phenomenon occurs in the case of utterances including the deictic item today. If I say:I’ll do it today, today refers to (some unspecified moment in the portion of that day that is not expired).If I say:I filled up with petrol today, today refers to (some unspecified moment in the portion of that day that is expired).- The use of yesterday, today and tomorrow is privileged over the use of the names of the days. So, we cannot say:I’m going to finish this book on Thursdayif today or tomorrow is Thursday.

In pragmatics (linguistics), entailment is the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (A) requires the truth of the other (B).

For example, the sentence (A) The president was assassinated. entails (B) The president is dead. Notice also that if (B) is false, then (A) must necessarily be false. To show entailment, we must show that (A) true forces (B) to be true and (B) false forces (A) to be false.

Entailment differs from implicature (in their definitions for pragmatics), where the truth of one (A) suggests the truth of the other (B), but does not require it. For example, the sentence (A) Mary had a baby and (B) got married implicates that (A) she had a baby before (B) the wedding, but this is cancellable by adding -- not necessarily in that order. Entailments are not cancellable.

Entailment also differs from presupposition in that in presupposition, the truth of what one is presupposing is taken for granted. A simple test to differentiate presupposition from entailment is negation. For example, both The king of France is ill and The king of France is not ill presuppose that there is a king of France. However The president was not assassinated no longer entails The president is dead (nor its opposite, as the president could have died in another way). In this case, presupposition remains under negation, but entailment does not.

The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to J. L. Austin's posthumous "How To Do Things With Words", a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act (i.e. the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (i.e. its actual effect, whether intended or not).

For example, my saying to you "Don't go into the water" (a locutionary act with distinct phonetic, syntactic and semantic features) counts as warning you not to go into the water (an illocutionary act), and if you heed my warning I have thereby succeeded in persuading you not to go into the water (a perlocutionary act). This taxonomy of speech acts was inherited by John R. Searle, Austin's pupil at Oxford and subsequently an influential exponent of speech act theory