Some sentences "conventionally" used in the

PERFORMANCE OF INDIRECT COMMISSIVES

The richest mine for examples other than directives is provided by commissives, and a study of the examples of sentences used to perform indirect commissives (especially offers and promises) shows very much the same patterns that we found in the study of directives. Consider the following sentences, any of which can be uttered to perform an indirect offer (or, in some cases, a promise).

I. Sentences concerning the preparatory conditions:

A. that S is able to perform the act:

Can I help you?

I can do that for you

I could get it for you

Could I be of assistance?

B. that H wants S to perform the act:

Would you like some help?

Do you want me to go now, Sally?

Wouldn't you like me to bring some more

next time I come?

Would you rather I came on Tuesday?

II. Sentences concerning the sincerity condition:

I intend to do it for you

I plan on repairing it for you next week.

III. Sentences concerning the propositional content

condition:

I will do it for you

I am going to give it to you next time

you stop by

Shall I give you the money now?

IV. Sentences concerning S's wish or willingness to do A:

I want to be of any help I can

I'd be willing to do it (if you want me to).

V. Sentences concerning (other) reasons for S's doing A:

I think I had better leave you alone

Wouldn't it be better if I gave you some

assistance?

You need my help, Cynthia.

Questions for Self-Control

8Give definitions of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts of speech.

1. Classify and exemplify illocutionary speech acts.

2. Comment upon the phenomena of direct/indirect, explicit/nonexplicit illocutionary acts.

3. Reveal the dimensional differences between the illocutionary acts.

4. What are the syntactical aspects of the classes of illocutionary acts?

5. Comment on the communicative relevance of speech utterances as it is revealed by Grice’s and Leech’s Maxims.

Lecture 3. Aspects of Discourse Content

Plan

1. Sense in Discourse: components and categories:

1. the Notion of Proposition;

2. explicature / Implicature;

3. the Notion of Presupposition;

4. discourse Content Organization. Communication Gap;

5. communicative competence.

2. Discourse Topic.

KEY TERMS AND NOTIONS: discourse , process of social interaction, the text, text interpretation, the topic, proposition, concept, reference, intersubjectivity, act of reference, meaning, implicature/explicature, inferences, cooperative principle, speech impliсatures, contextual effect, semantic presupposition, pragmatic presupposition, success of communication, communicative competence, communication gap, discourse topic.

Task 1. What is the story about? (Find out the topic of this text.)

The commonest kind of missing person is the adolescent girl, closely followed by the teen-age boy. The majority in this category comes from working-class homes, and almost invariably from those where there is serious parental disturbance. There is another minor peak in the third decade of life, less markedly working-class, and constituted by husbands and wives trying to run out on marriages or domestic situations they have got bored with. The figures dwindle sharply after the age of forty; older cases of genuine and lasting disappearance are extremely rare, and again are confined to the very poor — and even there to those, near vagabond, without close family.

When John Marcus Fielding disappeared, he therefore contravened all social and statistical probability. Fifty-seven years old, rich, happily married, with a son and two daughters; on the board of several City companies (and very much not merely to adorn the letter headings); owner of one of the finest Elizabethan manor houses in East Anglia, with an active interest in the running of his adjoining eighteen-hundred-acre farm; a joint — if somewhat honorary — master of foxhounds, a keen shot ... he was a man who, if there were an areum of living human stereotypes, would have done very well as a model of his kind: the successful City man who is also a country landowner and [in all but name] village squire. It would have been very understandable if he had felt that one or the other side of his life had become too time-consuming ... but the most profoundly anomalous aspect of his case was that he was also a Conservative Member of Parliament. (J. Fowles)

Seminar 4. Deixis. Co- and cross-reference. Substitution.

1. Deixis, its notion and types.

Task 1. Study the notion of deixis, its types and characteristic features. Consider and discuss the following points:

1. What is deixis? What are pure deictic terms?

2. What are the types of deixis? Characterize each of them.

3. What is the general principle of substitution and representation?

4. Characterize Jones’s theory of reference.

5. Give the definition for anaphora in linguistics.

6. What are the pragmatic approaches to anaphoric interpretations?

7. What is the difference between the indexical and symbolic meanings of deictic terms?

Deixis is generally understood to be the encoding of the spatiotemporal context and subjective experience of the encoder in an utterance. In other words, deixis is the use or reference of a deictic word.

Terms such as I, here, now, and this – the so-called pure deictic terms – are heavily context dependant and represent a kind of cognitive center of orientation for the speaker.

What, for instance is here for me, may be there for you. Clearly such terms pose problems in terms of both reference and meaning, and standard accounts have attempted to find a middle ground between lexical and pragmatic meaning.

Interest to the problem of deixis studying has recently increased, because of the development of communicative linguistics. Since deixis is directed toward the communicative aspect of language system – the forming of utterance is the field of its realization.

So we will examine certain groups of deictical units as different types of substitutions, taking into consideration their textual – forming functions. Substitutional words have a function of substitution both in lexical and syntactical relations, providing the structural completeness of the sentence and serve as extra means for more detailed and interesting description of the main characters in literary texts.

In keeping with this traditional definition the three kinds of deixis can be distinguished: the deixis of person, the deixis of time and that of space.

The deixis of person is revealed by the use of the indefinite pronoun “one” and the generalizing “we” and “you” in such expressions as: as you know, as we know, one may easily find out that…, if you slip into thinking that… The personal pronouns are also deictic in functional design because they serve for the indication of the communicants: I – the speaker, you – the addressee (s), we – both the speaker and the addressee (s) as the members of communication. Due to the shifting reference of personal pronouns their referential meaning is, therefore, not constant but shiftable.

The deixis of time, i. e. the temporal orientation in the speech situation in reference to the moment of uttering, can be made with the help of “now”, “just as present”, “at this moment” etc. The time-deictics can be used whenever the specification of the temporal meaning of the verb – forms is needed.

The deixis of space, i.e. the orientation in space made by the speaker in reference to himself and the other communicants is indicated by the elements “this” and “that”, “here” and “there” because the special orientation cannot be made with the help of the grammatical forms of the verb or the noun.

Functions as substitution, representation, pronominalization and deictic orientation are performed in English by the functional words belonging to the same class of units. The functional homonymity is a marking feature of some of the units. The element “it” is found in nearly all the functions characteristic of the pro – units. At the same time, its functional homohymity is easily obliterated by the conditions of the context.

Deixis vs Anaphora

The difference between ‘anaphora’ and deixis is fairly simple in standard accounts, but an increasing pragmatic emphasis has made the distinction between the two less easy to define. In standard accounts, anaphora is seen as much more of an intralinguistic or intrasentential element.

In linguistics, anaphora is a kind of cohesion between the two elements of the text, the former of which (preceding) is the antecedent and has the independent reference, and the latter (a substituent, an anaphor) refers to the antecedent, mentioned above.

Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic, for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent. First, anaphora indicates, "how discourse is constructed and maintained". Second, on the level of the sentence, anaphora binds different syntactical elements together.

Although it covers a range of expressions that the speaker may use in referring and picking out the intended referent, we will focus on pronominal referring expressions in discourse.

There is a considerable body of work devoted to promoting pragmatic approaches to anaphoric interpretations. In general these works share the view that anaphoric reference is interpreted by means of a range of inferential strategies. This is essentially a neo-Gricean approach, as evident in the work, particularly, of Huang (1994), who employs Gricean principles proposed by Levinson (1987) Much of the debate hinges on the very nature of pronouns and their contexts. Pronouns do not contain what is traditionally thought of as ‘descriptive material,’ and yet they are used to refer precisely to that material. This has led quite naturally to theories of anaphoric behavior, which are at the same time broadly considered ‘substitutional.’ Perhaps the most radical attack on these approaches was presented by Jones (1995), who declared the phenomenon of anaphora and its attendant substitution theories a ‘hoax.’ For Jones, reference is not an intrinsic (basic) property of particular language units and therefore not a property that some units have more than others. Broadly pragmatic, Jones’s theory sees reference as a contextualized communicative action expressed in and through the properties of an utterance as a whole. Since, for Jones, what is referred to by speakers is outside and beyond the means used to refer to it, there is no possibility of any linguistic constraints on reference.

Such a radical view represents the ultimate pragmatic position, but most theorists have been content with a compromise, whereby linguistic elements routinely prompt a number of interpretive strategies. However, such a compromise is rarely satisfactory and often results in a weakened pragmatics, wherein what appears to be a contextual rule is in fact no more than a linguistic one, dressed up in the language of Gricean or neo-Gricean pragmatics.

Furthermore, there seems to be evidence that anaphoric pronouns are not merely interpreted in a pragmatic fug of inferencing, but are, after all, subject to certain constraints. Jones’s view therefore throws too much onto context and pragmatics; after all, if there were no constraints or intralinguistic rules, we would not be able to make the right kinds of inferences.

Deixis is much more easily considered under a pragmatic theory. Traditional accounts make a distinction between the indexical and symbolic meanings of deictic terms. The symbolic meaning of a deictic term might be said to be its semantic aspect, while the indexical meaning is its pragmatic aspect. For example, the expression here might be said to have a symbolic aspect roughly glossed as proximity to the speaker, while the indexcal aspect would be the precise location to which here was referring. The terms ‘indexical’ and ‘symbolic,’ then, have much in common with the Fregean concepts of ‘reference’ and ‘sense/meaning’. But the semantic aspect is so vague in certain contexts that many have felt that it cannot really be said to have any bearing on interpretation. Nunberg (1993) in particular has shown that, just as the indexical meanings of deictic terms change according to the contexts in which they occur, so too do the symbolic meanings. This breaking down of traditional binarism has had important implications for pragmatic theory. Emphasis has shifted from the meaning and reference of terms in possible contexts to consideration of the cognitive methods that addressees employ in the interpretation of utterances. Pragmatic approaches have in general attempted to blur the line between deixis and anaphora, but some authors still see deixis as essentially exophoric element and anaphora as basically intralinguistic one.

Task 2. Considering the following sentences, find and analyze the elements of deixis and anaphora in them.

Ex.1: That man is very tall. He must have trouble buying clothes.

Ex.2: Fred came into the room. He sat down.

Ex.3: A man who walked in the park whistled.

Ex.4: A: Last night I met a Cabinet minister.

B: She was not a Cabinet minister.

Ex.5: Where a pronoun is apparently bound to an indefinite expression without restriction, certain difficulties arise, as in the following example (the so-called ‘donkey anaphora’):

Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.

Ex.6: I had ten marbles but dropped them. I found none. It had rolled under the sofa.

Ex.7: Every boy left school early. He went to the beach.

II. Identification of cross – reference. Criteria of co – reference.

Task 3. Study Topic 2 for self-work. Pay special attention to the features of written discourse, approaches to cohesion and its forms, especially reference and substitution.

Cross - reference is closely linked with co – reference. That is why in order to identify cross-reference between two items it is necessary to find out if they are co- referential. The problem of co – reference deserves special attention. When identifying co – reference, the following criteria should be taken into account:

1) Semantic;

2) Prosodic;

3) Position of nouns and pronouns in the sentence and in its constituent structure;

4) Distributional;

5) Type of pronoun;

6) Replaceability of the supported substituendum by its supported substituents or vise versa;

7) Contextual.

Task 4. Consider the following examples and find it out which words are co-referential, cross-referential or not referential at all, which italicized words are antecedents and which are anaphoric elements.

Example 1.

1. As men retire they are replaced on the board;

2. As they retire men are replaced on the board;

3. They are replaced on the board as men retire.

Example 2.

a) But Doc has his faults as who hasn't.

b) 1. She is a fine kind, Mollie;

2. Mollie is a fine kind, Mollie;

3. She is a fine kind, she.

c) 1. The barber shaved himself.

2. The barber shaved the barber.

3. He shaved himself

d) 1. Something would be done about profits. What?

2. Something would be done about profits. Something.

3. What would be done about profits. What?

4. What would be done about profits? Something.

Example 3.

1. I got a flat before I got to your flat .

2. a) " I'll lay a man on, it won't take long". "I'd wait a bit ".

b) " You will put me in touch with her". "I will ".

3." Is life worth living?" "It depends upon the liver! "

Example 4.

1. He is quite an artist, ↓Charley.

2. He is quite an artist, ↑Charley.

Example 5.

"And there is Tommy Johns" "The boy's father?" "Yes. He is a difficult chap, Tommy. "

Example 6.

But I wasn't welcome there tonight. No, Malcolm Rupert drunk isn't a fit guest for Reverend Skene on Chrismas!