語(yǔ)用與交際答疑題及答案.doc

語(yǔ)用與交際答疑題:1.What are Morris early definitions of syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, and his expanding definition?2.Please point out the narrowness of Carnaps view of pragmatics.3.How do pragmatic factors influence our daily life, please give us an example?4.Please illustrate the importance of the appropriacy and give us an example, which is against the appropriacy requirement of language use.5.Give an example and illustrate the indirectness of the language.6.Interprate the concept and knowledge of making inference in understanding utterances.7.Illustrate one more nature of language use indeterminacy, for example, in Diane Blackmore book Understanding Utterances (1992) the indeterminacy nature of the English possessives.8. In analyzing the indeterminacy, how shall we seek the help of context, giving rise to the meaning of it?9. Please explain concept and knowledge of linguistic context, non-linguistic context and role and function of context.10.Please explain the origin and concept of deixis with example.11.Please explicitly illustrate the relationship between context and deixis.12.Whats the traditional categories of deixis?13. What are the pragmatic functions of person deixis, and the three groups of pronominal pronouns?14.Please point out a distinction between gestural use and symbolic use of place deixis.15.Please distinguish the deictic and non-deictic uses of place deixis.16.Please give us a revision and summary of deixis.17.Give the concept and knowledge of conversational implicature.18.Whats the distinction of implicature and implication.19.Tell the significance of the notion of implicature.20.Tell the distinction between conversational meaning and conventional meaning.21. Give a brief introduction to the co-operative principle.22.Can conventional implicatures be shared by all cultures?23.Please give a detailed introduction of co-operative principle.24.What are four co-operative maxims?25.Explain implicatures of following co-operative principles and its maxims.26. How do people violate the second sub-maxim of quantity?27.What are the five features of conversational implicature?28. Please explain the feature of cancellability.29. Please tell your understanding of the politeness principle30.What are three important features of politeness? 31. And use example to illustrate the three properties.32.What do you think is the relationship between CP and PP?33. Please define the notion of face.34. What are positive face and negative face? 35. Generally speaking, how shall we be aware of peoples face wants in verbal communication?36. Whats the general function of the properties of politeness principle?37. Give us some revision and reinforcement work on conversational implicature (CI) 38. What is presupposition?39. What is semantic presupposition?40.What are semantic presupposition triggers? Please give us examples according to Karttunens theory.41.Please give us a general introduction to the projection problem.42. Explain the distinction between semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition.43.Please illustrate the origin and knowledge of speech acts.44.Please point out Austins distinction between constatives and performatives. And what conclusion can you draw from the previous distinction?45. Illustrate different types perfomatives.46. Explain explicit performatives and implicit performatives.47. Please discuss Austins division of five types of perfomatives.48.Tell your understanding of Searles development of speech acts語(yǔ)用與交際答疑題答案:1. Morris early definition:Syntactics : Syntactics is the study of the formal relations of signs to one another. Semantics: Semantics is the study of the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable.Pragmatics: Pragmatics is the study of the relation of signs to interpreters (interpreters of signs being used). His expanding definitionSome pragmatists suggest that we replace Morriss term, sign, with another term linguistic unit, which applies to morphemes, phrases, and sentences. With this change, syntax may be redefined as the study of the formal relations of linguistic units to one another, and the grammatical structures of phrases and sentences that result from these grammatical relations; semantics can be redefined as the study of the relation of linguistic units to the world to which they are referring; and pragmatics as the study of the relation of linguistic units to their users.2. If we consider carefully Carnaps view of taking pragmatics as the investigation making reference to users of the language, we shall find that it is too narrow because this definition neglects other deictic phenomenon in language use indicating place (e.g. here and there) and time (e.g. now and then). Like the interpretation of the words I in the example that relies on the identification of particular participants (or users) and their role in the speech event, place and time deictic words also rely on the interpretation of situation or context in communication. For example,2) I am ready to leave now.3) He is still standing there.3. Pragmatic factors influence our selection of sounds, grammatical constructions, and vocabulary from the resources of the language. Some of the constrains are taught to young kids at a very early age. In British culture, for example, there is the importance of saying please and thank you, or of not referring to an adult female in her presence as she. In our Chinese language, children are taught not to address those who are older by their names.4.But just imagine that a male teacher said to you during classMay I smoke ? You must feel astonished, as this requirement is not acceptable in the situation. Because a teacher, no matter who he is, is not supposed to smoke in class. Smoking in formal occasions like a class is not considered polite and appropriate.5. It is also remarkable that people are very clever at interpreting indirectness. Take the following conversation between A and B as an example,9)A: Wasnt the wind dreadful in the nightB: I didnt hear itA: Er it was dreadfulB: You know what they sayand A did. A understood the indirectness perfectly, and continued with A: I must have a guilty conscienceSo we see that indirectness too is typical of real-world language use, and that literal or stated meaning is only one aspect of the meaning conveyed in an utterance.6. Communication is not merely a matter of a speaker forming a thought in language and sending it as spoken message through space, or as a written message on paper, to a listener or reader who listens to or reads it. This is obviously insufficient-the receiver must not only interpret what is received but also draw an inference as to what is conveyed beyond what is stated. For example, “I really liked your new haircut”, is sincere or ironical.7. 1) I havent borrowed Janes car2) I would hate to have Simons job.Here Janes car could be interpreted as the car owned by Jane, the car kept by Jane, the car rented by Jane etc. and Simons job could be the job done by Simon, the job offered by Simon, etc.8. For example: Ive just finished a book We may take it to mean a. Ive just finished reading a book.b. Ive just finished writing a book.Without knowing who said it and at what time he said it, we feel difficult to determine which of the above two possible meanings is the intended one. But, if the utterance was said by a professional writer as he had just finished writing a book, we shall take the utterance to mean b. without much thinking.9. Linguistic context :It refers to the language that surrounds or accompanies a piece of utterance or discourse under analysis. Non-linguistic context: besides the linguistic context, there is a non-linguistic context. Both kinds of context give rise to the meaning of discourse/utterances. While the former includes the linguistic elements that are around an utterance, the latter includes: the type of communicative event (for example, joke, story, lecture, greeting, conversation); the topic; the purpose of the event; the setting including location of day, time and physical aspects of the situation; the participants and the relationships between them; the background knowledge etc.We see that context helps us to understand the meaning of utterances. Meanwhile, with the change of context, the meaning of utterances also changes. Look at this example:Ive got a flat tyre.If said in a garage, this might be taken to mean that I need help; said to a friend with a car, it might be that I need a lift; said as a response to a request for a lift from a friend without a car, it can mean that I am unable to give him a lift. We see that context is a big concept. It helps to create meaning. 10. The term deixis derives from the Greek verb de (knum, meaning show, point or indicate. It is used to indicate the function or property that certain words, such as personal and demonstrative pronouns, place and time adverbs and others have in language. The function of these words is always tied up to the role of participants, time and place of the utterances seen in relation to speakers. For example, people say, Bring the book here. and Take the cup there. Here and there are used from the speakers point of view. Or the deictic information expressed by here and there is related to the place where the speaker is.11. For example:Meet me here a week from now with a stick about this big.(Levinson S. C.1983:54-55)Because there is no indication of who wrote the note and when it was written, we do not know who to meet, where and when to meet him or her, or with how big a stick to bring with.From the above sentence, we see that interpretation of the underlined information depends on the context in which the utterances occur. Natural languages are thus anchored directly to aspects of the context. From pragmatic point of view, clear and sufficient deictic information is very important for the understanding of utterances.12. Traditional categories of deixis are:a. Person deixisb. Time deixisc. Place deixis13. Person deixis indicates the role of participants in communication. It is expressed through the use of personal pronouns or pronominal as linguists call such as you and I. Pronominal or personal pronouns may fall into three groups, namely: first person, second person and third person. Normally speaking, the category of first person can be understood as speakers making reference to himself/herself, second person as speakers making reference to one or more addressee, and third person as speakers making reference neither to speakers nor addressees of the utterance.14. For a distinction between the two, we may look at the following two remarks;1) This book2) This universitySuppose someone talks to a group of students. On hearing this book, the students will surely follow his gesture in order to know which book he is indicating, but on hearing this university, the students need not search for his gestures to know which university he is describing. They will know that this university is the one they are in. So here we find the gestural use of this in this book, but the symbolic use of this in this university.15. By deictic use of place deixis, we mean that the understanding of place deictic information must rely on the utterance context. Under the situation, the reference is not fixed and may vary as context changes. By the non-deictic use of place deixis, we mean that understanding of place deixis does not need to refer to the utterance context, and the reference is fixed.16. In this part, we have briefly examined pragmatic functions of some deictic item such as I, here, now, etc. We assume the importance of the addressees knowledge of the speakers identity ( in the case of person deixis), relevant temporal location (in the case of time dixis) and spatial location ( in the case of place deixis) in order to identify and understand the deictic information conveyed by these lexical items in communication. In the process, we have come to realize that literal meanings of deictic items are largely undetermined and may vary under different context. And it is utterances context that gives a piece of language its intended meaning. Deixis displays the property of all pragmatic language use-that of relying on speaker-hearer invoking a common context to which a very wide range of language uses can be interpreted.17. To understand what conversational implicature is, we must, first of all, know what an implicature is. The word implicature, like its cognate implication, derives from the verb to imply. Etymologically speaking, to imply means to fold something into something else. Then, what is implied, or folded in has to be unfolded in order to be understood. A conversational implicature is, therefore, something that is implied in a conversation that is something that is left implicit in actual language use.18. The use of the term implication, as distinguished from implicature, usually indicates a rather narrowly defined logical relationship between two propositions. Logical implication does not correspond to what in everyday life we understand by implicature or implies. In everyday life, (referred to the example of the text) we hold that the sons not finishing his meal implies (or has the implicature of) mothers not buying him the book. In a word, logic and everyday life do not always look at things in the same way. Based on this distinction, we may say that implicature is an inferred meaning, which is different from the logical meaning (implication) of the original utterance.19. The importance of implicature in recent work of pragmatics is due to a number of reasons.Firstly, the notion of implicature provides some explicit account of how it is possible to mean more than what is actually said, or more than what is literally expressed.Secondly, the notion of implicature simplifies both the structure and the content of semantic description. In this sense, implicature does not explain how a word or expression has several literal meanings but explains how a word or expression could imply different meanings by different language users. Thirdly, the notion of implicature has a very generative explanatory power. With the help of the context, implicature may explain how a large number of apparently unrelated sentences may convey the same meaning. In this way implicature helps to make our language use colorful.20. Not all implicatures have to be conversational (That is depending on the context of a particular language use-conversation). There is the kind of meaning that is always associated with an expression so that on every occasion when the expression occurs, the meaning occurs. For example, we can never say that one football team beat another without conveying that the first team scored at least one goal more than the second. This meaning that is naturally associated with an expression is known as conventional implicature. Unlike conventional implicatures, relating to the conversational context produces conversational implicatures. To know what people mean, we have to interpret what they say. But interpretation is a tricky affair, and misunderstandings are always possible. As Leech remarks, interpreting an utterance is ultimately a matter of guesswork. The qualified guessing must depend on the context, that is, the circumstances of this particular question, the person involved in the situation, these persons background, etc. The more we know about this context, the better grounded our guesswork is going to be.21. Communication is not a matter of logic or truth, but of co-operation; not of what people say, but of what they can say under certain circumstances. It is here that we shall turn to the next topic. That is, Grices Co-operative principle. According to him, the reason why people dont say what they mean is that they try to be co-operative by observing or violating certain rules in communication so as to make communication smooth and successful.22. Because language is basically culture specific, conventional implicature of the same expression may vary under different cultural background. For example, white gives the implicature of purity and chastity in western cultures and is associated with a bride; but it indicates ill-luck and misfortune in traditional Chinese culture and is associated with mourning. Often the conventional implicatures are formed by the conventional use of language within specific cultural background. They may or may not be shared by all cultures.23. In the previous section, we pondered on the question why people dont say what they mean and would choose to express their meanings in a roundabout way. The answer lies in the way people communicate with each other. In Grices opinion, in order to conduct successful and happy interactions, people are actually observing certain co-operative principles. These four maxims, or sub-principles, can be seen as instances of one super-ordinate (as Grice calls it ) Cooperative Principle: Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the talk in which you are engaged.( Grice 1975: 47)24. Grice suggested four sub-principles or maxims as:1)The Maxim of Qualitytry to make your contribution one that is true, specifically:a) do not say what you believe to be false b) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence2)The Maxim of Quantitya) make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchangeb) do not make your contribution more informative than required 3)Th