Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка. Тивьяева И.В. - 112 стр.

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Lecture 15

Semantics and Pragmatics.

Expressed and Implied Meaning of the Utterance.

1. Semantics and pragmatics.

2. Presupposition and its types.

3. Implication and inference.

1. Semantics and Pragmatics

Describing the ways in which sentences are formed, many scholars make

reference to meaning and how sentences express it. In modern linguistics, meaning

is not treated as a unitary phenomenon. The analysis of meaning is treated as

divisible into two major domains. The first deals with the sense conventionally

assigned to sentences independently of the contexts in which they might be uttered.

This is the domain called semantics. The second deals with the way in which

utterances are interpreted in context, and the ways in which the utterance of a

particular sentence in a certain context may convey a message that is not actually

expressed in the sentence and in other contexts might not have been conveyed.

This is the domain called pragmatics.

Semantics is thus concerned with the meaning that is directly expressed, or

encoded, in sentences, while pragmatics deals with the principles that account for

the way utterances are actually interpreted in context. Pragmatics is concerned not

with the meaning of sentences as units of the language system but with the

interpretation of utterances in context. Utterances in context are often interpreted in

ways that cannot be accounted for simply in terms of the meaning of the sentence

uttered. A central principle in pragmatics, which drives a great deal of the utterance

interpretation process, is that the addressee of an utterance will expect it to be

relevant, and will normally interpret it on that basis.

One of the major problems concerning semantics and pragmatics is lack of

adequate definition. The definitions that have been offered do not delimit

pragmatics from semantics either clearly and neatly, or to everybody’s satisfaction.

G. Leech distinguishes between three possible ways of structuring this