What Is Pragmatics In Literature

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Pragmatics and Literature Pragmatics is the study of the principles of the use of language in social interaction. The word ‘pragmatics’ can be found in Greece and Roman, it means ‘of being practical’. The term pragmatics as used by Charles Morris (1938) has therefore been defined in different ways to suit the goals of a discipline, linguistic pragmatics. In one its early definition is used to refer to one of the three major divisions of semiotics along with semantics and syntax. In other words pragmatics is one of the three branches of semiotics, which in turn is the systematic study of linguistic and non-linguistic signs, and which has been elaborated by many disciplines: philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics. From…show more content…
The social context includes such factors as social status of the speaker/hearer and familiarity. Politeness in the sense given by Brown and Levinson, Grice’s conversational maxims, the notion of ‘face’, or the presentation of self in public situations and Austin and Searle is that of a speech act. A speech act is the act accomplished when the speaker produces an utterance of a natural language in a specific kind of communicative situation. Such a situation is called a context. This means that a speech act is not just an act of "talking" or "meaning" but, in addition, and crucially by which members of a speech community interact with each other. Reference, deixis and presupposition are the linguistic phenomena that appear to share both semantic and pragmatic characteristics. 1. C.1: Issues in Pragmatics Formal pragmatics plays an important role in modern analytical philosophy of language, it aim is to explain how context, presupposition and intention can affect the meaning of certain special kind of utterances and also talking about the issues in pragmatics. 1. C.1.1:…show more content…
This utterance, regardless of whether it is true or false (whether or not there is a certain cat on a certain mat), presupposes that there is some cat and some mat, the addresser is referring to. The context, in which the sentence is uttered, might be pragmatic presupposition that the addresser is complaining about the cat’s dirtying the mat. (Mey, 1993:

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