Pragmatica

UNIT 1. LINGUISTC PARADIGMS. THE STRUCTURALIST PARADIGM UNIT 2. LINGUISTICPARADIGMS. THE CHOMSKYAM PARADIGM

 THOMAS KUHN
The structure of scientific revolution (two editions: 1962 / 1970). This is a book about science. THESES (argumentos): Science is not the story of how knowledge was acquired, but an accumulation of theories. It follows that old theories are not less scientific than thecurrent ones, but simply variations in a time continuum. Science does not develop by a gradual addition of discoveries. Science develops in a non-smooth curved line which has several irregularities (loops).

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Old view:
T1 -> T2 -> T3 Each theory inherits the previous discoveries and then they get better.

Kuhn’s view:
T1 T2 T3 Kuhn says that scientific theories are fighting between eachother. There is no guarantee that the last one is going to be the best.

According to Kuhn science develops in PARADIGMS: “Universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide models and solutions to a community of practitioners”. This scientific revolution is made by a single person (a very intelligent person); for instance: Darwin, Newton, Galileo… “When a paradigm makes itsfirst appearance in a period of revolutionary science, it is invariably resisted by the specialists… This hostility is understandable, since any new paradigm necessarily involves a profound change in the rules governing the practice of normal science”. (Thomas Kuhn) Scientific Revolution (instability) Scientific Paradigm (stability)

At the beginning of the 20th century, everybody studiedhistoricism and comparative grammar. Those people thought that Saussure was a lunatic, but afterwards his theory was approved = STRUCTURALISM Then, Chomsky came and happened exactly the same. In 1957 he published Syntactic Structures and another paradigm appeared = GENERATIVE GRAMMAR There is not a revolutionary person in pragmatics. That is why some people consider it should not be a paradigm.

1UNIT 3. PRAGMATICS: GENERAL ISSUES Pragmatics deals with language in use, language used in context This idea is opposite to the following one Saussure’s interest in language and Chomsky’s interest in competence Most definitions include at least one of the following factors: a) Pragmatics studies the context-dependent aspects of verbal communication and comprehension b) Pragmatics studies therole of non-linguistic factors in verbal communication and comprehension c) Pragmatics studies how language interacts with other cognitive systems (e. g. perception, memory, indifference…) in verbal communication and comprehension EXAMPLES OF DEFINITIONS a) Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others (Crystal, 1987)b) Pragmatics can be usefully defined as the study of how utterances have meanings in situations (Leech, 1983) c) Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated that is said (Jule, 1996) All these definitions suggest that a central problem for pragmatics is that the meaning a speaker conveys by uttering a sentence on a particular occasion typically goes beyond (context-independent)linguistic meaning assigned to that sentence by the grammar. In other words, the sentence-meaning provides less information than the speaker’s meaning.

Austin Social Issues

Wittgentstein

Grice

Searle Cognitive issues

60’s – 70’s Actions in a social context Intentions underlying actions

That people have when saying something The four were philosophers, but the first two were moreinterested in social issues whereas the last ones studied intention. Nerlich (1995): Importance of 30’s 18th century: Locke (Empirism) 19th century: Saussure (early 20th): language as system 1. 2. 3. 4. 1. 2. 3. 4. Ordinary language philosophy Context-oriented structuralism American semiotics (Peirce / Morris) Universal pragmatics (Habermas)

Language as use

Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle “Speech...