WHAT IS PRAGMATICS, AND WHY DO I NEED TO KNOW, ANYWAY?
Georgia M. Green · 2012
In chapter 5 , we discussed how what people said reflected, and was more or less consciously intended to reflect, their intentions and beliefs, especially beliefs about their interlocutors’ beliefs. The focus of this chapter is how the way in which something is said reflects speakers’ attitudes toward and beliefs about the topics and referents of an ongoing discourse. The aspect of how something is said that we will focus on is the choice of a syntactic construction from among the many which the grammar of the language makes available for the proposition to be expressed, although intonational choices ( Schmerling, 1976 ; Cutler, 1977 ; Ward & Hirschberg, 1985 ; Olsen, 1986 ) and phonological choices ( Cutler, 1974 , p. 117; Zwicky & Sadock, 1975 , pp. 26–27) have also been discussed, as well as the choice of which language to use ( Gumperz, 1976 ; Burt, 1990 ). Section 1 treats syntactic devices which reflect the speaker’s assumptions about the structure of the discourse. In section 2, we examine some constructions which differ from their truth-conditionally equivalent counterparts in various other ways. Some differ in rhetorical function (i.e., in what gets asserted and what is presupposed), but most reflect different beliefs about or attitudes toward referents of linguistic expressions that are part of the utterance. Section 3 deals with syntactic constructions which enable a speaker to compensate for (perceived) difficulties in producing or parsing a complex utterance. Many of the constructions have more than one use or function, and show up in more than one category.