Pragmatics and Discourse
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in a cognitive environment if the environment provides sufficient evidence for its adoption, and as we all know, mistaken assumptions are sometimes very well evidenced. Anything that can be seen at all is visible, but some things are much more visible than others. Similarly, we have defined ‘manifest’ so that any assumption that an individual is capable of constructing and accepting as true or probably true is manifest to him. We also want to say that manifest assumptions which are more likely to be entertained are more manifest. Which assumptions are more manifest to an individual during a given period or at a given moment is again a function of his physical environment on the one hand and his cognitive abilities on the other. Human cognitive organisation makes certain types of phenomena (i.e. perceptible objects or events) particularly salient. For instance, the noise of an explosion or a doorbell ringing is highly salient, a background buzz or a ticking clock much less so. When a phenomenon is noticed, some assumptions about it are standardly more accessible than others. In an environment where the doorbell has just rung, it will normally be strongly manifest that there is someone at the door, less strongly so that whoever is at the door is tall enough to reach the bell, and less strongly still that the bell has not been stolen. The most strongly manifest assumption of all is the assumption that the doorbell has just rung, the evidence for which is both salient and conclusive. We will have more to say, in chapter 3, about the factors which make some assumptions more manifest than others in a given situ-ation. For the moment it is the fact rather than the explanation that matters. Our notion of what is manifest to an individual is clearly weaker than the notion of what is actually known or assumed. A fact can be manifest without being known; all the individual’s actual assumptions are manifest to him, but many more assumptions which he has not actually made are manifest to him too. This is so however weakly the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘assumption’ are construed. In a strong sense, to know some fact involves having a mental representation of it. In a weaker sense, to say that an individual knows some fact is not necessarily to imply that he has ever entertained a mental representation of it. For instance, before read-ing this sentence you all knew, in that weak sense, that Noam Chomsky never had breakfast with Julius Caesar, although until now the thought of it had never crossed your mind. It is generally accepted that people have not only the know-ledge that they actually entertain, but also the knowledge that they are capable of deducing from the knowledge that they entertain. However, something can be manifest without being known, even in this virtual way, if only because some-thing can be manifest and false, whereas nothing can be known and false. Can something be manifest without being actually assumed? The answer must again be yes. Assumptions are unlike knowledge in that they need not be true. As with knowledge, people can be said to assume, in a weak sense, what they are capable of deducing from what they assume. However, people do not assume, in any sense, what they are merely capable of inferring non-demonstratively – that is, by some creative process of hypothesis formation and confirmation – from what they assume. Although it presumably followed non-demonstratively from what you
more explicit and systematic than the intuitive reconstructions supplied by un-sophisticated speakers, the analyses of implicature which have been proposed by pragmatists have shared with these intuitive reconstructions the defect of being almost entirely ex post facto. Given that an utterance in context was found to carry particular implicatures, what both the hearer and the pragmatic theorist can do, the latter in a slightly more sophisticated way, is to show how in very intuitive terms there was an argu-ment based on the context, the utterance and general expectations about the behaviour of speakers, that would justify the particular interpretation chosen. What they fail to show is that on the same basis, an equally convincing justification could not have been given for some other interpretation that was not in fact chosen. There may be a whole variety of interpretations that would meet whatever standards of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and clarity have been proposed or envis-aged so far. The theory needs improving at a fundamental level before it can be fruitfully applied to particular cases. In his William James Lectures, Grice put forward an idea of fundamental import-ance: that the very act of communicating creates expectations which it then exploits. Grice himself first applied this idea and its elaboration in terms of the maxims to a rather limited problem of linguistic philosophy: do logical connectives (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if . . . then’) have the same meaning in natural languages as they do in logic? He argued that the richer meaning these connectives seem to have in natural languages can be explained in terms not of word meaning but of implicature. He then suggested that this approach could have wider applications: that the task of linguistic semantics could be considerably simplified by treating a large array of problems in terms of implicatures. And indeed, the study of implicature along Gricean lines has become a major concern of pragmatics. We believe that the basic idea of Grice’s William James Lectures has even wider implications: it offers a way of developing the analysis of inferential communication, suggested by Grice him-self in ‘Meaning’ (1957), into an explanatory model. To achieve this, however, we must leave aside the various elaborations of Grice’s original hunches and the sophisticated, though empirically rather empty debates they have given rise to. What is needed is an attempt to rethink, in psychologically realistic terms, such basic questions as: What form of shared information is available to humans? How is shared information exploited in communication? What is relevance and how is it achieved? What role does the search for relevance play in communication? It is to these questions that we now turn.
warning; or, on a different plane, referring to people or things, presupposing the existence of people or things or the truth of propositions, and implicating mean-ings which are not overtly expressed. The idea of uttering as acting is an impor-tant one, and it is also central to CLS in the form of the claim, that discourse is social practice. The main weakness of pragmatics from a critical point of view is its individ-ualism: ‘action’ is thought of atomistically as emanating wholly from the individ-ual, and is often conceptualized in terms of the ‘strategies’ adopted by the individual speaker to achieve her ‘goals’ or ‘intentions’. This understates the extent to which people are caught up in, constrained by, and indeed derive their individual iden-tities from social conventions, and gives the implausible impression that conven-tionalized ways of speaking or writing are ‘reinvented’ on each occasion of their use by the speaker generating a suitable strategy for her particular goals. And it correspondingly overstates the extent to which people manipulate language for strate-gic purposes. Of course, people do act strategically in certain circumstances and use conventions rather than simply following them; but in other circumstances they do simply follow them, and what one needs is a theory of social action – social practice – which accounts for both the determining effect of conventions and the strategic creativity of individual speakers, without reducing practice to one or the other. The individuals postulated in pragmatics, moreover, are generally assumed to be involved in cooperative interactions whose ground rules they have equal con-trol over, and to which they are able to contribute equally. Cooperative interac-tion between equals is elevated into a prototype for social interaction in general, rather than being seen as a form of interaction whose occurrence is limited and socially constrained. The result is an idealized and Utopian image of verbal inter-action which is in stark contrast with the image offered by CLS of a sociolinguistic order moulded in social struggles and riven with inequalities of power. Pragmatics often appears to describe discourse as it might be in a better world, rather than discourse as it is. Pragmatics is also limited in having been mainly developed with reference to single invented utterances rather than real extended discourse, and central notions like ‘speech act’ have turned out to be problematic when people try to use them to analyse real discourse. Finally, Anglo-American pragmatics bears the scars of the way in which it has developed in relation to ‘linguistics proper’. While it has provided a space for investigating the interdependence of language and social con-text which was not available before its inception, it is a strictly constrained space, for pragmatics tends to be seen as an additional ‘level’ of language study which fills in gaps left by the more ‘core’ levels of grammar and semantics. Social con-text is acknowledged but kept in its place, which does it less than justice.
Data for this study was obtained from one strata of the larger population of Syria and the US. The Syrian compliment responses were uttered by middle class people from an urban area (i.e. Damascus) and most of the American compliment responses were given by Caucasian university graduate students. One cannot assume that these findings generalize to other groups within Syria or the US or to other Arabic-speaking or English-speaking countries. Further research is needed to know how generalizable these findings are. In order for students to become communicatively competent in a second language, they need both grammatical and pragmatic competence (Thomas 1983). However, achieving pragmatic competence may, at times, be complicated due to pragmatic transfer – using the rules governing speech events from one’s L1 speech com-munity when interacting with members of an L2 speech community. Pragmatic transfer can lead to pragmatic failure, to not understanding the illocutionary force of an utterance, to not understanding what is meant by what is said (Thomas 1983). Such situations can result in cross-cultural misunderstandings and communi-cation breakdowns. Cross-cultural studies such as this one contribute to our know-ledge of appropriate compliment/compliment response competence in Syrian Arabic and American English and also to our understanding of pragmatic transfer as a possible cause for pragmatic failure. The results of this study suggest similarities and differences in Syrian Arabic and American English compliment responses. Similarities include the overall manner of responding – both Syrians and Americans are much more likely to either accept or mitigate the force of the compliment than to reject it outright. In addition, members of both groups use some similar response types (e.g. Agreeing Utterances, Compliment Returns, Deflecting or Qualifying Comments, and Reas-surance or Repetition Requests). Finally, males and females in both groups employ most of the response types. An exception is Agreeing Utterances; Syrian females did not use this response. Students of English and Arabic can use these similari-ties between Arabic and English compliment responses to their advantage by learn-ing the responses that are similar in both languages. As Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993) point out, behaviors that are consistent across L1 and L2 usually result in communicative success. However, Hurley (1992) warns that the similarity of an L2 form to a form in the learner’s L1 can also be a pragmalinguistic problem. The danger is that the L2 learner may overgeneralize the form to inappropriate settings. Although the two groups share similarities in compliment responses, they also differ in important ways. In responding to compliments, US recipients are much more likely than Syrians to use Appreciation Tokens (e.g. thanks). The infrequency of this response in the Arabic data suggests that the utterance Shukran (‘thank you’) by itself is not usually a sufficient response to an Arabic compliment and needs to be supplemented by additional words. By itself, it may sound flat and awkward because it appears to signal the end of the conversation. As illustrated
female. One was attending college part-time and was 29 years of age, single, and a dental technician. The other was 25, single, a translator and secretary, and an English literature graduate from Damascus University. The other two interview-ers were male. One studied English literature at the University, managed his fam-ily farm property, was 27 and was single. The fourth also studied English literature at the University and was 22. All four were middle class. The Syrian compliment/compliment responses were not audiotaped. The Syrian interviewers reported that tape recorders were likely to make the interviewees feel uncomfortable; that, in general, Syrians are not familiar with the practice of conducting sociological or sociolinguistic studies about themselves; and that the tape recording would be culturally inappropriate. The Syrian interviewers praised 32 recipients, 20 males and 12 females, on physical appearance, on personality traits, or on a skill or job; listened to the responses; responded in turn; and after the interaction was completed, wrote down what was said. In some cases, the interviewers felt uncomfortable complimenting a person of a different gender or a person that was older. In these cases, they observed others giving and respond-ing to compliments and wrote down what was said. These observations resulted in an additional 20 compliment/compliment response sequences. In 7 cases, males were complimented, and in 13 cases, females were complimented. These proce-dures resulted in naturalistic data and yielded 52 Syrian compliment/compliment responses from 52 recipients, 27 males and 25 females. To insure the accuracy of the transcriptions, the Syrian interviewers were trained by one of the researchers. The trainer instructed them (l) to write down the exact words used in the complement/compliment response interaction, and (2) to do so as soon as possible after the interaction took place. In addition, the trainer gave each interviewer note cards and instructed them to write each interaction on a separate card. The trainer met with the interviewers at least once a week. At these meetings, the interviewers reported on their progress and the trainer again emphasized the importance of recording the interactions verbatim. To native speakers of English, recalling compliment responses word-for-word may seem difficult, but the task is less difficult for native speakers of Arabic. Many of the Syrian utterances consist of set formulas. The Syrian interviewers would remember the responses because they exist as formulaic chunks of discourse. The potential for varying the formulas is minimal. For the non-formulaic responses, it is possible that an interviewer might have made a minor change in the wording. However, if such a change occurred, the wording of the compliment response would still be an appropriate Syrian response to the situation. The Arabic compliments/compliment responses were translated into Eng-lish, but the primary analysis was based on the Arabic transcripts, not the English translations.