简明英语语言学教程第二版第6章答案

Chapter 6 PRAGMATICS

1. What does pragmatics study? How does it differ from traditional semantics?

答：Generally speaking, pragmatics is the study of meaning in the context. It studies meaning in a dynamic way and as a process. In order to have a successful communication, the speaker and hearer must take the context into their consideration so as to effect the right meaning and intention. The development and establishment pragmatics in 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study semantics. However, it is different from the traditional semantics. The major difference between them lies in that pragmatics studies meaning in a dynamic way, while semantics studies meaning in a static way. Pragmatics takes context into consideration while semantics does not. Pragmatics takes care of the aspect of meaning that is not accounted for by semantics.

2. Why is the notion of context essential in the pragmatic study of linguistic communication? 答：The notion of context is essential to the pragmatic study of language. It is generally considered as constituted by the knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer. Various continents of shared knowledge have been identified, e.g. knowledge of the language they use, knowledge of what has been said before, knowledge about the world in general, knowledge about the specific situation in which linguistic communication is taking place, and knowledge about each other. Context determines the speaker's use of language and also the heater's interpretation of what is said to him. Without such knowledge, linguistic communication would not be possible, and without considering such knowledge, linguistic communication cannot be satisfactorily accounted for in a pragmatic sense. Look at the following sentences:

(1) How did it go?

(2) It is cold in hem.

(3) It was a hot Christmas day so we went down to the beach in the afternoon and had a

good time swimming and surfing.

Sentence (1) might be used in a conversation between two students talking about an examination, or two surgeons talking about an operation, or in some other contexts; (2) might be said by the speaker to ask the hearer to turn on the heater, or leave the place, or to put on more clothes, or to apologize for the poor condition of the room, depending on the situation of context; (3) makes sense only ii the hearer has the knowledge that Christmas falls in summer in the southern hemisphere.

3. How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?

答： A sentence is a grammatical concept, and the meaning of a sentence is often studied as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of predication. But if we think of a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of communication, it becomes an utterance, and it should be considered in the situation in which it is actually uttered (or used). So it is impossible to tell if “The dog is barking” is a sentence or an utterance. It can be either. It all depends on how we look at it and how we are going to analyze it. If we take it as a grammatical unit and consider it as a self-contained unit in isolation from context, then we are treating it as a sentence. If we take it as something a speaker utters in a certain situation with a certain purpose, then we are treating it as an utterance.

Therefore, while the meaning of a sentence is abstract, and decontextualized, that of an