Pragmatics & discourse

concerned with the study of meaning communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener

has more to do with what people MEAN rather than what the words/phrases mean themselves

• study of speaker meaning

• study of contextual meaning

• study of how more than is said gets communicated

• study of the expression of relative distance

speaker: constructs linguistic message, intends/implies meaning

listener: interprets/infers meaning

prerequisite is shared assumption by participants

• a conventional knowledge structure that exists in memory

• a mental construct of reality as culturally ordered and socially sanctioned

• people’s expectations about …

-> schematic knowledge, schema of expectations

• actions, sequences of actions

• “expected sequence of events in an event, influenced by culture”

often hard to distinguish between schema and script,

-> script sort of a “dynamic schema”

context and assumptions of shared knowledge always influence how we say what we want to communicate (and how much we say)

• situational context (physical, auditory)

• background knowledge context (cultural, interpersonal)

• co-text (inside the text)

schema, script and context