Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics - Difference between Discourse analysis and Pragmatics

𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 & 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 - 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞, 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭 & 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 - 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐀𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭 - 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in relation to the context in which a person is speaking or writing. This includes social, situational, and textual context. It also includes background knowledge context; that is, what people know about each other and about the world. Pragmatics assumes that when people communicate with each other they normally follow cooperative principle; that is, they have a shared understanding of how they should cooperate in their communications. The ways in which people do this, however, varies across cultures. What may be a culturally appropriate way of saying or doing something in one culture may not be the same in another culture. The study of this use of language across cultures is called cross-cultural pragmatics.

We need to know the communicative function of an utterance, that is, what it is ‘doing’ in the setting in order to assign a discourse label to the utterance in the place of the overall discourse. For example, if someone says ‘The bus was late’ they may be complaining about the bus service (and so we label the stage of the conversation ‘complaint’), they may be explaining why they are late as a follow up to an apology (and so we label the stage of the conversation ‘explanation’) or they may be doing something else. We also need to know what this meaning is in order to understand, at a broader level, what people typically say and do as they perform particular genres in particular social and cultural settings.

An understanding of how language functions in context are central to an understanding of the relationship between what is said and what is understood in spoken and written discourse. The context of the situation (see Chapter 1 ) of what someone says is, therefore, crucial to understanding and interpreting the meaning of what is being said. This includes the physical context, the social context, and the mental worlds and roles of the people involved in the interaction. Each of these impacts what we say and how other people interpret what we say in spoken and written discourse.

A conversation between two people in a restaurant may mean different things to the actual people speaking, something different to a ‘side participant’ in the conversation (such as someone sitting next to one of the speakers), something different to a ‘bystander’ (such as the waiter) and again something different to someone who may be eavesdropping the conversation (Verschueren 1999 ).

There are, then, a number of key aspects of context that are crucial to the production and interpretation of discourse. These are the situational context in terms of what people ‘know about what they can see around them’, the background knowledge context in terms of what people ‘know about each other and the world’ and the co-textual context in terms of what people ‘know about what they have been saying’ (Cutting 2008: 5). Background knowledge context includes cultural knowledge and interpersonal knowledge. That is, it includes what people know about the world, what they know about various areas of life, what they know about each other (Cutting 2008 ), and what they know about the norms and expectations of the particular discourse community (see Chapter 2 ) in which the communication is taking place. Contextual knowledge also includes social, political, and cultural understandings that are relevant to the particular communication (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000 ).

Meaning is not something that is inherent in the words alone, nor is it produced by the speaker alone or the hearer alone. Making meaning is a dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer, the context of utterance (physical, social and linguistic), and the meaning potential of an utterance.

Meaning, thus, is produced in interaction. It is jointly accomplished by both the speaker and the listener, or the writer and their reader. It involves social, psychological, and cognitive factors that are relevant to the production and interpretation of what a speaker (or writer) says, and what a hearer (or reader) understands by what is said (Thomas 1995 ).

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