In this chapter, we take a closer look at the components that make up a speaker’s intended meaning. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the breadth and depth of pragmatic work that is involved in everyday communication. Working out what a speaker intends to communicate on any given occasion involves more than just decoding the words that she has uttered. In this chapter, we introduce the pragmatic processes that are involved in deriving a speaker’s overall intended meaning. We start by considering the processes that are involved in working out what the speaker intends to explicitly communicate. This section will include discussion of reference assignment, disambiguation, and pragmatic enrichment. We then look at the contribution that speech acts and communication of speaker emotion play. Finally, we consider examples of implicitly communicated meaning. In short, this chapter lays out the gaps between what is said and what is communicated and demonstrates how these need to be filled to derive a speaker’s intended meaning.

In Chapter 1, we introduce the subject of pragmatics and cover some basic concepts, definitions, and topics that will be central to the ideas discussed in the rest of the book. We begin with some definitions of pragmatics, and a key distinction is made between approaches which focus on social factors, and those which take a more theoretical approach. We move on to think about the role that context plays in interpretation. This leads us to a key distinction between sentences and utterances, with utterances as the focus of pragmatics. We then consider two different ways in which meaning may be communicated: via code and via inference. As we will see, inference plays a central role in the interpretation of utterances. Next, we discuss the idea that the identification of intention lies at the heart of utterance interpretation. This leads to a discussion of the cognitive abilities that are thought to underlie inferential processes, including mindreading, metarepresentation, and theory of mind. We look at what it means to be able to have thoughts about other people’s thoughts and why this is key for pragmatic processing.

Yet to Recieve

This chapter explains how the interplay between different societal factors and new technologies fosters a new form of social organization, which is no longer based on the individual or the traditional community but revolves around the idea of a network. Therefore, it discusses the idea of the network society along with the concepts of timeless time, the space of flows, and the weightless economy as well as the leading theories on network societies. The chapter outlines the effects of the increasing fusion of national public spheres with global information flows on public communication and presents two opposing developments: the participatory character of public communication and its restriction through economic interests and algorithmic processes. Furthermore, it focuses on the concept of network sociality, which is based on the assumption that networks and not communities are the dominant organizational form in a digital society. The chapter illustrates the role of social media in building and maintaining networks and introduces the term social capital, in order to understand network motivation. It ends with a reflection on the influence of algorithms on our socialities.

Yet to Recieve

In this chapter, the focus turns to practical matters as we outline the various ways in which pragmatics can be researched. To answer a pragmatics-focused research question or to investigate the pragmatics of an issue or practice we need two things. We need a theory of pragmatics, and we need data. We take a closer look at theoretical frameworks and the role they play in shaping a piece of research. We then move on to look at the different sorts of data that might be collected as part of a pragmatics research project. We discuss how intuition plays a role in research and how constructed examples can be used to test predictions and to fine-tune our understanding. We discuss free production tasks and judgement tasks, and we look at some examples of pragmatics research that has used transcripts, texts, or corpora for analysis. Finally, we discuss some of the practicalities of research in pragmatics. We think about how to find a topic to investigate, the ethical considerations that must be part of any project plan, and the issue of diversity and bias in research.

Yet to Recieve