Pragmatic statuses

Pragmatics is the practice of utterance interpretation (Levinson 1983). Utterances are actual instances of language in use, therefore they\ always occur in a context and their interpretations always affect and are affected by the context. What we will call pragmatic statuses have to do with choices speakers make about how to efficiently adapt their utterances to the context, including the addressee's presumed “mental state.” Like semantic roles, pragmatic statuses are usually, though not always, thought of as characteristics of nominal elements. However, semantic roles are features of the content of the discourse (see section 3.2.0), while pragmatic statuses relate the content to the context. Labels that have been used to describe various pragmatic statuses include: given, new, presupposed, focus, topic, identifiable (or definite), and referential. These terms will be described in the following subsections. But first we will sketch the conceptual background to these pragmatic notions.

People are constantly surrounded by sensory impressions, only a very small portion of which can be attended to at any given moment. Therefore, we have to be selective about which impressions to attend to, and which to ignore. When communicating with other people, we as speakers constantly (1) assess our audience's present mental state, e.g., what they already know, what they are currently attending to, what they are interested in, etc., and (2) construct our message so as to help the audience revise their mental state in the direction we would like it to go. For example, we may highlight items that we want someone to pay attention to, and which we sense he/she is not already paying attention to. Also, we may spend little communicative energy on information which we sense the audience is already thinking about or attending to. The study of how these kinds of highlighting and downplaying tasks affect the structure of linguistic communication is commonly referred to as pragmatics.

It should be pointed out that grammatical relations are one major means of expressing pragmatic information about nominal elements in discourse (see chapter 7). For example, in languages that have a well grammaticalized subject category, subjects tend to be identifiable, given and already available in memory. Direct objects are either given or new in about equal proportions.