Pragmatics in English An Introduction

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.