London School and Pragmaticst

The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long story.

England was already developing a recognized standard language by the eleventh century. From the sixteenth century onwards, England was remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of ‘practical linguistics’ flourished here, by which term is referred to such activities as orthoepy, lexicography, invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial ‘philosophical languages’.

Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet. Sweet’s phonetics was practical as well as academic. His Handbook of Phonetics of 1877 ‘taught phonetics to Europe and England the birthplace of the modern science’.

Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones. In 1907 he built up what became the first university department of phonetics in Britain. Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training on the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech sound.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R Firth.

Firth theorizing concerned mainly phonology ad semantics.  One of the principal features of Firth0s treatment of phonology is that it is polysystematic.

For Firth the phonology of a language consists of a number of systems of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in a phonological unit such as a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

It might be argued that the polysystemic principle ignores a generalization about human language. Languages do not display too great a variety of phonological ‘systems’: thus we do not on the whole find languages with quite different links and numbers of consonants before each distinct vowel.

A Firthinan phonological analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies.

Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related than they are usually taken to be. For Firth, a phonology was a structure of systems of choices, and systems of choices were systems of meaning.

To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski. For Malinowski, to think of a language as a ‘meaning of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a misleading myth: to speak is not to tell, but to do. Words are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.

Malinowski clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing to a notion of ‘context of situation’.

According to Lyon’s exposition of Firth’s view: an utterance or a part of an utterance is “meaningful” if, and only if, it can be used appropriately in some actual context.

Let us turn now to a consideration of the London School approach to syntax. Syntactic analysis in the London style is commonly called ‘systematic grammar’. The clue to London School syntax is that it is primarily concerned with the nature of import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one language makes available.

In syntax London School is more interested in stating the range of options open to the speaker that in specifying how any particular set of choices from the range available is realized as a sequence of words.

Pragmatics

Charles More interpretation of the pragmatics is that pragmatics is the ‘the science of the relation of signs to their interpreters’, pragmatics is concerned with the interrelationship between language form, message and language users.

One task of pragmatics is to explain how participants in a dialog move from the decontextualized meaning of the words and phrases to a grasp of their meaning in context.

The linguistic meaning of an utterance underdetermines the communicator’s intended meaning. This gap is filled by the addressee’s reasoning about what the communicator intended to communicate by his or her utterance.

When we speak we ‘do’ things like make request, make statements, offer apologies and so on. People use language to perform actions that have an impact in some way on the world.

The main import of an utterance may lie with what is implicated, or communicated indirectly.

Paul Grice argued that communicative behavior is guided by a set of principles and norms, which he called the ‘Co-operative Principle’ and maxims of conversation, which are the following:

• ·         Truthfullness (quality)
• ·         Informativeness (quantity)
• ·         Relevance (relation)
• ·         Style (manner)

Leech proposes a set of ‘politeness maxims’, such as the ‘modesty maxim’ and the ‘agreement maxim’, which operate in conjunction with the co-operative maxims.

Leech also suggested that language use involves a ‘pragmalinguistic’ and a ‘sociopragmatic’ perspective.

The pragmalinguistic perspective focuses on the linguistic strategies that are used to convey a given pragmatic meaning, whereas the sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the socially based assessments, beliefs and international principles that underlie people’s choice of strategies.

In pragmatics, context can be defined as the set of assumptions that have a bearing on the production and interpretation of particular communicative acts.

ACTIVITY