Pragmatic approach to discourse analysis

Some basic concepts

Bases for inferencing

The co-operative principle

Reference

Entailment

Presupposition

Inferencing

Implicatures

Reference is the relationship which holds between words and things

A distinction to be made between the reference of a word, which is the object designated, and the sense of a word.

Entailment as a concept from formal logic may be defined this way: When a proposition X is true, a proposition Y must therefore be true, then proposition X entails proposition Y.

Presupposition is the assumption the speaker makes about what the hearer is likely to accept without challenge

Process of reaching a conclusion based on facts or evidence

Implicatures is used by G Ice to account for what a speaker can imply, suggest, or mear as a distinct from what the speaker literally says

The assumption

Background knowledge

Conceptual meaning of
utterance

Informal reasoning

Cooperative Principle and its maxims

Conversational implicature

Quantity

Relation

Manner

Quality