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Pragmatics and Semiotics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Speech acts, Context…
Pragmatics and Semiotics
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b. Signs
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• Peirce: Triadic model → Signifier, Signified, Referent
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- Key Concepts in Pragmatics
→ Context
• Situational: physical, cultural, social factors
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→ Utterance vs. Sentence
• Utterance = spoken, context-bound, may be incomplete
• Sentence = grammatically complete, context-free
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• Charles Morris (1930s): Divided linguistics → Syntactics, Semantics, Pragmatics
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• Modern focus: discourse, conversation, speaker intention
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b. Searle’s 5 Acts:
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• Directives: requesting, ordering
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• Expressives: thanking, apologizing
• Declaratives: changing reality (e.g., “You’re fired!”)
c. Felicity Conditions
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• E.g., A promise must be sincere + future-oriented
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Mostly symbolic, but includes iconic (e.g., onomatopoeia: boom)
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Linguistic Syntactics: word order (e.g., SVO)
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- Pragmatics in Language Teaching
→ Importance:Avoids pragmatic failure (e.g., sounding rude or robotic)Learners often struggle with politeness, indirectness, sarcasm
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→ Solutions: Start with literal meaning (A1–B1 levels) Gradually raise awareness Use authentic input (films, conversations) Teach functional language (requests, apologies, hedges)
→ Teaching Activities: Compare formal vs informal expressions Practice using speech acts with different tones Analyze context in dialogues
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Concerned with speaker intent, listener interpretation
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Speech acts
- Austin’s Distinction: Three Levels of Speech Acts
- Locutionary Act: Literal meaning of the utterance.
- Illocutionary Act: Speaker’s intention or social function.
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- Perlocutionary Act: Effect on the listener.
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- Searle’s Classification of Illocutionary Acts
- Assertives: Statements of fact (e.g., “It is raining.”)
- Directives: Attempts to get the listener to do something (e.g., “Close the door.”)
- Commissives: Commit the speaker to an action (e.g., “I’ll call you tomorrow.”)
- Expressives: Express the speaker’s feelings or attitudes (e.g., “I’m sorry.”)
- Declarations: Change reality by being said (e.g., “You’re fired.”)
- Felicity Conditions (for successful speech acts)
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- Direct vs. Indirect Speech Acts
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They involve context, culture, and social norms.
Indirectness is often used for politeness, especially in requests and refusals.
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(e.g., being too direct in requests, misinterpreting apologies)
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Coined by J.L. Austin, expanded by John Searle.
Definition: An utterance that performs an action just by being said (e.g., apologizing, requesting, promising).
Context
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• Environment (Scharfstein, 1989)
• Background / Perspective (Hobart, 1985–86)
• Figure and Ground (Goodwin & Duranti, 1992)
• Context = Crucial for meaning, interpretation, cognition.
• Hard to define: vague, transdisciplinary, multidimensional.
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- High vs. Low Context (Hall, 1976)
• High: Emotion, indirectness, nonverbal, close relations.
• Low: Logic, directness, verbal, less personal.
- Private vs. Public Context (Kecskes, 2008)
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• Public: Shared, conventionalized understanding within a speech community.
- Objective vs. Subjective Context (Penco, 1999)
• Objective: External facts (time, speaker, place).
• Subjective: Mental representation (assumptions, beliefs, language rules).
- New Typology: Prime Context vs. Post Context (Çakır, 2004, 2010, 2011)
Prime Context
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• Shared, codified, and agreed upon by a community.
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Post Context
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• Negated, extended, narrowed, differentiated etc.
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