Pragmatics and

the English Language

PERSPECTIVES ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Series Editors: Lesley Jeffries and Dan McIntyre

Published titles

PRAGMATICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Jonathan Culpeper and Michael Haugh
THE LANGUAGE OF EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE: FROM CÆDMON TO MILTON
Sara M. Pons-Sanz
DISCOURSE AND GENRE: USING LANGUAGE IN CONTEXT
Stephen Bax
STUDYING THE HISTORY OF EARLY ENGLISH
Simon Horobin
CRITICAL STYLISTICS: THE POWER OF ENGLISH
Lesley Jeffries
ENGLISH LITERARY STYLISTICS
Christiana Gregoriou
STUDYING LANGUAGE: ENGLISH IN ACTION
Urszula Clark
THINKING ABOUT LANGUAGE: THEORIES OF ENGLISH
Siobhan Chapman
DISCOVERING LANGUAGE: THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN ENGLISH
Lesley Jeffries

Forthcoming title

STUDYING DIALECT
Rob Penhallurick

Perpectives on the English Language

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Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS, UK
Pragmatics and
the English
Language
Jonathan Culpeper
Lancaster University, UK

and

Michael Haugh
Griffith University, Australia
© Jonathan Culpeper and Michael Haugh 2014
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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Contents

List of Tables ix
List of Figures x
Series Editors’ Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Transcription Conventions xiv

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Meanings in context 2
1.2.1 Beyond the linguistic code 2
1.2.2 The scope of pragmatics 5
1.3 The pragmatics of English 8
1.4 This book 10

2 Referential Pragmatics 13
2.1 Introduction 13
2.2 Definite expressions 16
2.3 Deixis 21
2.4 Anaphora 30
2.5 Using and understanding referring expressions
in interaction 33
2.5.1 Referring expressions and context 33
2.5.2 Referring expressions and accessibility 35
2.5.3 Referring expressions and common ground 37
2.5.4 Referring expressions in interaction 41
2.6 Conclusion 44

v
vi   Contents

3  Informational Pragmatics 45
3.1 Informational pragmatics 45
3.2 Informational ground: background and foreground 46
3.3 Informational background 51
3.3.1 Background assumptions 51
3.3.2 Presuppositions 55
3.4 Informational foreground 64
3.4.1 Foregrounding 64
3.4.2 Focus 65
3.5 Informational pragmatics: an interactional perspective 73
3.5.1 Presuppositions and backgrounding 74
3.5.2 Common grounding 76
3.6 Conclusion 81

4 Pragmatic Meaning I 83
4.1 Meaning beyond what is said 83
4.2 What is said versus what is implicated 84
4.2.1 Grice on speaker meaning 85
4.2.2 Implicated meaning 88
4.3 Between what is said and what is implicated 102
4.3.1 Literalist approaches: the neo-Griceans 103
4.3.2 Contextualist approaches: relevance theory 109
4.4 An interim conclusion: on pragmatic meaning
representations 114

5 Pragmatic Meaning II 117

5.1 Analysing pragmatic meaning 117
5.2 Whose meaning? 119
5.2.1 Participant footings 121
5.2.2 Recipient meanings 128
5.3 Understanding meaning 133
5.3.1 Utterance processing 133
5.3.2 Discourse processing 138
5.3.3 Two types of pragmatic meaning? 142
5.4 Meaning in interactional contexts 145
5.4.1 Pragmatic meaning and accountability 145
5.4.2 Pragmatic meaning and meaning-actions 148
5.5 Conclusion 152

6 Pragmatic Acts 155

6.1 Introduction 155
6.2 Traditional speech act theory 156
Contents vii

6.2.1 Doing thing with words: J. L. Austin 156

6.2.2 Developing speech act theory: Searle 162
6.3 Directness/indirectness; explicitness/implicitness 168
6.4 Speech acts in socio-cultural contexts 175
6.5 Pragmatic acts and schema theory 181
6.6 Pragmatic acts in interaction 185
6.6.1 Pragmatic acts in sequence 185
6.6.2 The co-construction of pragmatic acts 189
6.6.3 Pragmatic acts and activity types 191
6.7 Conclusion 195

7 Interpersonal Pragmatics 197

7.1 Introduction 197
7.2 Two general approaches to politeness 199
7.2.1 The socio-cultural view of politeness 199
7.2.2 The pragmatic view of politeness 202
7.3 The two classic pragmatic politeness theories 202
7.3.1 The conversational-maxim view: Lakoff (1973)
and Leech (1983) 202
7.3.2 The face-saving view: Brown and Levinson (1987) 205
7.4 Recent developments 214
7.4.1 Discursive 214
7.4.2 Relational 217
7.4.3 Frame-based 221
7.5 Impoliteness 222
7.6 The interactional approach to politeness 228
7.7 Conclusion 232

8 Metapragmatics 235
8.1 Introduction 235
8.2 Metapragmatics and reflexivity 237
8.3 Forms of metapragmatic awareness 240
8.3.1 Metacognitive awareness 242
8.3.2 Metarepresentational awareness 247
8.3.3 Metacommunicative awareness 252
8.4 Metapragmatics in use 258
8.5 Conclusion 263

9 Conclusion 264
9.1 Pragmatics as language in use 264
9.2 Integrative pragmatics 266
viii   Contents

9.2.1 First-order and second-order perspectives

on pragmatics 266
9.2.2 Methods in pragmatics 268
9.3 The pragmatics of Englishes 269

Bibliography 271
Index 293
List of Tables

2.1 Categories of English referring expressions 15

2.2 Deixis types and English expressions 23
3.1 Characteristics of backgrounded and foregrounded
information in discourse 50
3.2 Types of presupposition and presuppositional triggers
in English 57
6.1 Felicity conditions for promising 162
6.2 Searle’s (1979) classification of speech acts 165
6.3 Sentence type and speech act correspondences 168
6.4 Sentence type and speech act mismatches 168
6.5 Felicity conditions for apologising 176
6.6 Felicity conditions for requesting 183
7.1 Categories in the rapport management framework 220
8.1 Explicit indicators of metapragmatic awareness 241

ix
List of Figures

2.1 The cognitive statuses of referring expressions 36

3.1 A figure/ground vase picture 47
3.2 Anne Robinson: You are the weakest link 68
4.1 Types of Gricean implicature 99
4.2 Types of pragmatic meaning representations 115
5.1 Types of participation footings 127
5.2 Utterance versus interactional meaning 144
7.1 Relational work 218
8.1 Loci of metacognitive awareness 246
8.2 Orders of metarepresentational awareness 251
8.3 Orders of normativity 256
9.1 Overview of integrative pragmatics 267

x
Series Editors’ Preface

We are delighted to introduce another new volume in the Perspectives on

the English Language series. The first phase of this series produced three basic
core books which cover the essentials for those studying English Language at
undergraduate level and this core was followed by a second phase of books
dealing with specific topics in linguistics as applied to the English Language.
The core books (Jeffries 2006, Clark 2006 and Chapman 2007) remain at
the centre of the series, establishing some common ground in terms of the
descriptive apparatus, the social variation and the philosophical approaches
to English. We now also have a growing range of texts dealing with some
of the major themes of linguistics but applied specifically to English. These
include literary linguistics (Gregoriou 2008), discourse analysis (Bax 2010),
critical stylistics (Jeffries 2010), the development of early English (Horobin
2009) and the language of early English literature (Pons-Sanz 2014).
We aim for our books to share the linguistic/scientific principles of rigour
and replicability in their approach to linguistic data, and we are proud of
their accessibility, without any consequential over-simplification of material
or treatment. The level of these books is intended to be appropriate for under-
graduates studying these topics as part of an English Language or joint degree
including English Language. However, students or researchers at higher levels,
but new to the particular topic, should find that they work as a good starting
point for their reading, as the volumes produced during this second phase are
all research-led and address theoretical as well as descriptive issues.
The next phase of development of the series will include books which
continue to broaden the range of topics as well as being based on cutting-
edge research. The clarity and accessibility will continue to be an important
aspect of the series, as will the scientific principles mentioned above. We also

xi
xii   Series Editors’ Preface

aim to produce a still higher level of book, modelled on the monograph, but
written for students as well as researchers. This will complete the link between
teaching-only textbooks and research monographs which we see as a false
dichotomy in any case.
This volume on the pragmatics of English brings together two signifi-
cant researchers in the field who take the reader from the basics of referen-
tial meaning through to the most recent questions of whether pragmatics
is concerned mainly with the language users’ meaning (first-order) or the
analysts’ meaning (second-order). Thus, although this book starts out with
few assumptions about the background knowledge of the reader, it manages
to introduce not only the main pragmatic features of English(es) but also
debate the theoretical questions that currently concern those working in this
field. Though pragmatics as a sub-discipline of linguistics has tended to illus-
trate its constructs using English examples, there has so far been no accessible
general treatment of the pragmatics of the English Language itself. This book
puts that omission right.
Lesley Jeffries and Dan McIntyre
Acknowledgements

In the making of this book, we have racked up debts. We cannot thank enough
the people who patiently read through the first draft, warts and all, namely,
Geoffrey Leech, Judith O’Byrne and the four reviewers procured by Palgrave
Macmillan (especially, the heroic reviewer 4). Their commentary has saved us
from howlers and infelicities, and enabled us to enhance innumerable aspects
of the book. Any deficiencies that remain are, of course, our responsibility. We
would also like to thank the people at Palgrave Macmillan for their support:
Kitty van Boxel for helping in the early stages, Aléta Bezuidenhout for her
careful eye in the closing stages, and Paul Stevens for his considered direction.
Finally, we would like to thank John Heywood for his invaluable help with
the index.
Example 4.1 is reproduced by permission of Universal UClick.
Examples of usage taken from the British National Corpus (BNC) were
obtained under the terms of the BNC End User Licence. Copyright in the
individual texts cited resides with the original IPR holders.
Figure 7.1 is reproduced from Watts (2005: xliii) by permission of De
Gruyter.
Example 8.1 is reproduced from the Brisbane Sunday Mail by permission of
Rory Gibson.

xiii
Transcription Conventions

[ ] overlapping speech
(0.5) numbers in brackets indicate pause length
(.) micropause
: elongation of vowel or consonant sound
- word cut-off
. falling or final intonation
? rising intonation
, ‘continuing’ intonation
= latched utterances
underlining contrastive stress or emphasis
CAPS markedly loud
° ° markedly soft
.hhh in-breathe
Hhh out-breathe/laughter
↓ ↑ sharp falling/rising intonation
> < talk is compressed or rushed
< > talk is markedly slowed or drawn out
(  ) blank space in parentheses indicates uncertainty about the
transcription
((  )) double brackets indicates extra contextual or non-verbal
information

xiv