KEY POINT: Utterances are interpreted in context not in isolation.
Pragmatics is the study of language in context. Other areas of linguistics (e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax) target the underlying systematicity of sounds and words and sentences. However, those sounds and words and sentences must be interpreted in context.
In order for a text (or a conversation or a series of text message or any other discourse) to make sense, not only do the utterances within it need to be well-formed but the utterances together must form a coherent whole in context. The nature of a coherent discourse is that the utterances within it do not appear together arbitrarily but, rather, relate to each other and the context in meaningful ways. Consider passages (1) and (2).
(1) Beryl applauded John. She admired him.
(2) Beryl applauded John. She pleased him.
The first sentences in (1-2) are the same, and the second sentences are structurally and referentially similar—each describes a state of affairs involving two individuals, in both cases re-mentioning the two referents from the first sentence in the same syntactic positions and with the same tense marking on the verb. They differ, however, at semantic and pragmatic levels: Admiration and pleasure differ in their lexical semantics, and that difference yields a contrast in the relationship between the two sentences in (1) and (2).
Note that in (1) and (2), identifying how the sentences work in context requires an inference about other information--namely that applause is an action typically performed for someone admirable. This piece of information is not stated overtly, yet the passage would fail to make sense if that information is not understood or accommodated. Such inferences are ubiquitous in discourse processing, yet are only apparent if we struggle to identify information that would make the utterances sensible in context, as in (3):
(3) Beryl applauded John. She hated him.
As in (1-2), the sentences in (3) are well-formed and easy to understand, but making sense of this passage requires an inference that is hard to reconcile with knowledge of the real world—namely that hatred could plausibly arise from or result in applause. The very fact that readers may start considering contexts in which (3) makes sense (maybe Beryl believes that John is a nervous and private person who cannot bear to be applauded?) is a testament both to readers' expectations that sentences must relate to their context and to the ease with which additional inferences arise beyond what is explicitly stated.
KEY POINT: Sentences are strings of words that abide by the rules of grammar. An utterance pairs a sentence and a context.
The expressions in (1-3) can be described as either 'sentences' or 'utterances'.
A sentence is a string of words that could be generated by the grammatical rules of a language. For example, (5) is a sentence of English but (6) is not:
(5) You're doing the web readings for your Pragmatics class.
(6) your for Pragmatics class doing You're web readings the.
Sentence meaning refers to the content of the words and the way those words combine. This is an abstract concept since it encapsulates the meaning of the sentence independent of its realisation in any surface form. The study of sentence meanings is typically analysed under the umbrella of semantics.
An utterance, on the other hand, is the use of a particular piece of language by a particular speaker in a particular context, as in (7-10):
(7) "Goodbye!"
(8) "Please open the window."
(9) "Beryl applauded John."
(10) "Beryl applauded John because she admired him."
An utterance like (9) is taken to be the pairing of the sentence itself and a context (who said it, when, where, to what listener, etc.). Utterance meaning is defined in terms of the speakers' intentions-what the speaker intended to convey by making that utterance. The study of utterance meanings is analysed under the umbrella of pragmatics.
Whereas a sentence is a surface strings of words that can be observed (or heard) and an utterance is a pairing of a sentence with a context, a proposition is more abstract. A proposition is the meaning expressed by a sentence when it is used to make a statement about some state of affairs in the world. Therefore, propositions are either true or false. The same proposition BERYL APPLAUDED JOHN is conveyed by both the active sentence (11) and the passive sentence (12).
(11) Beryl applauded John
(12) John was applauded by Beryl
The propositional content of a sentence is the part of its meaning that can be framed as a proposition. Semanticists talk about the propositional content of statements (like (11) and (12)) as well as questions like (13):
(13) Did Beryl applaud John?
The interrogative sentence in (13) is said to have the same propositional content as (11) and (12). A speaker uttering (11) or (12), however, would be asserting the truth of the propositional content BERYL APPLAUDED JOHN, whereas a speaker uttering the question in (13) would be questioning whether it is true that BERYL APPLAUDED JOHN.
KEY POINT: The distinctions between sentences, utterances, and propositions are useful notions for understanding semantics and pragmatics.
Content adapted from Huang, Y. (2007). "Pragmatics". New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 1.