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The “priority of literal meaning” over metaphorical meaning [] represents a strong intuition of speakers rooted in “what the speaker knows about his own language”, we could say in his linguistic competence and it has been the cornerstone of hypotheses about metaphor for centuries, so much so that the most intuitive and immediate way to define “metaphorical meaning” is precisely in ...
- The Pragmatic Functions of Metaphorical Language
4 The Pragmatic Functions of Metaphor. Metaphor appears to...
- The Pragmatic Functions of Metaphorical Language
- Pragmatics Definition
- Pragmatics Examples
- Pragmatic Principles and Maxims
- Conclusion
- References
Pragmatics is the field of linguistics that delves into how social context, shared knowledge, and other factors shape the way language is understood and used to communicate effectively. One of the most well-cited definitions of pragmatics comes from Crystal (2008), who defines it as: This definition suggests that, unlike formal semantics, pragmatic...
1. Sarcasm
In sarcasm, the intended meaning of the speaker is often the opposite of the literal meaning of their words. For instance, if it’s raining heavily and someone says, “Great weather, isn’t it?” they don’t actually mean the weather is pleasant. Rather, they’re implying that the weather is terrible (Levinson, 2000; Levinson, 2013). The listener understands this inversion not from the words themselves but from the context (the fact it’s raining), as well as the speaker’s tone of voice and possibly...
2. Irony
Irony, like sarcasm, involves a divergence between the literal and intended meanings, but it’s often used to highlight contradictionsor incongruities. Consider a habitual procrastinator who announces, “I’ll start my project right away.” If we know this person’s history of putting things off, we might interpret their statement as ironic. They say they’ll start immediately, but we understand, based on our knowledge of their usual behavior, that they probably won’t. Pragmatics allows us to make...
3. Implications
Implications, or implicature, refers to what the speaker suggests or implies, as opposed to what they directly express. For example, if someone in a room says, “It’s cold in here,” they could be implying that they want the window closed or the heating turned up. They haven’t explicitly stated this request, but the context and our understanding of social norms(e.g., that people typically want to be warm) lead us to this interpretation (Kecskes, 2020). Again, pragmatics helps us navigate these...
1. Grice’s cooperative principle
Coined by H.P. Grice (1975), this principle posits that communication relies on the assumption that all participants are trying to cooperate to make the conversation effective. This is a key element in the interpretation of what people say and what they intend to convey. Conversations would be ineffective if participants didn’t generally attempt to understand and be understood by others. For example, we can see in combative political discourse that Grice’s cooperative principle is not being a...
2. Maxims of conversation
Grice further elaborated the cooperative principle through four maxims. These maxims are: 1. Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more. 2. Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false or lack adequate evidence for. 3. Relation: Only say things that are relevant to the current conversation. 4. Manner: Be clear, brief, and orderly, such as not talking out of turn and do not dominate the conversation. While these aren’t rigid rules, violations can lead to m...
3. Relevance theory and its implications
Developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), this theory proposes that an essential feature of human communication is the pursuit and recognition of relevance. Speakers shape their utterances to be relevant to the listener’s context, and listeners interpret utterances based on the assumption of optimal relevance—that the speaker is saying something worthwhile and is doing so in the most effective way possible. This extends and refines Grice’s maxims, particularly the maxim of relevance.
Pragmatics helps people studying linguistics to develop deeper and more effective understandings of communicative acts. It helps us to reach the actual or implied meaning, rather than a surface meaning gleaned through decontextualized reading of a text. It’s therefore widely used in academic research, such as in content analysis, where a scholar ne...
Booth, S. (2015). Close reading without readings.New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Crystal, D. (2008). A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (6th ed.). New York: Blackwell. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts (Vol. 3, pp. 41-58). Academic Press. Kecskes, I. (2020). Conte...
2.3.2 The Pragmatics of Metaphor. Pragmatics is the study of intended “speaker meaning” (Cooper 1986: 88) as it appears in a certain verbal and situational context which provides certain propositions that go beyond the limits of the direct semantic associations of utterances. As such, the pragmatic meaning of an utterance is a feature of ...
The starting point is an exploration of the birth of the first pragmatic models of metaphor against the background of the then prevailing views of metaphor in linguistics. The first pragmatic elaboration of Grice's programme focuses on notion of implicature and on what role it plays, at various points, in getting from 'what is (literally) said' to 'what is (metaphorically) meant'.
- Miriam Taverniers
- 2017
Mar 31, 2024 · The salient meaning of a word or an expression is its lexicalized meaning, i.e., the meaning retrievable from the mental lexicon rather than from the context (e.g., the literal meaning of novel ...
Dec 3, 2021 · 4 The Pragmatic Functions of Metaphor. Metaphor appears to play various roles in human communication, which makes it unique among the tropes and other forms of loose language use. Its expressive power has been recognized for millennia and it has been utilized by poets and rhetors ever since.
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Jul 11, 2016 · This article examines the pragmatic interpretation of metaphor. It first looks at traditional approaches to this phenomenon, such as the Gricean model, which classify metaphor alongside other tropes like hyperbole or understatement. This type of approach analyses metaphor as resulting from an overt violation of the maxim of quality (involving ...
