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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 14 page paper discusses what is meant by pragmatics ad how it can be used in the study of language. The paper then loos at one aspect of pragmatics; Politeness Theory, also referred to as the politeness principle, and considers how this has helped our understanding of how it is we can be confident our meaning is interpreted as intended and that we are understanding others as intended. The bibliography cites 12 sources.
Page Count:
14 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TS14_TEpragmat.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
is the use of pragmatics, which looks at the context and has the aim of discovering the meaning in the context which is not apparent when studying only the mere
words and sentences structures that are the subject of study by semantics. By understanding pragmatics we can also move onto the theory of politeness which enriches the context of any
study of language and helps identify the various contexts and social reactions and can be used as a way to determining if the meaning and understanding are aligned. Pragmatics
is a relativity new area of study within the subject of languages studies with its foundations in the philosophy of language and also in the pragmatist philosophical school of thought
from the US (Verschueren, 1999). The original work that lead to the study of pragmatics can be traced back to Paul Brice
with his work on conversational implicature and also the cooperative principle and was also built on by theorists such as Stephen Levinson, Penelope Brown as well the development of politeness
theory by Geoff Leech. Verschueren defines the subject as "The general concern of pragmatics is to understand the meaningful functioning of language as a dynamic process operating
on context structure relationships at various levels of salience." (Verschueren, 1999: 69). This is a good overview, but for a more detailed definition we can look to Levinson;
"[T]he term pragmatics covers both context-dependent aspects of language structure and principles of language usage and understanding that have nothing or little to do with linguistic structure. It
is difficult to forge a definition that will happily cover both aspects. But this should not be taken to imply that pragmatics is a hodge-podge, concerned with quite disparate and
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