Pragmatics

Pragmatics

Pragmatics constraints on language comprehension and production may be loosely thought of as the effect of context on strings of linguistic events.
Second language acquisition becomes an exceedingly difficult task when sociopragmatics of pragmalinguistic constraints are brought to bear. Kasper (1998), LoCastro (1997), Turner (1995,1996), and many other researchers have all demonstrated the difficulty of such conventions because of subtle cross-cultural contrasts. Variations in politeness and formality are particularly touchy:

American : what an unusual necklace. It’s beautiful
Samoan : please take it. (Holmes & Brown 1987:526)

American : would you like to read?
Russian student: no, I would not (Harlow 1990:328)

In both cases the non-native English speakers misunderstood the Illocutionary force (intended meaning) of the utterance within the contexts.
Pragmatics is concerned with the interpretation of linguistic meaning in context. Two kinds of contexts are relevant. The first is linguistic context – the discourse that precedes the phrase or sentence to be interpreted. Try this sentence.
Amazingly, he already left her alone
Is essentially uninterpretable. There are no referents for he and her, an the reason for amazingly is vague. But if the sentence preceeding it were John met Mary yesterday, its interpretation would be clearer.
The discourse suggests the second kind of context – situational, or knowledge of the world. To fully interpret the sentences the listener must know the real-world referents of John and Mary. The interpretation amazingly is made clear by the general belief of knowledge that a person ordinarily needs more than a day to complete the act – the completion indicated by already – of leaving her.
Situational context, then, includes the speaker, hearer, and any third parties present, along with their beliefs and their beliefs about what the others believe. It includes the physical environment, the subject of conversation, the time of day and so on, and infinitum. Almost any imaginable extralinguistic factor may, under appropriate circumstances, influence the way language is interpreted.
Pragmatics is also about language use. It tells that calling someone a son of a bitch is not a zoological opinion, it;s an insult. Because pragmatics is concerned with the interpretation and use of language in context, it may be considered part of what we call linguistic performance.

Language and Gender
One of the major pragmatic factors affecting the acquisition of communicative competence in virtually every language, and one that has received considerable attention recently is the effect of one’s sex on both production and reception of language.
Some differences in the ways males and female speak have been found through researches;

- Among American English speakers, girls have been found to produce more “standard” language than boys, a pattern that continues on through adulthood.
- Women appear to use language that expresses more uncertainty than men, suggesting less confidence in what they say.
- Men have been reported to interrupt more than women, and to use stronger expletive, while the latter use more polite forms.

These studies of language and gender, which were conducted in English-speaking cultures, will be different result in other languages. For example, Japanese women speaks in different ways (syntactic variants, intonation patterns, and nonverbal expression. So, when an English learner of Japanese learn from Japanese female teacher, he will “say things like women”, then it may become his embarrassment in conducting a business with Japanese men.
For the second language learners, it is very important to know the correlation between language and gender on the view of their target language since it will help them to gain sociopragmatic competence of the target language.