parole. Therefore, pragmatics does not only study language in theories, but it studies language in the real usage.
Levinson 1983: 5-27 gives several definitions of pragmatics, they are: 1. Pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and context
that are grammaticallized, or encoded in the structure of language. 2. Pragmatics is the study of relations between language and context that are
basic to an account of language understanding. 3. Pragmatics is the study of the ability of language users to pair sentences
with the context in which they would be appropriate.
4. Pragmatics is the study of deixis at least in part, implicature,
presupposition, speech acts, and aspects of discourse structure.
In order to give clearer understanding on pragmatics, Tran 2003: 1 gives an example that the question: “Is John there?” at the beginning of a phone call
would be interpreted as a request to speak to John rather than as an information question. Another example is that my friend, Sisca, visits me at home and says to
me “I’m thirsty, Atik. ”The utterances would be taken as a request for something to drink rather than a descriptive statement. However, the same utterance may
have another functions in different contexts. Meanwhile Yule in Pragmatics, stated that there are four areas which
pragmatics is concerned with: 1. Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning
Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker or writer and interpreted by listener or reader. It has, consequently,
more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves.
2. Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning. This type of study necessarily involves the interpretation of what people
mean in particular context and how the context influences what is said. It requires a consideration of how speakers organize what they want to say in accordance
with who they are talking to, where, when, and under what circumtances. 3. Pragmatics is the study of how more gets communicated than is said.
This approach also necessarily explores how listeners can make influences about what is said in order to arrive at an interpretation of the speaker intended
meaning. This type of the study explores how a great deal of what is unsaid is recognized as part of what is communicated. We might say that it is the
investigation of invisible meaning.
4. Pragmatics is the study of the expression of relative distance. This perspective then raises the question of what determines the choice
between the said and the unsaid. The basic answer is tied to the notion of distance, closeness, whether it is physical, social, or conseptual implies shared experience
on the assumption of how close or distant the listener is, speaker determine how much needs to be said 1996: 3.
From the definitions given above, it can be concluded that pragmatics is a branch in linguistics which discusses the meanings of utterances and their
functions, what it is for and used for. In other words, pragmatics is a part in
linguistics which focuses on utterances expressed by the speaker which is associated with its contexts.
Context is who is talking to whom, place and time that is uttered in an utterance, presuppositions on who is involved in the act of uttering the utterance.
An anthropologist called Dell Hymes 1964 in Brown and Yule 1996: 38 – 39 had mentioned the criteria of the context which is relevant to speaking situation,
they are; Addressor speaker, writer or sender, Addressee hearer, reader or receiver, Audience, Topic, Setting time, place and other physical conditions
surrounding the speech act, Channels written, telegraph, spoken, signs, etc, Cole standard language, or dialect, or which style is used, Message-form chit-
chat, debate, preach, sonnet, love, letter, etc, Event, Genres fairy tale, advertisement, etc, Keys the tone of the conversation, eg; serious or mocking
and Purpose goal and outcome. I assume that speakers and listeners involved in a conversation are
generally cooperating with each other, eg; in the middle of their lunch hour, a woman asks someone how she likes the humberger she is eating, and receives the
answer in 1 ‘A humberger is a humberger’. From a pure logical perspective, the reply in 1 seems to have no
communicative value since it expresses something completely obvious. The example in 1 and other apparently pointless expressions like ‘business is
business or ‘boys will be boys, are called tautologies. If they are used in a conversation, clearly the speaker intends to communicate more than is said.
When the listener hears the expression in 1, she first has to assume that the speaker is being cooperative and intends to communicate something. That
something must be more than just what the words mean. It is an additional
conveyed meaning called an implicature.
Given the opportunity to evaluate the humberger, the speaker of 1 has responded without an evaluation, thus one implicature is that she has no opinion,
either good or bad, to express. Depending on other aspects of the context, additional implicatures for example, the speaker thinks all humbergers are the
same might be inferred. Implicatures are primary examples of more being communicated than is
said, but in order for them to be interpreted, some basic Cooperative Principle must first be assumed to be in operation Yule, 1996: 35-36.
There are four elements in Pragmatics discussing i.e; deixis, presupposition, conversational implicature and speech acts. In this thesis, I focus
on the Conversational Implicature Levinson, 1983
2.3 Grice’s Theory of Cooperative Principle
