Chapter II
1. History of Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a rather new branch of linguistics. The study of pragmatics was developed in Europe when Charles Morris in 1938 mentioned that semiotics,
or the science of signs, was devided into three major branches: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. According to him, pragmatics is the study of relation of signs to
interpreters. This view was then developed by Halliday who proposed social theory of language.
The development of pragmatics in US was inspired by Austin, a British language philosopher, and Searle. Autin’s work ‘How to Do Things with Words’
which was published in 1962 discussed about performative and constantive act. He also proposed his idea about locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary act.
Searle developed Austin’s idea to US and published his work. ‘Speech Act’ in 1969. He classified the number of speech act into five categories;
reperesentative, directive, expressive, commisive, and declarative. After the publication of their works, other theories appeared. Grice in 1975
proposed his theory of Conversational Implicature. His work appeared in an article ‘Logic and Conversation’. His other idea was about Cooperative Principle,
which is aimed to guide participants in a conversation to talk cooperatively, effectively, and efficiently. Cooperative Principle is described to four maxims;
quantity, quality, relation and manner. Levinson in 1983 published his book ‘Pragmatics’. He revised Grice’s
theory of implicature. He suggested the test of implicature and its type. According to Levinson, meaning can be expressed explicitly and implicitly. Implicit meaning
can be conventional and non conventional.
2. Definitions of Pragmatics
The oldest definition is proposed by Morris in 1983. According to Morris, pragmatics is a branch of semiotics, or science of signs. He difines pragmatics as
the study of the relation of signs and interprets Levinson 1983: 1. The speciality of pragmatics is the interpretation of signslanguage. The difference between
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics is: syntax discusses about formal relation of signs and semantics discusses the relation of signs and the object to which the
signs are applicable. Leech defines 1983: 6 pragmatics as the study of menaing in relation to
speech situation. According to him, speech situation involves five aspects: 1 addressesrs and addressees 2 context of the utterance 3 goals of utterance 4
utterance as the form of actspeech act 5 utterance as the product of verbal act. The consequence of his definition, pragmatics might interpret a meaning
differently from speech situation to another. He also distinguishes between semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is the study of meaning involving the
context of utterance. The central distinction, in other words, semantics emphasizes on language and pragmatics emphasizes on language use 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 elations between language and context that are
grammaticallized, or encoded in the structure of language. 2 Pragmatics is the study of the 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 that would be appropriate. 4 Pragmatics is the study of deixis at least in part, implicature, presupposition,
speech acts, and aspects of discourse structure. Mey 1993: 42 defines pragmatics as the study of the conditions of human
language uses as they are determined by the context of society. Language that is studied by pragmatics would be used in reality to various purposes. Based on this
view, pragmatics cannot be studied unless it is related to the daily usage of language. Thus, Mey emphasizes pragmatics on language and its usage.
3. Theory of Humor
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