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Davin : What type of iPhone do you own? Anna : It’s iPhone 5s. Do you have some leisure time?
Davin : Sure thing Anna : Oh, thanks a lot.
In the conversation above, Anna is indirectly asking Davin to help her fix her broken phone. We can see that there is actually no words that signify request from
Anna. By asking, “Do you have some leisure time?”, Anna essentially has used pre- request statement, allowing Davin to say that he is busy or he cannot help Anna at
the moment. In this context,Davin saying “Sure thing” is taken as an acknowledgment that he does not only have some leisure time, but is also willing to
help Anna even though there is no direct request from her.
2.4. Speaker
Pragmatics, according to Yule 1996:3, has 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. That being said, it is clear that pragmatics treats utterances in a direct relation with the speaker.
Pragmatics is a study of speaker meaning. An exactly identical utterance, when uttered by different speakers, might result in different meanings. For instance:
“Wow, this room is so cold” The statement above can produce different meanings when stated by two
different speakers. When it is stated by a person who has been doing activities under the sun for hours, it shows a positive meaning, a thankful expression, or a pleasing
compliment. On the contrary, when the statement is stated by another person who has
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stayed in a cold room for a lengthy time, it gives a negative meaning, a sense of complain, or a dislike expression.
When it comes to pragmatics, focusing on the speaker is the main key in order to interpret the meaning correctly. This is what makes pragmatics considered to
be an exceptional branch of linguistics, simply because it is the only one which allows humans into the analysis Yule 1996:4.
A question that might raise is, “Do we have no chance at all to analyse meaning without relating it with the speaker?” Sure thing we do. The statement
“Wow, this room is so cold” for example, can be analysed without looking at who the speaker is. However, will the interpreted meaning be objective, especially when
we do not even know who the producer of the statement is? The speaker is regarded as an important object because it is almost impossible to analyse the correct and
exact meaning of an utterance by ignoring the person who produces the utterance itself.
By having a knowledge about the speaker, one can analyse the meaning of the utterances more easily. Speaker is treated as an important object in pragmatics
because, as explained in the beginning, pragmatics does not only focus on the meaning as seen from the structure of the utterances, but far more than that, the
meaning as implied by the speaker. Knowing who the speakers are, their backgrounds, statuses, and occupations
will help us tremendously in interpreting the meaning of their utterances. For instance, the statement “I am not guilty” when stated by a suspected criminal is
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harder to believe than when it is stated by a normal and well-rounded person who has never been involved in crimes.
Getting to know the speaker means that we have reached a point where we have to put a close observation regarding the speaker’s personality. Pragmatics, as
stated by Yule 1996:4, allows humans into its analysis for one important basis: one simply cannot separate the relationship between linguistic forms and the users of
those forms. A statement is produced as a result of the condition of the speaker. Hence, before one talks about invisible meanings, one should be clear about the
“behind the scene” of producing a statement, and relating it with the person who states it.
2.5. Cognitive Pragmatics
