Review of Related Studies

Have Been, the data of the present study are obtained from How I Met Your Mother, season 2, episodes 1 to 5.

B. Review of Related Theories

1. Pragmatics To this day, a number of theories of language have been developed by linguists. One of these theories is pragmatics. Thomas 1995: 22-23 defines pragmatics as meaning in interaction. It takes not only the contributions from the speakers in saying utterances, but also from the hearers in understanding the utterances from their point of view. Besides the contributions from the interlocutors, contexts of utterance, such as physical, social, and linguistic contexts, and the meaning potential of utterance are taken into account in producing meaning. Thus, pragmatics is context-dependent. An utterance cannot be understood separately from the context it is uttered. Related to pragmatics‟ nature of context-dependent, Levinson 1983: 21 suggests that pragmatics is “the study of relations between language and context that are basic to an account of language understanding”. The meaning of “language understanding” is that understanding an utterance does not only involve knowing the meaning of the words and the grammatical relations between them, but most importantly, it involves the ability to make inferences in order to connect what is said to what is assumed in a certain context. Yule 1996: 3-4 also states another definition of pragmatics. He suggests that pragmatics is concerned with four areas explained as follow. First, pragmatics is “the study of speaker meaning”. It means that pragmatics is more concerned with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than the utterances mean by themselves. Second, pragmatics is “the study of contextual meaning”; meaning that context has an important role in influencing what people say. Thus, it needs a consideration of how people deliver what they want to say in accordance with who they are talking to, where, when, and under what circumstances a conversation takes place. Third, pragmatics is “the study of how more gets communicated than is said”. From this third definition, this approach also analyze how the listeners can make inferences about what the interlocutors say in order to understand the speakers‟ intended meaning. Fourth, pragmatics is “the study of the expression of relative distance”. Distance, in this type, means the closeness, whether it is physical, social, or conceptual, which implies shared experience between the speakers and the listeners. Thus, how close or distant the listener is, the speakers decide how much needs to be uttered. From the definitions suggested by linguists as mentioned above, it can be concluded that pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning in a particular context. Thus, by studying pragmatics, people are able to know others‟ intended meanings, assumptions, purposes, ideas, even the action they are performing at the moment of speaking.

2. Context

Related to the definition of pragmatics, understanding utterances cannot be separated from the context in which the conversation takes place. In here, context plays an important role in the interpretation meaning. Cutting 2002: 3-7 explains that there are three contexts in order to deal with meaning of words in context, which are, situational context, background knowledge context, and co-textual context.

a. Situational context

Situational context is “the situation where the interaction is taking place at the moment of speaking” Cutting, 2002: 4. This context deals with what the speakers and the hearers can see around them. Gestures are part of situational context because interlocutors are able to see each other‟s gestures during their conversation. Thus, gestures add meaning to the utterances when the speakers and the hearers share the situational context.

b. Background knowledge context

There are two types of context based on background knowledge context. The first one is cultural background context and the second one in interpersonal background context. Cultural background context is “the cultural general knowledge that most people carr y with them in their minds, about area of life” Cutting, 2002: 5. This type of background context is the knowledge that is mutually shared by people in the same community, people in the same country, people in the same school, or people in the same family. The example of this cultural background context are the knowledge people in the same country have about who the country‟s president is, or, the students in the same class who knows about each other‟s name of the students in that class. People who have shared knowledge of cultural context are possible to have shared attitude towards that cultural context. For example, some people in a music community think that a certain singer has a very great voice. Once other people in that community find out that the singer has a great voice, then they will modify their attitude to like the singer‟s voice too. Thus, when speakers modify their expression to reflect their interlocutors‟, it can be seen as their effort to be accepted and be seen that they belong to the same group. In conclusion, it is this cultural context and shared attitude in a group of people that can make humor of one country is different and is difficult to understand for people for another country, or the humor from one generation is impossible to understand for other generation. The other type of background knowledge context is interpersonal background context . It is “knowledge acquired through previous verbal interactions or joint activities and experiences, and it includes privileged personal knowledge about the interlocutor” Cutting, 2002: 6. For example, a woman and a man are best friends since they have become co-workers for five years. The man already has a wife and the woman knows his wife. In here, the man must have told the woman that he already has a wife in previous conversations. He might also have told the woman about his wife‟s name or the place where she works. This personal knowledge about the mas is the example of shared knowledge that is acquired through interactions or activities they experienced together. The last type of contexts suggested by cutting is co-text; which is the contextual context. Due to the fact that this type of context is related only to the context in a text, this theory of co-text will not be explained further because this theory is not used to analyze the data in this study, which are not taken from a text.

3. Conversational Implicature

The basic assumption in communication is that when speakers and hearers are engaged in a conversation, they are generally being cooperative with each other. At some point, the meaning of utterances is not conveyed from the expressed meaning but from the implied meaning. Something that is more than what the words mean is called an implicature; the additional conveyed meaning of utterances Yule, 1996: 35. Implicatures are the example of more is being communicated than what is said. Implicatures which occur in conversations and depend on certain context for their interpretation is usually called conversational implicatures. The example of conversational implicature can be seen from the example bellow: Example 3: Nic: Did you do the homework? Mar: I didn‟t have enough time last night. Mar has to assume that Nic is being cooperative, but apparently, he does not mention whether or not he did the homework. He just mentions that he did not have enough time last night. By saying this, Nic must intend that Mar infer that the sentence „I didn‟t have enough time last night‟ means that he had something to do last night which made him did not have enough time to do the homework. In conclusion, from the example above, it is the speakers‟ job to communicate meaning via implicature and the listeners‟ job to recognize the communicated meaning via inference.