Essay Sample on Pragmatics and Gricean Maxims

Introduction

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics dealing with language in use and the contexts in which it's used including matters such as deixis, taking turns during conversation, text organization, presupposition and implicature. It can also be described as a branch of linguistics that's concerned with the relationship of sentences to the environment. As phrased by Paul Grice who introduced the cooperative principle," Make your contribution as it is required at the stage which it appears by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange you are engaged in." Cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations. The cooperative principle can be divided into four maxims called the Gricean Maxims which describes specific rational principles observed by people. By examining the episode in Seinfeld - The Keys, Do You Ever Yearn, there is adequate evidence to prove that all the maxims of the Cooperative Principle were violated to create humor.

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Discourse analysis is the investigation of knowledge about language beyond the word, clause, phrase and sentence levels. Discourse analysis has a strong focus on studying language in its own right, although it is often appropriated as an analytical tool by researchers from other disciplines. Despite its clear focus on language, Discourse analysis has its origins in sociology.

Discourse analysis approaches have been developed to examine ways in which knowledge is socially constructed in classrooms and other educational settings. By studying discursive activity within classrooms and other educational settings, researchers have provided new insights into the complex and dynamic relationships among discourse, social practices, and learning. Specifically, this body of work has provided understandings of how opportunities for learning are constructed across groups and events.

Discourse Analysis approaches used to examine such educational issues draw on discourse theories and methods developed in other disciplines, e.g. applied linguistics, law, literary studies, psychology, sociolinguistics and sociology among others. However, educational researchers have not merely taken up and applied existing approaches. They have also contributed to the development of discourse theories and methods as they have adopted and adapted existing approaches and constructed new approaches to address questions of importance to education as a discipline. Discourse analysts are interested in how people Knit into a structure, what they intend to convey to others in a conversation or a piece of writing. For example, there are cultural differences of greetings in Japan and USA. In the USA they are very short while in Japan they include weather and other details in greetings as they say, "Greetings from HOT and SIZZLING Tokyo" instead of only the word of greetings which is not a requirement in English.

Defining Intended Speaker Meaning

The notion of the intended meaning of an utterance can be illustrated by contrasting it with that of semantic meaning. The semantic meaning of a declarative utterance is the propositional content assigned to the type of utterance by the semantic rules of the language. For example, if someone says, "you're a prince," the semantic meaning is that the person addressed by the speaker is the son of a king. By contrast, the intended meaning depends on the psychological state of the speaker at the time and place of utterance. The speaker may mean that he thinks the hearer is a nice guy and wants to tell him so.

How Hearers Interpret Metacommunicative Signals

Metacommunication is communication about communication. The significance of metacommunication goes well beyond the obvious fact that communication can be a topic of discussion. More fundamentally, metacommunication refers to a "level" of meaning through which every message implicitly defines the relationship between communicators. Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, who introduced the term, described metacommunication as a "new order" of communication that arose in the evolution of mammals and explained some distinctively complex, creative, and deeply paradoxical qualities of social interaction.

One of those essays, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," opens with the observation that human verbal communication operates simultaneously at multiple levels of abstraction (Angela Knoop, 2007). Beyond the denotative level (the literal content of what is said) are more abstract levels of two kinds: metalinguistic and metacommunicative. The metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages are usually implicit in the communication; they can be explicit (e.g., someone could explicitly say "'Media' is a plural noun," or "Let's be friends"), but more commonly the respective points would be made implicitly, by using the word media as a plural noun or by acting in a friendly way. Especially important is a type of implicit metacommunicative messages about how to interpret signals of friendliness or hostility.

Research on Seinfeld - The Keys

This study investigates the creation of humor in the dialogue of the television sitcom Seinfeld to gain a deeper understanding of humor techniques in a long format. By analyzing the episode, it is seen that the Incongruity Theory of Humor, violations of Grice's maxims of the Cooperative Principle, and perspective clashes are essential to the humor throughout each episode (Flying Lap Productions, 2008). This paper deals with one of the most notable American comedies of the last few decades: Seinfeld. Created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, the show features characters that deviate from conversational norms frequently, sometimes even marveling at their ineptitude (Oring, 2011). However, because of the show's nature as a comedy program, audiences are aware that these conversations are designed to have a humorous effect.

The perspective clashes and miscommunications in the show are the results of the characters' interactions with and violations of the maxims of the Cooperative Principle and the humor of the show hinges on these conversations, as the characters' deviations from the audience's expectations. This deviation creates an incongruous experience for the audience. Additionally, this paper proposes that there are two primary ways in which the maxims can be treated in the television sit-com. The first case shows the way short, individual instances of violations of the maxims can create humor. All the maxims of the Cooperative Principle were violated to create humor.

Conclusion

This material/book serves as a reference for students who want to pursue their research/studies in discourse analysis. It is useful both for the new entrepreneurs and the research scholars. It explains discourse analysis and different approaches to discourse, society, pragmatics, genre, grammar and corpus studies.

References

Angela Knoop, C. (2007). Fictional communication: developing Gregory Bateson's "Theory of Play and Fantasy". Kybernetes, 36(7/8), 1113-1121. doi: 10.1108/03684920710777900

Flying Lap Productions. (2008). Seinfeld - The Keys (Do you ever yearn?) [Video]. Retrieved from http://watch

Oring, E. (2011). Parsing the joke: The General Theory of Verbal Humor and appropriate incongruity. Humor - International Journal of Humor Research, 24(2). doi: 10.1515/humr.2011.013