Questions: Linguistic Pragmatics

Question 1

Someone points to a chair and says 'This is what I sat in during the interview.' The word 'this' acquires its reference from the physical context of the utterance, not from its dictionary meaning. This is an example of:

• A. Compositional semantics
• B. Deixis
• C. Semantic ambiguity
• D. Conversational implicature

Answer: (B)

Deixis refers to expressions whose reference is anchored to the coordinates of the utterance — who is speaking (I/you), where (here/there), and when (now/then). 'This' is a demonstrative deictic that points to something in the immediate context. It has no fixed referent independent of the utterance situation.

Question 2

Pragmatics is essentially a subdiscipline of etiquette — it studies how speakers are polite or impolite.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

While politeness is one phenomenon pragmatics can analyze, pragmatics is a formal linguistic subdiscipline concerned with systematic principles governing how context shapes utterance interpretation. Deixis, reference resolution, and the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning are core pragmatic topics with nothing to do with politeness.

Question 3

Give an example showing that the same sentence can convey different meanings in different contexts, and explain what this demonstrates about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics.

Model answer: Example: 'Can you pass the salt?' is semantically a yes/no question about physical ability, but in a dinner context it functions as a polite request. The sentence's literal semantic content is constant, but the pragmatic interpretation — what the speaker actually means — depends on context. This shows that pragmatics enriches or overrides literal semantic content to produce the speaker's intended meaning.

Semantics gives the literal, context-independent meaning of an expression. Pragmatics accounts for how context, shared knowledge, and communicative norms determine what the speaker actually means on a particular occasion. The two levels cooperate rather than compete.