Appunti completi di Modulo Teorico III, Appunti di lingua inglese

English theoretical module (prof. Zurru)

Speaking vs communicating

Is “to speak” the same as “to communicate”? No.

Bloom's taxonomy of thinking skills

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

Language and communication

Communication > Pragmatics

Propositional meaning > Semantics

Structure of sentences > Syntax

Morphemes > Morphology

Sounds/phonemes > Phonetics/Phonology

Graphemes > Graphology

Semantics and pragmatics

Semantic: study of propositional meaning

Pragmatics: study of spoken language

Pragmatics studies the relation between language and meaning context and it focuses on language as it is used by users in communication. Pragmatics takes into account the fact that speakers often imply more than what they say. It studies the intended and perceived meaning of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, or, to be more exact, utterances (= enunciati).

Example:

A- Do you like my dress, honey?

B- I like the color.

The answer means “I hate the dress”.

Meaning types

• Propositional meaning
• Implied meaning (= sottinteso)
• Intended meaning (= pianificato)
• Perceived meaning (= percepito)
• Context

Importance of context

Very often we need to know the context of a communicative exchange.

Example:

A- Door!

It could be: “open the door”, “there is someone at the door”, “there is a door”, “close the door”.

We don’t know what is the correct sentence because we don’t know the context, the time, the place. We only have a propositional meaning.

Contextual exchange example

A- Door!

B- I’m in the bath!

A- Ok!

There are not random sentences. We communicate because we have a purpose and they are talking to each other. In this case, we have more context than before when we have only “Door!". The context is: they are in a house or a hotel, we don’t know exactly where but in a familiar place. There is a personal close relationship between the two people because nobody has a shower when there is a stranger in the house.

Meaning in context

Meaning in context can be explained by:

• Physical and social world: bilocation does not exist; it is often not “socially acceptable” to open the door wearing a towel.
• Socio-psychological factors influencing communication: “I can’t open the door wearing a towel”, this is my well-deserved bath, I’m not moving for the world” and so on.
• Time: while having a bath
• Place: home

Therefore, in this specific example, interlocutors communicate more than what their words apparently say.

Speaker's meaning

- Speaker’s meaning: based on assumptions of knowledge, namely hypothesis based on factual evidence or on previous knowledge shared by both speaker and hearer: the speaker constructs a message which has an intended meaning, which very often is implied.

- The Hearer interprets the message and decodes the implied meaning, if any. His/her decoding of the message leads them to formulate further assumptions.

BUT: if the hearer doesn’t understand what the speaker means, there is a misunderstanding, and the conversation will break.

The hearer decodes the message and the intended meaning; then he produces an utterance that also has an implied meaning. Intended and implied are not always synonymous!

We need a contextual element to start and understand the communication. Here, the context makes begin the conversation.

Context types

The context can be:

• Situational/communicative context
• Background knowledge context/knowledge of the world (KOW)
• Co-textual context/co-text

Relation between context and meaning making

There are three main reasons why context is strictly related to both the production and interpretation of meaning:

1. It influences the way we communicate
2. It helps reduce the potentiality of utterances
3. It allows us to use utterances which are reduced in explicitness and understand other people’s utterances which are reduced in explicitness.

Meaning potential

Reason 2: Meaning Potential

Utterances have meaning potential: they can potentially mean anything, including the opposite of their surface/propositional meaning. We can’t predict what an utterance is meant to convey in isolation from a given context!

Example:

A- Door!

• Someone is knocking
• Open the door, please
• The wind is blowing and the door is about to slam

Reduction in explicitness

Reason 3: Reduction in Explicitness

Example:

A- See you in five minutes

A- Can you pass me that?

The people who are talking know where they are and what they want.

A- See you in five minutes > See you at ten past ten Alex

A- Can you pass me that? > Alex can you pass me the bottle of water?

Deixis

Deixis: personal (I, you…), time (now, then…), place (here, there…): words that literally point at something around us and link the language to the external world; the context is necessary. Whenever we communicate, we tend to avoid being over-explicit, for example through deixis (“that” instead of “bottle of water”)

Situational/communicative context

Generally speaking, it is the situation where the integration is taking place at the moment of speaking. It is a non-verbal/extra-linguistic information that helps speakers to eliminate any ambiguity in the text and determine the meaning of the utterance(s). Also, it determines the way speakers communicate with one another.

Utterance underlying assumptions

Example:

Utterance: Underlying Assumptions: Intended/Implied Meaning

A- Door! Someone is knocking at the door. Go open the door!

B- I’m in the bath! I know it’s for me/I know you But I can’t/won’t because I’m always get the door/I know I having a bath! should go this time/I know you want me to get the door

A- Ok! Oh, ok! You’re having a bath, so I I see, I’ll get the door myself then. get you can’t open the door while in a bath

A- Door! The possible intended meaning:

• The wind is blowing, close the door before it slams!
• Someone is knocking.
• Watch it! You are going to crash against it!

Contextual variables

The situational context is composed of a number of contextual exchanges:

• Topic
• Setting
• Participants
• Medium

They influence what/to whom/how/where/when/why we do something. They can help us understand the intended meaning (= reduce the potentiality of utterances). They allow us to be reduced in explicitness.

Topic

1) It may affect lexicon, grammar, and style.

Example: legal documents

Long and complex clauses, repetitions, clarity (no ambiguity), formal language, etc. (> topic often overlaps, with purpose (clarity) and text-type (formal document).

2) It helps reduce the potentiality.

Example:

This place is a greenhouse (at home)

This place is a greenhouse (a real estate agent showing a farm to potential buyers)

3) Reduction in explicitness.

Setting (time and place)

1) It may affect language/communication in a variety of ways:

Time: (diachronic) if you are to read Chaucer you need to read middle English; (synchronic) lesson vs office hours.

2) It helps us understand the intended meaning

3) Reduction in explicitness

Participants

Different sub-variables communication:

• Individual identity (personality)
• Social identity (differences in gender, class, religion, age, and role)
• Personal and/or social relationship between interactors
• Presence or absence of an audience

Medium

Written differences between (organized, complex structure, linear progression, grammatical accuracy) texts and texts (disorganized, simple structure, subject changing, grammatical inaccuracy, generalized vocabulary). Mixture between the two: written-to-be-spoken vs spoken-to-be-written.

Text: the whole communicative interaction, which can be realized through different text-types: conversation, phone call, Skype call, political speech, oral exam, lecture, assignment, text message, emails, etc.

Interplay between medium and the rest of variables

1) Medium + text type and purpose

Example: speech by the Italian President of Republic vs University by lecture. Both are written-to-be-spoken (both will show signs of both media) but the text type and purpose differ.

2) Medium + channel + participants

Example:

Oh, hi, it’s me, how’s life? [phone call between friends]

vs

Good morning, Professor, it’s Marco Rossi here. I was wondering whether you could give me some information about… [phone call between a student and a lecture]

Background knowledge context/knowledge of the world (KOW)

The background knowledge or knowledge of the world is constituted by everything we know about the world-all the information that we possess and that influences our communicative behavior. It allows us to reduce the potentiality of utterances and to perform utterances reduced in explicitness and understand other people’s utterances which are reduced in explicitness.

It is the knowledge about how things usually go in the world which we update with every new experience we make; it is stored in our memories and helps us fill in the missing links in communication and understand the intended meaning of utterances.

Example of KOW

A- Tell us about your fairy tale.

B- It is about a wonderful prince. He is tall and big, he is fat, green, and stinks!

A- Yeah! I like Shrek very much too!

The teacher expected another beautiful prince or princess. To find something funny, you must have a background. If we haven’t we wouldn't understand it.

Encyclopedic/cultural vs (inter) personal KOW

Encyclopedic cultural: open-access knowledge shared by the members of the same group of community (which may vary in size! Ex: Shrek is likely to be known by half the globe), acquired through school, books tv, radio, cinema, the internet, etc.

(Inter) personal: knowledge acquired through previous conversations and social activities which include personal knowledge about the interlocutor; it is the knowledge, different and unique, which each of us possesses.

Putting these two elements together, we have our background knowledge!

Co-text

The Co-text is the context of the text itself: it is constituted by linguistic information, namely the words/sentences/utterances which constitute the rest of the text and come before and after the utterance we are considering.

The differences with the previous two types of context is that the situational and background context include non-verbal/non-linguistic elements.

Example of co-text

When we enter a room and a person is saying something bad about us and when he sees us says: “It’s not how you imagine, you don’t know what I was saying before you arrived”.

A- Door!

B- Oh my gosh, thank you! I hadn’t realized there was a glass door!

A- Yeah, I know! I could see that, you were clearly going to crash against it!

In other words, a change in co-text implies a change in the whole communicative exchange and in the intended meaning of utterances (even of the same utterance!)

Example of co-text change

A- Door! > Go get the door

A- Door! > Watch it! You’re about to crash against a glass door!

Context is therefore the dimension of communication which turns language as a formal system (Saussure’s “langue”) into a means of communication (Saussure’s “parole”).

Cohesion vs coherence (discourse analysis)

Coherence: it is in the meaning, the thematic text, and logical progression to be considered coherent (this is the Discourse Analysis approach, pragmatics considers coherence as relevance)

Cohesion: grammatical and lexical unity of the text- the way the text makes links with and within itself. In other words, it is the way the co-text hangs together.

Example of coherence

The cat was playing with the ball. The ball will become red once the baby girl will throw it into the paint. Indeed, the paint was green because Martha had mixed blue and yellow.

In this text, there is a text but not coherence because we have no progression. Repetitions make cohesion but this text isn’t coherent.

Cohesion

Language making links with itself.

Example: Making its grammatical and lexical relationship explicit.

Verbal signals present in the text (remember the co-text is only made up of linguistic elements).

Cohesion is all about words!

Grammatical cohesion

• Reference
• Substitution
• Ellipsis
• Conjunction

Lexical cohesion

• Repetition
• Lexicon

Reference

Referring expressions are linguistic forms, known as which are used to indicate or refer to something in the external world or in the text, which is known as a referent. Reference is used to avoid unnecessary repetitions that would make the text over-explicit.

Example of reference

The boy with the red hat was playing in the garden. The boy with the red hat was playing with the ball. The boy with the red hat was nine years old.

It isn’t easy to communicate with someone who talks in this way. Repetitions can be powerful because it helps us to memorize some information, but unnecessary repetitions can be dangerous and useless. Remember that human communication is usually based on Reduction in Explicitness.

Exophoric and endophoric reference

Exophoric reference is dependent on the context outside the text.

Example: Elisabetta is a lecture of English Linguistic.

Endophoric reference refers to items within the same text.

Example: Jack and Sandra will get married. They met at university.

Exophoric reference

1. The referring expression represents the first mention of the referent in the text.
2. The referring expression refers to something in the KOW (also known as intertextuality).

Examples of exophoric reference

Example 1: Tom is studying so hard at the moment because he has to take his finals in a few weeks’ time.

Example 2: What happened here? Looks like the 2nd World War broke out in this apartment.

> cultural/encyclopedic/intertextuality

Example 3:

A- Omg! What Sara told him yesterday was amazing!

B- You bet it was!

> (inter) personal intertextuality

Exophoric reference, to be understood, sometimes needs the background knowledge context (ex. 1), other times the situational context (ex. 2).

Endophora

There are two types of endophora: anaphora and cataphora.

Anaphora

The type of endophoric reference that links back to a referent that has already been mentioned in the same text (Cf. left dislocation: My neighbors, they moved > “they” anaphoric reference to “My neighbors”).

Example: Jack and Sandra will get married soon. They met at university. > “Jack and Sandra” exophoric reference, “they” endophoric reference anaphora.

Cataphora

The type of endophoric reference that links forward to a referent that follows in the text (Cf. right dislocation: They moved, my neighbors > “they” is referred to “my neighbors” that is mentioned after.

Example: Million of copies of his novel has been sold so far. Dan Brown is one of the most famous writers of the year. > “his” endophoric reference cataphora that refers to “Dan Brown”.

Associative endophora

The associative endophora is related to noun phrases and to the fact that sometimes noun phrases in co-text are linked to one another because they belong to and they share a presuppositional pool. There are occasions in which the NPs (noun and pronouns) are not explicitly linked to each other, but one of them is linked to entities associated with the other NP: we have associative endophora.

Example of associative endophora

Youtube is a popular video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. > Associative endophora between the noun phrase (website) and the noun phrase (video sharing) because if we didn’t have website we may think that when we are talking about “video sharing” we are referring to physical “video sharing” (DVD).

Deixis

Is it linked to endophoric or exophoric reference? Deixis is another type of exophoric reference!

There are several types of deixis:

Types of deixis

• Person Deixis: (I, you, them)
• Place/Spatial Deixis: (here, there)
• Time/Temporal Deixis: (now, later, in 5 minutes)

Examples of deixis

Person Deixis Example: Look at him! He’s all dressed up! (in the context “him/he” = John; outside the context “him/he” = a man)

Place/Spatial Deixis Example: The glasses are there, can you take them, please? (in the context “there” = in the cupboard; outside the context “there” = a place away from the speaker)

Time/Temporal Deixis Example: I’ll see you in 5 minutes (in the context “in 5 minutes” = at 10:15; outside the context “in 5 minutes” = 5 minutes after the moment of speaking)

Discourse deixis

• Discourse Deixis: (this > future discourse elements; that > past discourse elements)
• Psychological use of Spatial Deixis: (more emotional than literal) (abstract space + emo

Examples of discourse deixis

Future Discourse Example: Listen to this: get out and never come back! (“this” refers to a near future)

Past Discourse Example: That was not a nice thing to say, you know? (“that” refers to a very near past)