Considerations in pragmatics

As JL Austin noted, it is amazing how few instances of miscommunication take place daily amidst the wondrously confusing and ambiguous use of "Standard" and "Non-Standard" language. In prescriptive grammar, there is an assumption that use of non-standard forms of language results in communicative ineffeciency and ineffectiveness, and the coherence of any text or utterance will be greatly diluted even with available context and co-text. In the Cambridge Grammar, an authoritative, or should I say Authoritarian, text on Grammar usage and errors, thousands of instances of miscommunication can take place hypothetically, and in some cases, realistically.

In the study of pragmatics, there is an assumption that communication is successful when speaker's intention and listener's interpretation are met. With that, it would require that reference, inference, denotations and connotations are successful to some degree. When we interpret and analyze these discourses, it may appear commonsensical to us, and with the assistance of theoretical understanding, we are able to apply labels such as "anaphora", "antecedents", "connotations", "denotations", "success", etc to them.

However, considering the commonsense in us is inadequate to apply an understanding into the functions of human communications and relations. We are able to see that context applies in communication, and the necessary background information and logical explanation allows us to fully understand such utterances. Our various "domains" in which text are formed and uttered is bound by several key factors in the understanding and genuine interpretation of such communicative subtleties. Consider the following and decide if these are legitimate considerations, and changes in each attribute might somehow alter our perception of communicative success, and the resulting implications on Connotations and Reference.

Power: Jenny Thomas states that Power alters our discourse pattern, i.e., we speak differently to people "in power" and to people with "lower power" than us. As in most sociological study of power, it remains true that the class in power tends to overpower and shape society, as do those without power either aspire to communicate in the norms of the powerful, or totally rebel against it. Examining this relationship, we can look at the X-Men dialogue with a differing point-of-view. Grey, being mutant, observed to an extent the positive connotations of "mutant" and "mutation". However, consider the overall success of her communication? Was she able to convince, or perform a perlocutionary act, or was she only able to inform, which is an illocutionary act? Consider then, the next speaker, Senator Kelly, who obviously was able to communicate his connotation more successfully than Grey. Did his audience understand him and were convinced as he possessed greater power, thus heightening his perlocutionary force in his connotations? Did the senators equate his connotation as they were all "alike" in power, status, humanity and "gender" as opposed to Grey's contrastive differences? Did real authority of listener over the speaker alter the communicative relationship? How then, can we ignore Tamir-Ghez's assumption of Speaker's Authority over Listener? Did the Forced encoding and resulting understanding of the connotation alter in relation to the speaker or the authority?

Ideology: Similarly, Ideology shapes the connotations and references of lexemes. Kelly's connotations were more agreeable to the audience as his, and perhaps the prevailing ideologies, were Right-wing and Classical, while Grey appeared to be sympathetically Left-leaning as well as Liberal. Similarly, connotations to us which may appear derogatory yet commonsensical such as "Normal", "EM3", might have different connotations to the more sympathetic and Liberal, or to those who reject the existence of connotations for the literal. Other ideological clashes such as Theism, Epistemology, Realism, Structuralism, etc. do result in differing connotations of words, both functional and descriptive, which I will not expound further lest it leads to a full 300000 words thesis.

Culture: Our interpretation of language, as clearly understood in the lectures on Sociolinguistics as well as pragmatics, is bound by Culture as well as Context, which I would simplistically list as Time, History and Heritage. Meanings are bounded by Time, as expressions of my generation such as "spastic" or the recent "SMS" could not be understood clearly in a different age. Furthermore, the sentence construct and syntax do differ across Time, with notable differences in Academic/Literary writings through the ages, leaving remnants of their culture and norms for the Modern Reader to determine. Again, this is a consideration more for sociolinguistics than Pragmatics, thus I will not continue. However, do consider the use of Vernacular language and dialect in informal discourse, as well as in politcal rallies (as in the recent elections), and its communicative effectiveness over the formal, standardized language in the Formal Parliamentary sessions. Did the semantical understanding of the audience or Speaker's intentions cause such alterations from their daily speech? Was the utterance better understood when informal speech is used in a formal context (rally), or did Hearer's comfort and alliance reshape our discourse pattern? Why did the examples from Yule, Lyons and Thomas, risk ambiguity and indirect difficulty to construct sentences in this manner?

Sylistics, Artistry and Aesthetiscism:- Written and Spoken Language: The prestige of written words and its natural tendencies to rely on antecedents and endophora rather than the spoken word that uses more exophora causes a necessary code-switching. Is speaker's intent and reader's intepretation better served with fullness in formal written text than an informal spoken text relying on exophora? Again, this is bound by power attributed to written discourse and its supposed aestheticism over the common spoken word, perhaps devoid of beauty. -Absence of signifiers: Eden, Eden, Eden, a disturbing book on child prostitution, caused a relook into the perspectives on language. There was no signifier, and the intensity of the language, the vulgarities, the narrative mood, the actions, the descriptions, leads to a text that celebrates not content, but the disintegration and the explosion of language. As in many Modernist/Post-Modern approach towards text, essential meaning in language is inessential, and words themselves never ever convey the intent of the speaker and the Hearer never fully understands the Speaker. How then, can pragmatics function as a discipline which endeavours to understand the functions of text in human discourse? Is there a greater problem in analyzing critical discourses such as philosophy, and Rhapsodic Texts such as poetry and literature, which produces texts for effect rather than to communicate any reality to its readers?
Furthermore, artistry raises more problems from pragmatics as frequently, literature has raised many issues into language such as the Indecision of the speaker, a deliberate misinterpretation of speakers' intent, Deception of the speaker, self-deception of the listener, notably in Marcel Proust's Remebrance of Things Past and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The indecision of Proust is elemental to his discourse, which means to us, was the speaker/writer successful in his communication, and does and can his reader understand Proust's prose? His sentences, even if many fulfill Grice's Maxims, can mislead his readers, and his prose stylistics which flouts many of Grice's Maxims, do allow the reader to understand (?) his intention.Further problems in Art for pragmatics would raise the problem of the Real and Implied Writer and Reader.

As it is, I shall neither bore nor confuse you no further with my rantings, except to note that
"There was a notable absence of patterns".