Linguistic Pragmatics and why I think we should all learn it
his article is not about the Spanish language. Nor is it about learning foreign languages, or about motivation for learning. I'm warning you from the start because, while I find the topic I'm going to discuss here very interesting, this text adds little for someone who is learning Spanish or any other foreign language. But it is interesting, at least to me, because we're going to talk about linguistic pragmatics, and in my understanding, comprehending concepts of pragmatics helps us with the use not only of foreign languages we may be acquiring, but with the use of our own language. Because speaking is not simply emitting a message in a code decipherable by another brain that understands it. No, communicative acts have many levels and, if we think about them from a pragmatic point of view, we can modify the effect they have on those who receive them, and even achieve positive things. Well, or negative ones. It all depends on our intentions.
Pragmatics, broadly speaking, is the branch of linguistics that studies how context influences the interpretation of an utterance’s meaning. Unlike semantics, which, so to speak, interprets the literal meaning of words and sentences, pragmatics focuses more on the why behind the emission of an utterance, on the context, on the intention. And while in this article I’m going to give personal opinions that probably have little to do with pragmatics itself, I think it’s interesting to review this topic a bit to frame the concepts I want to express here. As John Langshaw Austin, a British philosopher, proposed, communicative acts have three levels: the locutionary, which represents the mere emission of a message, the illocutionary, which represents the intention with which we emit said message, and the perlocutionary, which are the consequences caused in our environment by the emitted message. Let’s look at this with a simple example. If I ask someone can you close the window?, from a strictly semantic point of view I could be asking them, for example, if they have the physical capacity to close the window in question, but generally when someone asks that question their intentions, that is, the illocutionary level of that question, is for the person being asked to close the window. The perlocutionary level, as I said before, are the consequences: whether the other person closes the window or not. Why am I bringing up these concepts, and why do I use, pragmatically, the word consequences? Because communicative acts have consequences and because the main concept I want to leave in this article is that if we embrace pragmatics as a strategy, communicative acts can be planned.
Speaking, that thing we do all the time when interacting with other people, is not simply emitting messages decipherable by someone else. It’s the basis of our interaction as human beings. That’s why, in all languages, there exist, for example, forms of politeness. Their existence implies that there are several ways to transmit the same message. And the fact that there are several ways to transmit the same message implies that we can, each time we’re going to say something, choose which one we’re going to use. I understand that a conversation is usually a very fast exchange situation, and that human beings tend to react and to do so many times in a bad way. And it’s very easy for me to say what I’m going to say now, because I’m a very emotionally stable person, I’m in a good mood all the time and, naturally, I tend not to react emotionally, and I know not everyone is like that. But, also, since I learned concepts of pragmatics, I also learned to use communicative acts. What I mean is that, from my point of view, if we choose how to transmit whatever message, we can bring a situation to the terrain where we handle ourselves best. And we can also transmit messages that change, for better or worse, a given situation.
I’ll tell you an anecdote. I don’t know how to fight. Fight in the sense of maintaining an argument, confronting points of view, with a raised voice, angry. I can’t do it. And I don’t know how to intervene in an argument like that: if two people face off in front of me in an argument that escalates, I’m paralyzed, without energy, and I don’t know what to do. I’d love to have the ability to yell a couple of times and intervene, but I don’t have it. One night, a few years ago, I was at a friend’s house. He and a mutual friend, coworkers of theirs, started talking about a particular situation at their work. They had diametrically opposed points of view and the conversation, which had started on friendly terms, escalated into a fight. Both of them angry, with red faces, raised voices, almost shouting. There were three of us in the house, that is, them arguing and me sitting on a sofa, watching that spectacle with my complete inability to intervene. So I made a very adult decision: I threw myself on the floor and pretended to have a seizure. The scare I gave them, clearly, ended the argument. That’s how incapable I am of intervening in a fight: the planning of communicative acts allows me, for example, to bring people who come to talk to me wanting to fight onto the terrain of friendly conversation.
Why not say something positive?
Humans are complicated. Something I’ve noticed in life is that we tend to highlight the bad: when something goes wrong we criticize, point it out, highlight it. But when things go well we generally skimp on praise. And this also has to do, at least from my point of view, with pragmatics. For that thing about criticizing in private and praising in public, and because a positive comment always improves the atmosphere. Telling someone great job when they did their task well, for example, changes that person’s disposition for the rest of the day. Or, in my work, for example, where I normally work with different colleagues, telling someone it’s great that we’re working together today. Or, simply, telling someone we love that we love them. Without reason, without it being a special day. And if we have to say something negative, make a criticism or whatever won’t be positive or pleasant, we can also plan it so that something positive comes out of it.
I said it in this article: something very useful when learning a foreign language is learning some colloquial language. And I reaffirm it now that we’re talking about linguistic pragmatics. When we speak a foreign language, the native speaker doesn’t expect us to use words that are used day to day, on the street, but that are outside formal language. And this, from the point of view of pragmatics, can also be used to break the ice or to generate interest, for example. I’m aware that this article has been, basically, a lot of talk. But I wanted to share these concepts because having studied linguistic pragmatics was a before and after for me when it comes to interpreting the communicative acts I find myself involved in and, above all, using my own language in everyday life.
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