ABSTRACT
The term pragmatics is often used in linguistic research to refer to the study of the interpretation of meaning. Although it has proven difficult to determine an exact definition for the term pragmatics (Levinson discusses the issue over more than 50 pages in his influential 1983 work Pragmatics), a user-friendly definition is suggested by Fasold (1990: 119): ‘the study of the use of context to make inferences about meaning’. In this definition, inferences refer to deductions made by participants based on available evidence (Christie, 2000). This available evidence is, according to pragmaticists, provided by the context within which the utterance takes place. Cutting (2008: 3-11) distinguishes between three different types of spoken context: situational, what speakers know about what they can see around them; background knowledge, what they know about each other (interpersonal knowledge) and the world (cultural knowledge); and co-textual, what they know about what they have been saying (see also Chapter 3). Therefore, the pragmatic choices made by conversational participants can simultaneously encode indications of position and time and interpersonal and cultural indicators such as power, status, gender and age. Thus, as Christie (2000: 29) maintains, pragmatics provides ‘a theoretical framework that can account for the relationship between the cultural setting, the language user, the linguistic choices the user makes, and the factors that underlie those choices’.
