Unit 1.

Pragmatic awareness

1.1. Pragmatics: communication in context

Think for a moment about whether the following utterances sound common to
you and also about when we use them:
(a) Is it appropriate if I address her by her first name?
(b) What do you mean?
(c) This is not relevant to what we are discussing.
(d) He was literally drunk.
(e) Is it impolite to start drinking without saying ‘cheers’?
(f) I take for granted that you know my friend.
The frequency with which utterances like those listed above form part of the
everyday language use proves that if there is an aspect of the study of language
which speakers who are not linguists refer to and reflect upon is pragmatics.
Indeed, notions like appropriacy (a), intentionality (b), relevance (c), literal vs.
implied meaning (d), politeness (e) and presupposition (f) cannot be considered as
alien to the intuitions of language users. This is what makes pragmatics at the same
time easier and more difficult to study. On the one hand, the study of pragmatics is
easier because we can start from our previous (‘unscientific’, if you want) reflec-
tions about the topic in question. At the same time, however, those previous reflec-
tions may condition us to seeing certain linguistic phenomena in a certain way,
making us blind to other analytical options.

Questions and topics such as those mentioned above constitute the object of study
of pragmatics, an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with aspects of language
use or the functionality of language. Jeff Verschueren (1999: 8) a specialist in
pragmatics summarises in simple terms what pragmatics is about in the following
question: ‘How does language function in the lives of human beings?’. If we focus
our attention for a moment on the meaning of the words ‘function in the lives’ we
can probably begin to understand the difference between the study of the
traditional components of linguistic theory (i.e. phonetics, phonology, morphology,
syntax and semantics) and the study of pragmatics. If a phonetician or a
syntactician were given a chance to rephrase this question in order to describe
what they do, they would probably use ‘work’ instead of ‘function’ and ‘mind or
brain’ instead of ‘lives’.
The reason for the changes proposed is that a phonetician or a syntactician aim
basically at describing as accurately and efficiently as possible how the system of
language is organised (i.e. how it works) in the minds of human beings. In
metaphorical terms, we could say that these linguists try to make up the ‘puzzle’
which shows the way in which the ‘pieces’ or units of language with which they
work (e.g. phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, etc.) are capable of
con- forming an organised whole.
A pragmaticist, on the other hand, looks at language as a resource for survival
in particular cognitive, social and cultural environments. In this case, the word
‘function’ does not refer to how a particular element of the system relates to the
rest (e.g. ‘the’ functions as determiner, ‘-s’ functions as morpheme of plurality, [ph]
functions as an allophon of the phoneme /p/ in word-initial position and stressed
syllable). Function, from the point of view of pragmatics, refers to the speaker’s
intent in undertaking a specific goal-oriented linguistic action and the listener’s
interpretation of that intent.
Instead of talking about meaning as inherent in the words of the dictionary and
preexistent to the act of communication, pragmaticists prefer to talk about meaning
as a process of negotiation of intentions and interpretations in a specific con- text.
Pragmaticists believe that communication involves much more than the simple
processes of codifying an idea by a speaker and the subsequent decodification by a
listener. In order to fully understand communication, pragmaticists say, we must
take into account the beliefs of speaker and listener as well as their respective
assessments of the communicative situation in which they find themselves. It is
based on these beliefs and assessments that they will be able to make inferences
about what the other believes and about the effect intended. An example may be
useful at this point:
Imagine the situation in which ‘you feel emotionally and sexually attracted to
someone and think that it would make you a happier person if your relationship
with that person became more intimate’. What could you do? The advice of
many people would be ‘Why don’t you just tell him/her?’ Knowing English as you
do, you could probably find a word with which you could refer to your
personal feelings: ‘love’.
In theory, now that you have a predicate (love), an agent (I) and an object
(you), you simply need to chain three words together into an acceptable syntactic
construction in English: ‘I love you’. Is that what you would do? Would you say
that it is not so easy? What problems may there be in telling the person ‘I love you’
straightaway? Here are a few suggestions about the reasons why you may decide
not to do so:
(i) You are not 100% sure that what you feel can be referred to as ‘love’.
(ii) You think that in saying “I love you” it will interpreted as a strong
commitment on your part.

(iii) You have not known the person long enough to commit yourself in
these terms.
(iv) In your social environment, the emotional commitment typically expressed
by means of the word “love” is becoming out of fashion.
(v) You and your partner have been drinking a bit too much and the utterance
may not be interpreted as reflecting your true feelings / intention.
(vi) Your partner has just been telling you about his/her parents imminent
divorce and that she does not believe in ‘true love’.

Once you have considered your own beliefs and assessment of the situation
and those of your addressee, you may have reached the conclusion that it will be
‘safer’ for you to say ‘I like you a lot’ instead of ‘I love you’. You hope that your
utterance will be effective in conveying your emotional state towards the person
but you cannot be sure. What if your addressee responds with ‘What do you mean
by ‘I like you a lot’?’ At this point you and your interlocutor have started to
negotiate and construct a meaning that, in the end, might well be different from the
one you originally had in mind, and you might even end up telling your partner “I
love you”!
Your addressee may also consider the range of choices you had available
to attempt to fulfill your goal. S/he might think that your choice of the verb “like”
instead of “love” indicates that you are not interested in becoming emotionally
involved and this is precisely what s/he wants. S/he might also think that you could
have said just nothing on the matter and could have waited for him/her to take the
first ‘approaching step’.
Beliefs and assessments of the situation such as those exemplified above
constitute the basis upon which pragmaticists attempt to explain how language
users attempt to fulfill their goals in specific contexts by making linguistic choices.
The main goal of linguistic pragmatics, therefore, is to establish relationships
between structures and specific contexts of language use, where context refers to
the psychological, physical, sociocultural and linguistic environment in which an
utterance is produced. In a sense doing pragmatics is asking questions like the fol
lowing:
(i) Why did s/he say this to him/her?
(ii) Why did s/he use precisely those words?
(iii) Why did s/he say it now?
(iv) Why did the other person respond in a specific way?
(v) How was it possible that there was a misunderstanding?
(vi) How conscious were the speakers about what the linguistic choices they made?

1.2. Language awareness and language learning

In the literature on the topic of language awareness, three concepts appear with
great frequency to refer to similar phenomena, although with different emphases:
knowledge about language (also known as KAL), awareness, and consciousness.
The term ‘ knowledge about language’ has been mainly adopted in Great
Britain (Carter, 1990; James and Garrett, 1991). The idea behind this term is
probably that of reinforcing the distinction between ‘knowing the language’ and
‘knowing about the language’. In the former case, we refer to the ability to use the
language in the way an educated native speaker does. The latter term also refers to
an ability, but in this case it is the ability to take language as an object of reflection
with the aim of understanding, controlling and manipulating its use. This ability, in
the view of some (e.g. Preston, 1996; Sharwood Smith, 1997) depends on the
possession of a certain type of technical knowledge, which is often associated with
linguistics.
In front of the distinction between knowing the language and knowing about
the language, we could ask about the extent to which the distinction has an
impact on the way a foreign language learner user/learner like yourself approaches
learning a language and your expectations on what you can achieve. You might
say that your long-term goal is to know the language. However, somebody could
add that besides knowing the language, it is also important to know about it, that
is, understand how it works. Others would say that given the limited circumstances
in which the process of knowing the language must develop (e.g. only a few hours a
week, and in the unreal context of a classroom) it is better to concentrate on
knowing about the language and hope that some day they will be able to put all
that knowledge into practice. Other pertinent questions we could ask ourselves are
about the amount of time we devote to one type of knowledge or another and the
relevance of concepts (knowing that) or procedures (knowing how) in our learning
activities.

The term awareness is given two possible meanings in the Collins Cobuild dic-
tionary (Collins, 1987). One of the meanings is “to know about something because
you have thought about it or because you have just noticed it”. From this definition
we can infer that language awareness may, but does not necessarily involve careful
thinking, since noticing a phenomenon is a sufficient condition. Therefore, it is
possible to suggest that language awareness work should not be reserved for those
learners who have a high level of maturity and academic preparation to think
about language, because in order to notice something one just needs to pay
attention. This is precisely the second meaning of the term: “to pay attention”.
However, the problem that this second meaning poses is that we do not always
pay careful attention to how we or other use language.
The term consciousness was first used by researcher on second language
acquisition (e.g. Ellis, 1991; Fotos, 1993; Schmidt, 1995; Doughty & Williams,
1998) and its relevance stems from the question of whether an active focusing on
specific formal aspects of language can promote acquisition. Four main common
senses of ‘consciousness’ can be found in the specialised literature: (a) intention,
(b) attention, (c) knowledge, and (d) control. By means of consciousness-raising
activities learners focus their attention on linguistic form, apply their knowledge of
and about language and learn to control and manipulate its use. These four senses
also appear as well among the different meanings given in the Collins Cobuild
dictionary (Collins, 1987): (i) mind and thoughts; (ii) ideas, attitudes and
beliefs; (iii) noticing; (iv) thinking about something more than other people;
doing something deliberately; (v) awake rather than asleep. Perhaps the main
characteristic of the set of possible definitions is that it presents a combination of
rational thinking (thought, idea), emotions (attitude), values (belief) and processes
(thinking, doing).
In this module, we will use the term awareness as a cover term to refer in gen-
eral to all of the phenomena that have been mentioned so far, and in order to frame
the discussion about the place of language awareness in language learning, it is
interesting to consider the three main points of view that, according to Schmidt
(1995), have been adopted in the field of foreign language learning about the role of
language awareness:
Conscious learning: In this view conscious understanding and study are the
keys to success in foreign language learning. Mistakes are the result either of not
knowing the rules, forgetting them or of not paying attention. Knowledge (gener-
ally in the form of explicit description of rules) should precede practice. There
should be an emphasis on controlled practice, error correction and comparisons
with the L1. Genuine communicative practice, although important, sometimes needs
to be sacrificed to the benefit of rule explanation and more controlled practice. The
syllabus is basically defined in terms of grammar and vocabulary.
Unconscious / subconscious learning: From this point of view successful lan-
guage learning results, as in the case of natural settings, from participating in social
interaction. High levels of proficiency can be achieved without focusing explicitly
on the language itself. Error correction and controlled practice are not effective
and, therefore, learning should be meaning-oriented and based on taking part in as
genuine communicative situations as possible. The syllabus tends to be defined in
terms of communicative situations and functions.
Meaning-based approach with a focus on form: According to this third view, it
is essential for foreign language pedagogy to be meaning-oriented and
communicative. However, the complexity of certain language features requires
 a focus on form. This focus on form must derive from genuine input and
interaction and takes the form of ‘metacognitions’, which can be seen as ways of
conceptualizing particular linguistic/communicative phenomena according to a
specific analytical framework. Authors like Byalistok (1982), Gass (1983), and
Bourguignon and Candelier (1988) have suggested that through metacognitions, the
language learner can gain insights into the language which are first transformed
into intuitions and later into skills and capacity to produce and process texts:

METACOGNITIONS

INSIGHTS

INTUITIONS

TEXTS

However, for James (1992), these metacognitions must not necessarily be

derived from the FL because the learners first language (L1) has a very impor-
tant role in this process, since metacognitions, insights and intuitions can be more
solidly derived from something which is well ‘known’, and if there is one thing
that the FL learner knows it is his/her L1. Therefore, according to this author, the
process should be initiated in the learners’ skills to use their L1 and the subsequent
reflection about those skills will lead automatically to the learner’s formulation of
intuitions, insights and, ultimately, metacognitions. Once this process is concluded,
those metacognitions obtained from the analysis of the L1 samples of
communication can be applied in a reverse fashion to the description of
communicative phenomena in the FL. The process could be represented in the
following way, as developing from left to right:

NL work FL work

SKILLS/TEXTS SKILLS/TEXTS

INTUTITIONS INTUTITIONS

INSIGHTS INSIGHTS

METACOGNITIONS METACOGNITIONS

In the next units we are going to follow this pattern by structuring each of them into four stages
of student’s work. Besides these four stages, each unit also includes a brief introductory stage to
which you will be asked to return at the end of it in order to check out the extent to which the
work you have done has been useful to develop your awareness of how English works in
communication. The module includes five units (excluding the introduction) which correspond
to the five of the most characteristic topics of pragmatics: speech acts, deixis, conversational
turn-taking, speech events, and politeness. The stages to be followed in units 2-5 are the
following:

Stage 1: Raising awareness about the L1

In this section we try to make you aware that as a competent speaker of Catalan you already
knows a lot about how language is used, and we help you to pause and notice certain aspects
that you may not have noticed. Therefore, this section incudes activities intended to tackle your
intuitions about the pragmatic phenomena studied in the unit and to develop metacognitions
about them. The activities involve the analysis of different aspects related to the phenomena in
Catalan.

Stage 2: Notions and concepts

The aim of this section is to introduce ‘language to talk about language’, that is a series of
concepts and notions. Together with the intuitions that you expressed on Stage 1, in this stage
you will be provided with precise terminology which should increase your capacity to describe
and explain communicative phenomena such as those that you encountered in Stage 1. Stage 2
also includes short practical activities through which you will be able to check out your
understanding of the concepts introduced.

Stage 3: Notions and concepts applied

In this stage you are asked to apply the concepts introduced in Stage 2 to particular
communicative situations in English, the aim being that you should be able not only to describe
but also explain how language is used in specific contexts and for particular purposes.

Stage 4: Performing in English

This stage includes a series of practical communicative activities in which you have to use
English for communicative purposes while focusing on the phenomena studied in the unit.

The data used in Stage 1 form part of a corpus of contemporary Catalan of the University of
Barcelona (http://www.ub.edu/cccub/). While a few examples in sections 2 and 3 have been
adapted the Santa Barbara corpus of Spoken American English,
(http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/santa-barbara-corpus) others have been either
collected by one of the authors, adapted from a published source or simply invented.
References:

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Bourguignon, Ch. and M. Candelier. 1984. Réflexion guidée sur la langue
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