Pragmatics - Area of linguistics that puts meaning into context

Cooperative Principle:

• 4 main assumptions of pragmaticists - we assume people are generally trying to be cooperative with us

A. Quality - high quality information: we assume people tell the truth

B. Quantity - sufficient quantity information - enough detail but not too much

C. Relevance - is something relevant?

D. Manner - people will say things as straightforward as possible for the context

If someone doesn't make sense 'literally', assuming they're trying to contribute in a cooperative way in a conversation, we can infer information. (e.g.it's a raining day and you say "do you want to go on a picnic", and the partner says "it's raining" is declining).

The act of infering thanks to context and the assumption that the other person will be cooperative

implicature - addional meaning layered on top of words we say

In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate

"the subscribe button is below the video" - please subscribe without overtly saying it.

(way of being polite by being indirect)

Particles - A particle is a word that has a grammatical function but does not fit into the main parts of speech

Hedges - tends to make things seem more polite

Qualifiers

Caveats

Asking instead of ordering

We follow our culture and our language's norms of politeness because it's part of the whole process by which we create meaning between us and the people we're talking to.

Pragmatics affects everything from our words to the very way we have those conversations