BEDO
4. Semantics and Pragmatics
Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that studies linguistic meaning and how
expressions convey meanings. It deals with the nature of meaning itself --- what exactly are linguistic meanings, what is their relationship to the language user on the one hand and the external world on the other (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011)? The last section of syntax has mentioned that there is a kind of relationship between semantics and syntax, in which they are interconnected with each other while remaining separate as two independent aspects. In order to define a sentence, one not only needs to know the meaning of words but also needs to be familiar with the syntactic regulations by which they are assembled. In other words, meanings of lexical expressions ---- lexical semantics and ways to combine them as phrasal meanings --- compositional semantics are two major fields in semantics. The other two
S VP
NP
VP Is
Det N
VP N
Adj N
Adj N
the
best
background Educationmy aim
is
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158 critical notions in semantics are sense and reference. In a word, sense deals with the abstract concept of an expression in mind whereas reference refers to the actual object of an
expression in reality.
Concluding from the previous analysis and an overview concentrating on the meaning expression, basically, my participant has a fairly good command of communicating his ideas in spite of certain numbers of grammatical errors and improper usage of lexicon occurring as a result of long-time partial isolation from English. Compared with those complicated and advanced vocabulary in academic writings, he uses simple but logical description which stays on topic most of the time. However, I do notice some patterns in his wording that impair other people’s understanding. Here are some examples (…suggest pauses in speech):
(1)Perhaps economics or financial or something else which I am interested in is my expectation.
(2) she is the old lady’s neighbor or friends or something else.
(3) He found that he will be late for office or something.
(4) He hurried to…er…to take on his clothes and searched for the money or some…or money…or the change…the changes and the other things.
(5) It take the…less and less…er…er…important than me…the important in my life.
The lines in red indicate that he would use “or something” and “other things” to cover words he hasn’t thought of yet or that he is still in the processing of searching for the correct expression. And such repeated pattern is likely to cause listeners or readers’ confusion upon receiving the information conveyed. The last sentence shows his struggle in organizing sentences and words but failed to get the smooth expression. Based on the contexts, what he wanted to say in the simplest version might be “It becomes less and less important in my life”.
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If semantics is to examine the essence of linguistic meaning, then pragmatics studies the ways people use language in actual conversations (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011). It takes context and situation as vital elements to decide the appropriateness of utterances. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance (Mey, Jacob L., 1993).
“Deictic” is used to describe those words and phrases relying on contexts to be understood.
They have their semantic meaning but still generate ambiguity and puzzlement without specific clues in related texts. The pronouns “he”, “it” and “they” and adverbs “here” and
“there” are deictic words when used alone in single sentence.
I have found some sentences with deixis in my participant’s written work:
The reason is that the teacher didn’t give the expression the student got 1 correct answer which is more positive… In theory each answer got wrong for the 1/3 possibility. But there is only one situation because of the point which the teacher emphasized. If not, the teacher would say that the student got totally all wrong for the first 2 questions…This expression will be more alarming… In fact the conclusion is also valid in peoples’ exchange.
The phrases “the reason”, “the point”, “this expression” and “people’s exchange”
belong to the deictic type. He didn’t explain the vague meaning they refer to.
On the other hand, he did well on the felicity feature in pragmatics. An utterance that is felicitous is one that is situationally appropriate, on that is appropriate relative to the context in which it is uttered (Mihalicek & Wilson, 2011). In responding my questions, Joey answered with relevant information and sometimes provided with supporting details.
Current stage of second language acquisition and SLA theoretical framework
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160 Current stage of SLA
To identify my participant’s current stage of English, I have first probed into the specific aspects of negation, questioning, possessive determiners, pragmatics, relative clauses and reference to past. Generally, he has a good command of knowledge in negation, putting the negative elements, verbs and auxiliaries in right places and marking for person, number or tense. There are some phrases appearing to be in the first stage (negative element+verb) such as “no idea”, “no need”, “no courage”, “no talent” and “no passion”, but they are inserted in the full sentences of “I’ve no idea why I must have to learn it…”, “ I have no need to challenge risk…” and “I have no courage and no talent to save the world. I have got interest but no passion in learning…”, which obey the right grammatical rules. Therefore, they do not belong to the initial stage of using negation. The only problem with negation is the incorrect tense. For example, he would write “I don’t want to get any more”, “I am not happy” and “I don’t know the meaning of my life” to describe past states.
The sequential development of questions in SLA was first brought up and then elaborated by Pienemann and Johnston in 1986, 1987 and 1988, followed by the work of Spada and Lightbown (1993,1999), who made the concept more well known. I collected question samples of my participant and made the following chart:
Figure 3-1 Stages of questions in the samples
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Stage1 Stage2 Stage 3 Stage4 Stage 5 Stage 6