PRAGMATIC STUDY OF BOVI AND BASKETMOUTH (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.0 Preamble
This study examines the pragmatics of comedy. Adrian Akmajian conceives of pragmatics as a term that “covers the study of language use, and in particular the study of linguistic communication, in relation to language structure and context of utterance.”(361) When Charles Morris proposed his famous trichotomy of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, he defined the last as “the study of the relation of signs to interpreters” (6). But he soon generalized this to “the relation of signs to their users” (29). What this implies is that pragmatics interprets meaning from the angle of the speaker (i.e. speaker-intended meaning). When comedians use language, what acts are they performing? What are the issues of politeness in their language use? These are some of the questions this study will attempt to answer.
Background to the Study
The intricacies in language use have brought philosophers (first) and then linguists (later) into the study of language. Although, the first attempt made to study language was prescriptive, less technical, superficial, unprofessional, shortsighted and weak, the Greek philosophers provided the basis for which today’s linguists have made rigorous and more serious researches into the complex nature of language, its behaviour, and its workings from one society to the other or from an individual to another.
Language may be studied from different perspectives. If the substance of language is the focus of language study, then it is referred to as phonetics/phonology and graphology. The former deals with the phonics (sound) of a language and the latter deals with the graphs or the written letters of the language. If the aspect of word formation or word behaviour or word arrangement is the focus of language study, it is referred to as morphology/syntax. However, if the context of language and its function are the focus of study, then the study is placed within semantic/pragmatic fields. This present study is situated in the area of pragmatics.
Although semantics and pragmatics both study meaning, there has been a number of attempts to fairly separate them. Leech observes that “once meaning has been admitted to a central place in language, it is notoriously difficult to exclude the way meaning varies from context to context, and so semantics spills into pragmatics… Semanticists found they had bitten more than they could chew” (2). However, linguists have succeeded in delineating these two subfields. In doing this, Adegbite dichotomizes them from the perspective of whole-to-part and parts-to-whole. He claims that if semantics is given a wide coverage- cognitive, social and contextual meaning, then pragmatics will be seen as part of semantics (whole-to-part). But if it is given a narrow coverage- cognitive meaning, then they are different parts that constitute the study of meaning as whole (parts-to-whole). It is in line with this that pragmatics is seen as covering those areas uncovered by semantics.
