Conclusion

This topic has been focused on informational pragmatics, how we package and organize information, largely within the scope of the sentence. We introduced the concepts of figure and ground as a springboard into the various notions that was introduced– the distinction between cognitive givenness/newness and semantic givenness/newness, for example – that involve some elements being in the background and others in the foreground. We approached the notion of backgrounded information through schema theory and related this to associative inferencing in particular. Amongst other things, we briefly noted how schemata can account for culturally varied understandings. We then examined presuppositions, broadly speaking, background assumptions conventionally associated with linguistic expressions. In particular, we looked at presupposition triggers, noting how these varied across languages (e.g. some languages have far richer aspectual systems than English, which can have implications for change-of-state presuppositions). We also dwelt on some of the functions and contexts of naturally occurring presuppositions. We approached the notion of foregrounded information through foregrounding theory, a theory that articulates general principles about how some elements are made more cognitively salient compared with others. We then went on to consider focus, a notion discussed on the pragmatics-grammar border and which can be considered in terms of either semantic newness, cognitive newness or salience. More specifically, we discussed the placing of focus (cf. end-focus), prosodic prominence, semantic contrasts, non-canonical syntactic structures and focus formulae. We noted how focus is achieved differently in different languages.

We will cast some aspects of the previous discussion in a different light. In the first subsection, we noted how presuppositions could be used to assert new information. Something that seems to run counter to how they have sometimes been defined. We suggested that one way of conceiving how presuppositions relate to information is in terms of that information’s (non)controversiality. We also returned to the notion of common ground, a subset of background assumptions. Rather than looking at how discourse might rely on common ground for generating its full meaning, we considered how discourse can actively shape common ground itself. We will observed meanings in interaction, dynamic and emergent, and both shaping and being shaped by language.

It is worth contemplating that pragmatics books, especially textbooks, have largely overlooked the kinds of things we have discussed in this topic. Thomas (1995) contains none of them; Leech (1983) merely the mention of some broad principles; Levinson (1983) an exclusive focus on presuppositions. Perhaps part of the problem is that they are not viewed as truly pragmatic. We hope to have demonstrated that these phenomena, have a full role to play in pragmatics and, notably, integrative pragmatics.