Pragmatics
- On the TV show Little House on the Prairie, the preacher says to Mrs. Ingalls, Family discipline is based on promises kept—whether punishment or reward. The preacher here is lumping together two different types of illocutionary acts.
- What are the two illocutionary acts the preacher is referring to?
Expressive and assertive acts
- What general category of illocutionary acts do they both belong to?
They both belong to performative acts
- How do the two illocutionary acts differ in terms of their felicity conditions?
The two illocutionary acts differs in terms of felicity conditions; for instance, the directive act has preparatory condition since it has a promise. The latter is a sincerity condition where the speaker’s intention is clearly brought ought.
- A friend comes to visit you for the first time and, being positively impressed by where you live, says, What a nice house you have! The syntactic form of your friend’s utterance is _declarative____. The illocutionary act is __expressive___. The illocutionary act is performed directly.
Semantics
- A man calls up an auto supply store on Florida Boulevard and asks if the store is located east or west of Airline Highway. The clerk who answers the phone says, It depends on where you are. Using the relevant concept from semantics, explain why the clerk’s response is nonsense.
The clerk’s response is nonsense because the man requires getting direction to the store. The clerk ought to give direction which he fails terribly. Although the clerk is trying to prove that the question is ambiguous, she ought to give a better explanation since failure to do so is becoming even more ambiguous.
- A caption under a TV news item read Mom chains sons to bed. Explain the discordant nature of this caption in terms of semantic theory.
The caption is discordant in terms of semantic theory in the sense that a mom chaining son to bed makes no sense. Chaining son to bed is play on words and lacks literal meaning.
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