Theoretical Grammar

Absolute deictic markers are forms attached to a social role: Your Honor, Mr.President, Your Grace, Madam, 
etc. Relational deictic markers locate persons in relation to the speaker rather than by their roles in the society: 
my cousin, you, her, etc. In English, social deixis is not heavily coded in the pronoun system. ‘You’ refers to 
both – singular and plural. As well as in the Ukrainian language, English possesses ‘a powerful we’: We are 
happy to inform…, In this article we… 
 
LECTURE 11: PRAGMATICS. SPEECH ACT THEORY 
1. Basic notions of pragmatic linguistics. 
 
The term ‘pragmatics’ was first introduced by Charles Morris, a philosopher. He contrasts pragmatics 
with semantics and syntax. He claims that syntax is the study of the grammatical relations of linguistic units to 
one another and the grammatical structures of phrases and sentences that result from these grammatical relation, 
semantics is the study of the relation of linguistic units to the objects they denote, and pragmatics is the study of 
the relation of linguistic units to people who communicate.
This view of pragmatics is too broad because according to it, pragmatics may have as its domain any 
human activity involving language, and this includes almost all human activities, from baseball to the stock 
market. We will proceed from the statement that linguistic pragmatics is the study of the ability of language 
users to pair sentences with the context in which they would be appropriate. What do we mean by ‘appropriate 
context’? 
In our everyday life we as a rule perform or play quite a lot of different roles – a student, a friend, a 
daughter, a son, a client, etc. When playing different roles our language means are not the same – we choose 
different words and expressions suitable and appropriate for the situation. We use the language as an instrument 
for our purposes. For instance,  
(a) What are you doing here? We’re talking 
(b) What the hell are you doing here? We’re chewing the rag 
have the same referential meaning but their pragmatic meaning is different, they are used in different 
contexts. Similarly, each utterance combines a propositional base (objective part) with the pragmatic