Textual Pragmatics In Language Education

RESEARCH ARTICLE Textual Pragmatics In Language Education Ratiba Mhamda Bouloudani Doctor (PhD) Higher School for Teachers Constantine, Algeria Email : Doi Serial                   4 Keywords \ Pragmatics, text, educational text, textual Rhetoric, presentations \ Abstract X Textual linguistics tries to re-establish the linguistic study on another basis, which is the text, and its main issue is to X search for how the text is compatible with the discourse, in order to achieve the communicative process in all its

The emergence of pragmatics as a philosophical theory is attributed to Peirce, while its development as a method and theory is credited to the English philosopher Austin, who shifted from the linguistic, grammatical, and psychological level of language to the social level, by using language as a means to achieve the process of communication.

The Concept of Pragmatics

In Lisan al-Arab , under the root (D-W-L), it is stated: “Al-Zajjaj said: al-dawla is the name of something that is circulated.”

Whereas in Mu ʿ jam Maqayis al-Lugha , under the root (D-W-L), it is traced to two main origins: “One of them refers to the transformation of something from one place to another and the other to weakness and relaxation. The linguists said: ittadala al-qawm when they moved from one place to another. From this category also comes the expression: tadawala al-qawm al-shay ʾ baynahum , meaning it moved from some of them to others. The word al-dawla has two forms, and it is said that al-dawla relates to wealth, and al-dawla to war. They were both named based on analogy, as it refers to something that is circulated, moving from this to that, and from that to this.” ¹

Thus, tadawul (circulation) is the movement, transformation, and exchange of a thing among parties.

Pragmatics ( tadawuliyya ) is an Arabic term that has not settled on a single fixed form. It has been referred to as: tadawuliyya , maqamiyya (situational), wazifiyya (functional), naf ʿ iyya (utilitarian), dhara ʿ iyya (pragmatic), siyaqiyya (contextual), among others. Its equivalent in French is the term “ Pragmatique ”, and in English: “ Pragmatics ”. Both terms are derived from the Greek word Pragmatikos , which refers to everything related to the meanings of action: ² Action .

Beginning in the seventeenth century, its use shifted to the scientific field, and “Pragmatique” came to mean: “any research or discovery that may lead to practically fruitful applications.”3

In linguistic terminology, the use of the term Pragmatique Linguistique is attributed to the American philosopher Charles Morris in 1938, who considered pragmatics a part of semiotics. It is concerned with the relationship between signs and their users. Pragmatics is: “A new science of communication that studies linguistic phenomena in the domain of usage, thus integrating multiple cognitive projects in the study of linguistic and interpretive communication.”

Pragmatics is primarily concerned with communication between interlocutors in different linguistic contexts, drawing upon cognitive fields such as psychology, semantics, and others...

The Emergence and Development of Pragmatic Theory:

Pragmatics had a strong and very early presence in the ancient Arab heritage, no less significant than in Western studies. The first reference to pragmatics dates back to the early beginnings of linguistic study with Sibawayh, up to the later critics and rhetoricians. Sibawayh pointed to the principle of intentionality when he said: “In his discussion of verbs that require two objects, he reveals that syntactic composition or what we have seen among Westerners falls under what is called first-degree pragmatics or the level of expression, which is primarily subject to the speaker’s intent.”

He held the view that the locations of meanings in the mind are interpreted by the words that indicate them in speech, and that these meanings are also linked to the speaker’ s intent, which may require additions or omissions.

We also find this with al-Jahi ẓ , but in the domain of rhetoric, which represents a science of connection, as it is linked to the use and practice of language, as well as to communication.

In this context, the pragmatics established by Austin intersects with many concepts of classical rhetoric from Aristotle until our time especially with Arabic rhetoric in its treatment of declarative and performative expressions in the section on meanings (al-ma ʿ ani).

We find al-Jahi ẓ dividing statements (al-khabar) into three categories:

• •    A truthful statement: one that conforms to reality and is believed by the speaker to be accurate.

• •   A false statement: one that does not conform to reality and is believed by the speaker to be inaccurate.

• •   A statement that is neither truthful nor false: it may or may not conform to reality, but the speaker either be

lieves it does not or has no such belief.

This relies on a pragmatic criterion: the speaker’ s belief and intention.

In the work of al-Jahi ẓ , we find a resemblance to what Searle does when he considers the condition of sincerity as one of the criteria for identifying the illocutionary forces within speech.

Rhetoric for al-Jahi ẓ signifies two meanings:

• •    The first is delivery or transmission, as rhetoric is a synonym for communication in modern linguistics ⁴. That is, the speaker seeks through their discourse to deliver speech and convey it to the addressee or recipient. The communicative process proceeds from the sender to the receiver.

• •    The second meaning is persuasion: after the speaker delivers the message to the addressee, they work to persuade, influence, and change them.

Rhetoric often appears in al-Jahi ẓ ’s writings accompanied by the words reason or logic, indicating that rhetoric relies solely on intellectual and logical capacities for persuasion. He confines bayan (clarity of expression) to verbal form and links persuasion to pragmatics, starting from the communicative function.

Foundations and Pillars of Pragmatic Theory:

Pragmatics is a new field of study, yet it lacks clear boundaries, which has made it difficult for researchers to precisely define its subjects. They have broadly outlined them as follows: speech acts, presupposition, conversational implicature, and conversation theory each representing a fundamental pillar of pragmatic theory.

Speech Acts:

This theory is attributed to Austin, and his lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955—were compiled in a book titled How to Do Things with Words. In it, he explains that when a speaker talks, they simultaneously inform about something, make a declaration, command, prohibit, invite, and so on.

Austin believes that language is not only used for communication but also serves as a tool for persuasion and changing behavior and attitudes. He divided utterances into two types: constative and performative utterances. The former, “constatives,” are descriptive or informational, such as: “The weather is very cold.”

As for the second type, "Performatives", it means performative and enunciative acts. It is itself divided into:

• •    Direct performative , where the act is explicit, such as: command and supplication...

• •    Indirect performative , where the act is not explicit, as in His saying: “ ⁵ ” وما الحياة الدنيا إلا متاع الغرور. Here, the act in this verse is not explicit; its implicit meaning is “beware.”

He distinguished in these utterances three types of speech acts:

• 1.    Locutionary act: It is the articulation of linguistic sounds and their structure, where concepts present syntactically are recalled through words ⁶, meaning the act that results from the operation of speech organs.

• 2.    Perlocutionary act: Or the act of effect in discourse, where the speaker convinces the hearer to do something, such as commanding him to open the door. The act is fully effective if the final effect or result matches the intended purpose⁷; the hearer then opens the door after being convinced by the command, and the act of opening matches the speaker’ s purpose.

• 3.    Presupposition: Archiouni defines presupposition as: “It is that information which, although not expressed, is automatically included in the utterance that contains it originally, regardless of its specificity” ⁸.

• 4.    Conversational implicature: Its origin goes back to Grice’s lectures, who observed “that sentences in natural languages, in certain contexts, indicate a meaning not included in their original propositional content.”

The Literary Text in Light of the Pragmatic Approach:

The word text ("texte") is derived from the verb to weave ("texere"), which means weaving. Accordingly, the text means fabric, and subsequently, the sequence of ideas and succession of words9.

The central meaning of the signifier text is: appearance, revelation, and clarity.

If we move beyond the lexical aspect to the terminological one, we find that theorists are divided into three groups:

• • The first group, led by Paul Ricœur, links the concept of the text to writing, considering it a communicative development: “The text is discourse that has been fixed through writing” ¹⁰.

Thus, the text is any written speech, in contrast to oral discourse, whose tool is spoken language, while the former uses written language. Therefore, the text is a linguistic performance and a linguistic production carried out by a specific individual.

The text is: “A linguistic device that redistributes the system of language, revealing the relationship between communicative words, indicating direct data that connects them with different patterns of previous and simult a-neous statements” 11.

As such, the text is a productive process that includes its relation to language through deconstruction and reconstruction. It is a fabric of words organized in composition and coordinated in a fixed manner, and it is historically linked to law, religion, literature, and science.

The text is: “An implicational system whose components can be distinguished on three levels: utterance, syntax, and semantics. It parallels and overlaps with the linguistic system” 12.

In summary: The literary text is every speech that is fixed or can be fixed. It is a fabric of words arranged in a way that creates meaning. And since it appears through a set of signs, it has “a material existence and its own domains, each of which has its own orientation toward reality, breaking or distorting its reflection in its own way” 13.

• 2- The Relationship between Pragmatics and the Literary Text:

The text is a message faced by the writer as the sender, addressed to the reader, who is the recipient. Accordingly, the text has its pragmatic function: “knowing the conditions of the Arabic expression through which it conforms to the context is what achieves the pragmatic function, as this function can only be realized with the presence of a sender (the speaker), a receiver (the addressee), and a message, which is the speech or expression contained in the text.”

By relying on the method of comparison, analysis, and citation—through the use of linking tools that are meaningfully connected to inference “one of the tasks of pragmatics is to formulate the conditions for the successful performance of an utterance” in order to achieve understanding by the other. The proper use of these expressions helps to convey the idea and achieve understanding and communication between the writer and the reader. These elements are among the key foundations of both the text and pragmatics.

The Literary Text in the Theory of Speech Acts (The Text as a Speech Act):

When a literature scholar examines a text, they do not analyze it solely in terms of structure—that is, its formal and thematic structure but also take into account the function performed by the set of utterances that form a text in a given context through form. The reader of the literary text, when uttering a sentence or several sentences in a particular context, is performing a speech act or multiple speech acts. Even when uttering a fully quoted text, they are performing a global speech act (Marco acte de langage).

In this context, G. Oldenshein (G. Oldens) defines the text by saying: “It is that which gives a series of linguistic elements an effective material existence.”

The text is thus a material product of a speech situation, and in this way it achieves communication, and therefore is a speech act. From this angle, it can be included within the system of major signs, which is the system of acts that occur between humans, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, through a speech act that, like any other utterance act, contains the three basic acts: Referential act, Predicative act, Performative act.

These characteristics are linked to the sentence, for it was observed that when the speaker utters a sentence, they have effectively performed three types of acts:

• •    The first act is the utterance of the word, the second is the act of reference and predication to a specific meaning, and the third is the performative act, which may be: a question, an assertion, a promise... According to Land-qvist, these characteristics can be extended to the text, thus shaping the text as a speech act composed of a set of sentences, as follows:

A diagram illustrating the structure of the text as a speech act14

This diagram illustrates the position of the text as a speech act. It is a fabric of sentences, and each sentence contains three speech acts: performative, enunciative, meaning that every text producer has intentions aimed at conveying them to the recipient.

Literary Activity:

The text constitutes the core of the educational act in teaching Arabic language activities. In terms of its definition, it is a fabric of words interconnected with each other. It is also a fabric of syntactic, morphological, structural, semantic, and rhetorical relationships. As for how it should be presented by the teacher, we must understand that the text “is a written discourse, and one of the essential aspects of discourse is that it is directed to someone; there is another speaker and a recipient of the discourse, and the presence of these two the speaker and the lis-tener—is what constitutes language as communication” 15.

Pragmatic Features in the Literary Activity

[In Praise of Peace and Warning Against the Calamities of War by Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma]

The pragmatic features are reflected in the presentation of this lesson as follows:

The teacher began with an introduction to the lesson to place the learners in the context of the text: “The more the recipient possesses information about the components of the text… the more clearly the lines for understanding and interpreting the message are drawn, that is, placing it in its context” 16, linking it to real and practical life so that the lesson is freed from formal constraints (representation through reality).

As for the introduction of the author of the text, it was done through a question-and-answer method, i.e., stimulus and response, which is the basis of behaviorist theory, and it was then written on the board.

• ■    The teacher then moved to a cultural element related to linguistic repertoire, as communication (which is the essence of the pragmatic approach) cannot be achieved without the learner having knowledge of word meanings. This allows the learner to deepen their understanding of the Arabic language, acquire the ability to use it, and discover new contexts.

• ■    Through the analysis of the text (I discover the data and I discuss the data), the teacher, together with the learners, addresses the general meaning of the text and places it in its historical, artistic, cognitive, and c ultural context.

• ■    During the explanation process, the teacher uses verbal language as well as body language, which is used unconsciously ¹⁷, and greatly contributes to the learner's understanding.

  

The communication process between the teacher and the learner takes place through two channels: verbal discourse (or utterance) and external carriers. “When both the speaker and the listener are at the level of understanding and being understood, a reciprocal relationship should arise between the two poles of communication. Within its limits, the speaker adjusts their speech according to what they expect from the discourse, except in cases where they say things and are met with a reaction from the listener”18.

Therefore, communication that occurs through utterance and external carriers must also be preceded by a background on the part of both the teacher and the student, so that educational communication becomes effective. The teacher’ s utterance and movement are, for the student, a readable text, “and background knowledge actively contributes to breaking the tense relationship between the reader and the text, thereby making them feel capable of understanding and interpreting” 19.

• •    As for the second principle of pragmatics, which is speech acts, we ask the following question: How can we benefit from this principle in the teaching process? The answer would be:

We draw from this principle the classification of speech into constative acts and performative acts.

It is important to determine whether the teacher (as speaker) is delivering a constative act, whereby the student understands that the teacher is conveying information— as in the teacher’ s narration of the Dahis and al-Ghabra ʾ war.

But if the act is performative, then the teacher is requesting a response from them.

Teacher: What does the word "yaminan" (by oath) mean? → Performative act

Student: It means an oath → Perlocutionary act

Or he may ask them to comprehend and understand:

Teacher: Pay close attention, examine the expression carefully → Performative act

Students' response → Perlocutionary act

Conversational implicature:

The teacher frequently uses this principle when responding to students’ questions, as he means more than he explicitly says.

For example, when a student asks:

Student: Was Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma a Muslim poet?

Teacher: He died before the advent of the Prophet’ s mission.

The semantic load of the teacher’ s response indicates two meanings:

Literal meaning: He died before the advent of the Prophet’s mission.

Implied meaning: The poet did not live to witness Islam, thus he was not a Muslim.

The teacher may also intend the opposite, as when he says to a student who was distracted throughout the entire lesson: “I will repeat the lesson for you in a special session.”

Literal meaning: I will repeat the lesson for you.

Implied meaning: Reprimand and scolding for not paying attention. Presupposition: Previous experiences, which act as assumptions of the communicative background, constitute the basis for the success of the communication process, and are contained within the utterance.

Archiouni defines presupposition as: “It is that information which, although not explicitly examined, is automat i-cally included in the utterance that already contains it” 20.

The teacher is not obliged to explain every term he uses. For example:

Teacher : In what way is the poet's human dimension represented?

This means that the student understands the meaning of humanistic tendency, and the teacher knows this. But if the student understands the term from the expression itself, this is an implicature.

– I identify the structure of the text:

“The teacher seeks to help students identify the dominant mode of the text and discover its features, then train them orally or in writing to produce texts in the studied mode” 21.

For example, in this text, the dominant mode is argumentative, which the students were able to identify based on internal textual indicators:

– Starting from a specific issue and gradually presenting ideas and opinions in a systematic, logical way to reach the intended conclusion.

– Using direct discourse and short sentences.

– Using tools of affirmation, negation, reasoning, deduction, and elaboration in a logical sequence.

– Resorting to evidence and proof.

The poet frequently used forms of affirmation, such as oaths (yaminan, wa-qad qultuma) and negation in his saying (la taktumana Allah...), and reasoning such as (liyukhfa, wa-manhum yaktum Allah ya ʿ lam, wa-ma al-harbu illa ma ʿ alimtum...).

The teacher does not stop at defining this mode and identifying its indicators as abstract knowledge, but rather aims for these mechanisms (textual pragmatic mechanisms) to be realized in the students’ communicative competence, which is manifested through their responses and writings as communication with the social environment for the purpose of persuasion and thus, effective communication.