Linguistics - Pragmatics

Sometimes we don’t say exactly what we mean, but other people are able to figure out what we mean using context.
Pragmatics is thus the study of how meaning is put into context
Assumptions made about context to fill incomplete information:
- quality
- quantity
- relevance
- manner
The cooperative principle says that people can be assumed to do all of the above. If they don’t convey them literally, it can be inferred that there’s something fishy
An implicature refers to a meaning that is layered on top of the literal meaning
People also hedge if they don’t want to say something literally

This is the study of the relationship between linguistics and people’s identity
Sociolinguistics features include
- Dialectology
- Accents
Sociolinguistics can be influenced by
- Demographic factors
- Social connections
Observer’s paradox
- When linguists study other people using a language, the subject changes the way the use the language because they know that they are being studied
Code-switching
- When people speak to different group, they change the way they speak
- Someones, people even switch dialects in different situations
Linguistic discrimination
- People react different to different accents

Languages change over time (of course), and historical linguists retrace how a language changed
Why this happens
- People make up new words
- People reanalyse the language
- People try to make their language easier
- Language contact
Sometimes a certain situation can enable the rapid development of a new language
diachronic analysis looks at change using evidence from written text
synchronic analysis looks across language at a given time
Languages that are reconstructed are called proto-language and this can be done with comparative reconstruction, which uses diachronic and synchronic analysis to deduce the changes from the ancestral language that took place

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