Pragmatics and the English Language

Introduction

Meaning can kill you. In the UK in 1952, Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig broke into a warehouse. Craig was armed with a revolver. They had been seen entering, and the police were called. One police officer managed to grab hold of Bentley. At this point, witnesses claimed that Bentley said: Let him have it, Chris. Craig fi red, but only grazed the police officer. Nevertheless Bentley was arrested, while Craig managed to get away. Upon the arrival of more police officers, Craig was apprehended, but not before shooting one of them dead. Craig and Bentley were charged with murder, which for Bentley carried the possibility of the death sentence (Craig was underage). Much of the court case, and the subsequent appeals, focused on the ambiguity of the words Bentley had spoken. Do they mean “let the police officer have the gun, Chris”, or do they have the more idiomatic meaning “shoot the police officer, Chris” (presumably derived by metonymy from “let the police officer have a bullet, Chris”, assuming it refers to a bullet)? The judge and jury decided on the latter, and Bentley was sentenced to death and hanged. The fact that they made this decision perhaps reflects the cursory way in which ambiguities and indeterminacies of meaning are generally treated. The folk belief is that language fixes meanings, and their recovery is easy – you just need to know the code. In fact, humans determine meanings, and their recovery is far from easy – certainly not just a simple matter of decoding. In 1998 the Court of Appeal overturned Bentley’s conviction. The judge, Lord Bingham, made it clear that the summing up of the original judge, Lord Goddard, had not given adequate attention to the possible ambiguity of the Let him have it, Chris, or even whether he had actually said it (R v. Derek William Bentley 1998, paragraphs 74 and 86). In fact, scholars of traditional linguistics would not fare much better in accounting for Bentley’s utterance. Phonology, morphology, syntax and even semantics would have little to contribute to our understanding of why Bentley’s utterance was ambiguous, part of which is understanding to whom or what him and it are referring, and also understanding the presence of literal and non-literal meanings. In contrast, such issues lie at the heart of pragmatics. Let us begin by working through some examples illustrating issues which are pertinent to pragmatics. After this, we will briefly outline our view of pragmatics.