Situation and Meaning

Page 82

Imagine a three-year-old child sitting in a house of worship with his parents. He’s having a great time banging his stuffed toys around until his mother grabs them away during a silent part of the service. Clearly upset, the child calls her a nasty name. Mom’s face turns bright red, and she escorts her little one out to the car.

When you acquire language, you learn semantics, but when you learn how to use the verbal symbols of a culture, you learn pragmatics.

Semantics involves the relationship among symbols, objects, people, and concepts and refers to the meaning that words have for people, either because of their definitions or because of their placement in a sentence’s structure (syntax). Our little friend in the example understood the relationship between the word he used and the concept of being unhappy; he was upset about losing his toys, so he uttered the same word he had probably heard a family member use when unhappy. He may have also observed strong responses from others to that word, so he thought it would help him get what he wanted. What he had not learned was pragmatics, the ability to use his culture’s symbol systems appropriately. He may have gotten a few laughs by using the curse word in front of his family at home, but he hadn’t yet learned that it’s inappropriate to use the word outside the home. When you acquire language, you learn semantics, but when you learn how to use the verbal symbols of a culture, you learn pragmatics.