Pragmatics and Register Awareness
Domain 6 - Pragmatics and Register Awareness - tests meaning as action. You must infer what a speaker is doing with words - requesting, refusing, hedging, implying, establishing distance or solidarity - and judge whether the register fits the tenor of the situation.
Speech acts and indirectness
- The same act can be performed directly (“Close the door”) or indirectly (“It's rather cold in here”). At C2 you are asked what is intended, not what is literally said.
- Felicity conditions matter: a promise requires sincerity and ability; an apology requires the speaker to accept some responsibility.
Gricean implicature
- The maxims are quantity, quality, relation and manner. Flouting a maxim generates implicature rather than nonsense.
- Scalar implicature: “Some of the results were positive” implicates that not all were; “warm” implicates not hot.
- Relevance does the rest: “Are you coming to the seminar?” - “I have a deadline on Friday” is an answer, not a change of subject.
Politeness, hedging and register
- Negative politeness minimises imposition: “I wonder if you could possibly…”, “I'm sorry to bother you.”
- Hedges soften commitment: arguably, to some extent, it would appear. Boosters harden it: clearly, undoubtedly, without question. Academic prose hedges claims; advertising boosts them.
- Register is field, tenor and mode. Address terms, modals and lexical density encode power and distance.
Worked example
Text: “I'd appreciate your thoughts on the draft by Friday, if that's workable.”
Reasoning: this is a directive, but heavily hedged. “I'd appreciate” distances the request and puts the writer in the position of beneficiary rather than commander; “if that's workable” offers the addressee an exit and preserves autonomy. The writer is a colleague of equal or slightly greater standing, not a superior issuing an order. The deadline is real; the flexibility is a politeness strategy, not genuine uncertainty. An answer claiming the writer is “unsure about the deadline” misreads the pragmatics.
Traps
- Reading irony or sarcasm literally.
- Missing British understatement and litotes.
- Assuming politeness equals sincerity, or that a hedge equals real doubt.
- Confusing the implied author with the historical writer.
- Missing a power shift signalled by a switch from “could you” to “you will”.