LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 23:6 June 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

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A Journey from Literal to Pragmatic Concept -- A Case Study of AMU Jargon

Dr. Mahboob Zahid and Md. Arfeen Zeeshan, Research Scholar

Abstract

Communication, which is generally defined as an act of transferring information from a human to another human, involves a linguistic code as their means. In these linguistic codes the encoder (speaker) encodes some ideas and concepts that get decoded by decoder (hearer). Every social set up or group develops its own terms and Jargon to convey ideas and concepts quickly. These terms and jargon simplify communication for insiders but make it complex for outsiders . The data was collected through observation and interviews with the participants. The findings of the study show that jargon is an important aspect of communication in AMU, and it is constantly evolving to meet the needs of its speakers. The study also highlights the importance of pragmatic competence in understanding jargon and its use in different contexts. These ideas and concepts are highly pragmatic in nature and their development seems as a journey which starts from literal meaning and reaches to pragmatic meaning via context. This paper discusses how the lexicalized concept of an utterance changes into an ad hoc concept and how pragmatic inference operates in these changes, in special reference to AMU campus jargon.

Keywords: AMU, Literal concept, Pragmatic concept, Jargons, Literal meaning, Pragmatic meaning.

Introduction

Every word encodes literal meaning, also known as lexicalized meaning. This lexicalized meaning contributes in giving the meaning or concept to the proposition in which it occurs. Communication, traditionally defined as ‘an act of transferring information from a sender to a receiver by means of a (linguistic) code’ - (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). According to code model (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) a speaker codifies his thought and idea into a linguistic string and that encodes the hearer of that linguistic string decodes thought and idea of linguistic string. According to this model, at the end of communication, which starts from codification and ends at de-codification of thoughts and ideas, the speaker and hearer will share the same thoughts and ideas that are encoded (Semantic Model).

The later studies show that there is no one-to-one mapping between linguistic meaning and utterance meaning. In other words, there is a gap between semantically-underspecified meaning and speaker meaning (Pragmatic Model). These gaps can only be bridged by pragmatic inference.

As, according to truth-conditional pragmatics, a word may contribute an ad hoc concept or meaning to the proposition expressed, that is, something that differs from the concept the word encodes (the lexicalized concept or meaning). This ad hoc concept or meaning is also called the pragmatically derived concept or meaning. According to Carston (Carston, 2010: 242.) the pragmatically derived concept may be more speci?c or more general than the encoded concept; that is, its denotation may be either a proper subset or a superset of the denotation of the linguistically encoded concept, or it may be a combination, both extending the lexical denotation and excluding a part of it.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. Mahboob Zahid
Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics Central University of Rajasthan
Email: mahboob@curaj.ac.in

Md. Arfeen Zeeshan
Research Scholar
Department of Linguistics
Aligarh Muslim University
Email: mdarfeen65@gmail.com
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