Steven Pinker on Language Pragmatics

[Music] so why do people understand language so much better than computers what is the knowledge that we have that has been so hard to program into our machines well there's a third interface between language and the rest of the Mind uh and that is the subject matter of the branch of linguistics called pragmatics namely how people understand language in context uh using their knowledge of the world and their expectation about how others speakers communicate the most important principle of pragmatics is called The Cooperative principle namely assume that your conversational partner is working with you to

try to get a meaning across truth ful and clearly our knowledge of pragmatics like our knowledge of syntax and pH phology and so on is deployed effortlessly but involves many intricate computations for example if I were to say if you could pass the guacamole that would be awesome you understand that as a polite request meaning give me the guacamole you don't interpret it literally as a rumination about a hypothetical State of Affairs you just assume that the person wanted something and was using that string of words to convey the request politely often comedies will use

the absence of pragmatics in robots as a source of humor as in the old get smart situation comedy which had a robot named haime and a recurring joke in the series would be that Maxwell Smart would say to haime haime can you give me a hand and haime will then go remove his hand and pass it over to Maxwell Smart not understanding that give me a hand in context means help me rather than literally transfer the hand over to me or take the following example of pragmatics in action consider the following dialogue Marsha says I'm

leaving you John says who is he now understanding language requires F finding the antecedence to pronouns in this case who the he refers to and any competent English speaker knows exactly who the he is presumably John's romantic rival even though it was never stated explicitly in any part of the dialogue this shows how we bring to bear on language understanding a vast store of knowledge about human behavior human interactions human relationships and we often have to use that background knowledge even to solve mechanical problems like who does a pronoun like he referred to it's that

knowledge that's extraordinarily difficult to say the least to program into a computer [Music]