Pragmatics and discourse: implicature and Grice's maxims, politeness and face, speech acts and deixis, and discourse structure including cohesion, turn-taking and adjacency pairs, and reading their effect (AO1 and AO3 across H470).

What this dot point is asking

Pragmatics is the analysis of meaning beyond the literal: what is implied, assumed and done with language in context. Discourse is the analysis of whole-text organisation: how a text or conversation hangs together. The two are paired because both move beyond single words and sentences to how meaning works across a text and between participants. This dot point covers the toolkit (implicature, politeness, speech acts, deixis, cohesion, turn-taking) and the move from feature to effect, the AO1-to-AO3 move every analytical task rewards.

The answer

A pragmatic and discourse analysis succeeds when it identifies features precisely (AO1) and reads what they do to meaning and to the relationship between participants in context (AO3). The unifying idea is that meaning is co-constructed: a text implies more than it states, manages the face of its readers, performs actions, and organises itself to lead a reader or hold a conversation together. Your task is to read these moves.

The pragmatic toolkit

A focused set of concepts covers most pragmatic analysis, and naming them precisely is the AO1 foundation.

• Implicature and Grice's maxims. Grice's cooperative principle holds that speakers usually observe four maxims (quantity, quality, relation, manner). Flouting a maxim generates an implicature, an implied meaning, which texts exploit (a deadpan understatement, a pointed silence, an evasive answer).
• Politeness and face. Brown and Levinson's positive face (the wish to be liked) and negative face (the wish not to be imposed on), and the strategies that protect them. A face-threatening act can be softened by hedging or mitigation.
• Speech acts. Language that performs an action: a promise, a warning, an apology, a request. The intended act may differ from the literal form.
• Deixis. Words that point to context: person (I, we, you), place (here, there), and time (now, then). Inclusive "we" is a powerful positioning device.

The discourse toolkit

• Discourse structure. The overall organisation of a text: how it opens, develops and closes, and the order in which it presents information (for example problem to solution).
• Cohesion. The links that bind a text: reference (pronouns, the definite article), substitution and ellipsis, lexical cohesion (repetition, synonymy), and connectives.
• Spoken discourse. Turn-taking, adjacency pairs (a question expecting an answer, a greeting a greeting), topic management and shifts, and features such as overlaps and back-channelling in transcripts.

Move from feature to effect

The habit that separates bands is the move from feature to effect. Naming a feature ("the speaker flouts the maxim of quantity") earns AO1; reading the implicature or the relational effect earns AO3. Each point names the feature, quotes or references the moment, and reads the effect.

Examples in context

The texts and transcripts in the exam are unseen, so the moves below are illustrative.

A model pragmatics paragraph. "When asked whether the product works, the advert never states that it does; instead it flouts the maxim of quantity, offering testimonials and the implicature that results follow, while avoiding a claim it could be held to. The inclusive deixis of 'we all want' constructs a shared community of readers, a positive-politeness strategy that flatters the audience into the group the advert addresses." This names features (flouted maxim, implicature, deixis, positive politeness) and reads their effect.

A model discourse paragraph. "The letter is organised as a problem-solution structure: it opens by establishing a difficulty the reader will recognise, builds the stakes, then presents the writer's proposal as the resolution. Cohesion is managed by lexical repetition of the key term across paragraphs, which keeps the issue in focus and makes the closing call to action read as the inevitable end of an argument rather than an abrupt request." This reads structure and cohesion as meaningful organisation.

Try this

Q1. What is an implicature, and how is one generated? [2 marks]

• Cue. An implicature is an implied, unstated meaning; it is generated when a speaker flouts one of Grice's maxims, prompting the listener to infer the intended meaning.

Q2. What is the difference between positive and negative face? [2 marks]

• Cue. Positive face is the wish to be liked and approved of; negative face is the wish not to be imposed on. Politeness strategies protect each.

Q3. Analyse how pragmatic and discourse features in a text construct the relationship between participants. [10 marks]

• What the marker wants. Accurate pragmatic and discourse terminology (AO1) fused with analysis of how the features construct meaning and the relationship in context (AO3), as an argument rather than a list.

A note on the toolkit

This guide is AI-written and not individually human-reviewed. The pragmatic and discourse concepts you are expected to deploy, and the theorists associated with them, are set out in the current OCR H470 specification and its sample materials, so revise from those. The feature-to-effect method transfers across every level.