Pragmatic Idioms

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.0 (B), University of Paderborn (Anglistics), course: English Idioms in Linguistics and Language Teaching, language: English, abstract: Pragmatic Idioms play an important role in the English language and even more in everyday conversation and comprehension. We necessarily use expressions like 'How do you do?', 'Thank you', 'I am sorry' and so on. They are fixed parts in human interaction and 'closely bound to a special function or communication situation'. They are a fixed part in our everyday conversation. Phonetics, the study of human speech sounds in the centre. Followed by phonology, the sound patterning, that is surrounded by syntax, the arrangement and the form of words, which also links together the sound patterns and the meaning. Next is semantics (meaning), that together with phonology, syntax and semantics is the 'bread and butter' of linguistics (grammar). Around the centre of grammatical hub comes pragmatics, which is a relatively new and fast expanding topic that has connections both with semantics, and with the various branches of linguistics. Pragmatic idioms have a great variety of definitions and terms that continuously change. Some of these expressions are: pragmatic idioms, conversational routines, situational fixed expression-idioms, interactional idioms, Routineformeln or speech act idioms. In this paper I am going to use the expression pragmatic idioms (as well as in our presentation in the seminar) to present and illustrate this branch of linguistics. Because of this confusing and enormously wide field of definitions and information, I am going to start with a first overview, some basic definitions concerning fixed expressions, idioms and idiomacity in general before having a closer look at pragmatic idioms in detail.