The Importance Of Pragmatics

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Being able to communicate in English is not only shown by the ability to ask and answer using English words. This fact should be understood by people that they have to understand what utterance they should produce in any certain condition so that the utterances are proper for the situation and suitable for the hearer. Alternatively, this is what so called as pragmatic competence by linguists. As such, pragmatic competence is essential for successful communication and is a fundamental part of general communicative competence, which is the goal towards which much language learning and teaching strives (Neary & Sundquist, 2013: 151). Therefore, for people whose occupation is as a teacher, they should also learn pragmatics so that they can be able …show more content…

Fraser (2010:15) argued that hedging is a rhetorical strategy that attenuates either the full semantic value of a particular expression, as in He’s sort of nice, or the full force of a speech act, as in I must ask you to stop doing that. Another definition of hedging is of Behnam and Khaliliaqdam's paper (2012:74) who stated that a hedge is a mitigating device used to lessen the impact of an utterance. Those theories are in line with Seskauskiene (2008: 72) in her paper which revealed that by using hedges, ones can give texture in interaction to contribute to flexibility of the text as well as the persuasiveness of the ideas. Indeed, these facts have some contributions towards the performance of teachers in classroom. The hedges are necessary to be studied and applied by the teachers in classroom so that their utterance will not be considered stiff and too strong. For example, instead of saying “your answer is wrong”, teachers may hedge their utterance and say “I think, your answer is slightly improper to solve this problem”. The adding of the words I think and the changing from wrong into slightly improper are the example of how hedging is done. Further, hedges make the utterances weaken and soften so that by using hedges, one's utterances may seem more polite and accepted to the

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