Week 11: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Pragmatics — you can know every word in a sentence and still not know what it means. The final subsystem your language needs, and the hardest to set down

3 May 2027

The Tamarians speak in allusion. Every utterance is a reference to a story their culture holds in common — “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” means something like two strangers cooperating against a shared threat, but only if you know who Darmok and Jalad were and what happened at Tanagra. The universal translator translates every word correctly and still conveys nothing, and the crew spends the episode unable to communicate with people whose language they can already translate.

The episode is a clear illustration of what semantics on its own does not cover. Meaning is not only in the words. Grice’s account, still the standard one, is that conversation runs on an assumption of cooperation, and that speakers exploit it constantly by saying less than they mean and trusting the listener to infer the rest. “Some of the students passed” implies that not all did, although it does not say so and would not be false if all had.

Every language conveys meaning this way, and none of it is stated in the grammar. Deixis — here, now, this one — has no fixed referent at all and depends entirely on who is speaking and where they are standing. Speech acts do things rather than describe them: naming a ship, making a promise, conceding a point.

So the question for your language is not what it can say. You have spent nine weeks on that. It is what your speakers do not need to say, because everyone already knows it — which is a question about their society, and it is the last piece your language needs before somebody else has to read it aloud.

Outline#

• what the Tamarians are actually doing, and why translation is not enough
• Grice, cooperation, and meaning more than you say
• implicature, deixis, and speech acts — meaning that lives outside the grammar
• what your speakers leave unsaid, and what that tells us about them