The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics

Anne Barron, Yueguo Gu, Gerard Steen, Anne Barron, Yueguo Gu, Gerard Steen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415531412
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317362562
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics provides a state-of-the-art overview of the wide breadth of research in pragmatics. An introductory section outlines a brief history, the main issues and key approaches and perspectives in the field, followed by a thought-provoking introductory chapter on interdisciplinarity by Jacob L. Mey. A further thirty-eight chapters cover both traditional and newer areas of pragmatic research, divided into four sections:

• Methods and modalities
• Established fields
• Pragmatics across disciplines
• Applications of pragmatic research in today's world.

With accessible, refreshing descriptions and discussions, and with a look towards future directions, this Handbook is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in pragmatics within English language and linguistics and communication studies.

1
Pragmatics broadly viewed

Introduction

Anne Barron, Yueguo Gu and Gerard Steen

Pragmatics deals very broadly with the study of language in the social contexts in which it is used. This area of study has roots stretching into earlier centuries (albeit not under the term pragmatics), but pragmatics as a field of research in linguistics was not established until the 1970s. It developed outside of linguistics in ordinary language philosophy, in particular under the influence of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Austin, John Searle and Herbert P. Grice. Rather early in its development, two main strands of pragmatics began to be identified: an Anglo-American tradition and a Continental tradition (cf. Nerlich 2010; Jucker 2012; Mey 2013; Huang 2015: 4–6 on the history of pragmatics).

The Anglo-American tradition, also termed ‘the component view’ or ‘the pigeon-hole view’ (Huang 2015: 4), was particularly influenced by Geoffery Leech’s textbook, Principles of Pragmatics (1983), a renowned publication which determined the basis of the early discipline. This approach is rather narrowly focused and notably favours a pragmalinguistic over a sociopragmatic approach. It sees pragmatics as one core ‘component’ within linguistics, on the same level as other core components such as semantics, syntax, morphology and phonology, and values clear task delineation from these other levels of language analysis. It deals, in particular, with implicature, inferencing, presupposition, deixis, reference and speech acts.

The other tradition which emerged, the Continental European tradition (macropragmatics, in Mey’s [2001] terms), is broader in scope. It does not view pragmatics as one component of linguistic analysis, and is not concerned with marking boundaries with other components of language. Rather, it sees pragmatics as dealing with social meaning and representing a superordinate perspective on linguistic communication in general (hence the approach is also termed ‘the perspective view’ [Huang 2015: 5]). The perspective view sees pragmatics as not only limited to linguistic research, but also as practised across neighbouring fields such as sociology or psychology. The range of topic areas dealt with include those addressed in the component perspective, but also such areas of interest as intercultural pragmatics and literary pragmatics, among many others. In addition, this view extends the focus from language alone to behaviour and thus also focuses on nonverbal communication.

This division of focus between the Anglo-American and Continental European traditions is upheld today. Indeed, many of the major textbooks on pragmatics, of which scholars have published a growing number in recent years, reflect this tradition. Two very recent textbooks by Birner (2013) and Huang (2015), for instance, concentrate on the Anglo-Saxon tradition alone. Others, such as Culpeper and Haugh (2014), however, seek to unite both. This is also the aim of the present handbook. Specifically, this collection is an attempt to unite these different pragmatic traditions in one volume and to bring together experts from all strands of the discipline to present a state-of-the-art overview on the wide breadth of research in pragmatics. Thus, while some chapters take a more microlinguistic approach and others a more macro sociocultural approach, others deal narrowly with linguistic structure and also at the same time with the broader macro context.

Underlining the unifying aims of this handbook, the present collection begins with a chapter on interdisciplinarity in pragmatics and linguistics by Jacob Mey in which he, looking back on the development of the field of pragmatics, highlights its status as an interdisciplinary undertaking. Following this introductory chapter, the remaining chapters are grouped into four major sections, focusing on methods and modalities, established fields, pragmatics across disciplines and, finally, on applications of pragmatic research in today’s world, respectively. Each of these content areas is briefly described later.

Section I, Methods and modalities, contains two subsections. The first addresses data collection methods employed in pragmatics today, as well as recent innovations and trends in the area. The second deals with nonverbal communication, underlining that pragmatics may be also concerned with behaviour in general, not just with verbal communication alone. The Established fields section follows. It provides a state-of-the-art approach to pragmatics in all of the major areas of pragmatics research. As the section given most weight in the volume, it is subdivided into five further sections, namely:

• Pragmatics and variation
• Pragmatics and culture
• Linguistic pragmatics
• Cognition and pragmatics
• Interactional pragmatics

The third section, Pragmatics across disciplines, enables readers familiar with one approach to pragmatics to gain an understanding of other approaches. Particularly readers with a linguistic background will see here the opportunity to experience a range of ways in which pragmatics has been approached across related disciplines, from ethnography, neurolinguistics and clinical linguistics through to evolutionary approaches. This in turn will provide readers with an understanding of the applicability of their field of study to related disciplines.

Finally, the fourth section, Applications, concerns applications of pragmatic research in today’s world. It comprises a series of chapters dealing with areas such as pragmatics in ontology, translation, interpreting, legal interpretation, social media and language teaching, and its inclusion is an attempt to broaden the base of pragmatics and to encourage cross-dissemination across theoretical and applied disciplines.

This handbook is designed to be relevant and accessible to a wide readership, from upper-level undergraduate and taught postgraduate students through to researchers and academics. The chapters explain the significance of the topic or approach at hand, provide a critical survey of the principal approaches to it and sketch future directions. Contributors to this volume are from around the world and include established figures in the field, on occasion teamed up with younger, up-and-coming voices. Similarly, the topics addressed aim at representing traditional areas of pragmatic research, but also newer ones, such as the newly emerged fields of variational pragmatics and postcolonial pragmatics. We hope, in conclusion, to have compiled a volume which will not only further blur the lines between the component and perspective traditions of pragmatic research, but which will also provide readers with accessible, refreshing descriptions and discussions and with future perspectives and challenges which will shape and inform the pragmatics of tomorrow.

References

Birner, B. J. (2013) Introduction to Pragmatics. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Culpeper, J. and Haugh, M. (2014) Pragmatics and the English Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Huang, Y. (2015) Pragmatics, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jucker, A. H. (2012) ‘Pragmatics in the history of linguistic thought’, in K. Allan and K. M. Jaszczolt (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 495–512.

Leech, G. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.

Mey, J. L. (2001) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Mey, J. L. (2013) ‘A brief sketch of the historic development of pragmatics’, in K. Allan (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 587–612.

Nerlich, B. (2010) ‘History of pragmatics’, in L. Cummings (ed.) The Pragmatics Encyclopedia. London/New York: Routledge. 192–193.

2
Interdisciplinarity in pragmatics and linguistics¹

Jacob L. Mey

Introduction

At the Second International Conference ‘Zeichen und System der Sprache’ (Magdeburg, September 1964), a certain East German professor took the floor during a discussion of one of the linguistic presentations. He started his comments by saying: ‘Als Mathematiker weiß ich zwar von der Sache nichts, kann aber immer etwas Prinzipielles dazu sagen’ (‘Being a mathematician, I don’t know anything about the subject matter, but I can always make some principled remarks.’). The case is interesting as an instance of what I call ‘cross-disciplinarity’: the ‘crossing over’ from one discipline to another, applying the ‘principles’ one is familiar with from one’s own discipline to problems raised in another disciplinary context.

By contrast, consider the situation of a linguist investigating a case of ‘language death’ (a particular language or dialect falling into oblivion and being pronounced ‘dead’ when the last native speaker passes away – sometimes attested historically, as in the case of Cornish, when its last speaker, a woman called Dolly Penreadh, age 102, died in 1777; Pedersen 1924: 48). Such instances are hard to explain by appealing to internal linguistic factors; usually, the social context and the life circumstances of the speakers are brought to bear on the phenomenon, or individual or communal psychological factors are invoked. In our days, the phenomenon of ‘domain loss’ comes to mind, where whole segments of a language are surrendered to a foreign idiom (mostly English, as with ‘computer speak’). In such cases, the ‘principles’ of one’s discipline, considered as an imminent, coherent whole, will not be sufficient to furnish an explanation, and an interdisciplinary approach is needed.

When we talk about ‘interdisciplinarity’ in linguistics and pragmatics, we often confuse these two concepts: the cross-disciplinary and the (true) interdisciplinary. Whereas the former notion, when we look at pragmatics, involves a ‘crossing over’ into the disciplines of linguistics (e.g. as regards the pragmatic aporias that one encounters within semantics, or the pragmatic inconsistencies within conversation analysis and the ways its data are collected, selected and evaluated), interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, is concerned with the two disciplines’ mutual interpenetration and dialectic interdependence. In particular, linguistics needs pragmatics to obtain a proper perspective for its findings (a perspective sometimes captured under the somewhat misleading label of ‘pragmatic intrusion’; see further later); but also, pragmatics needs linguistics to obtain the data required to prove its pragmatic points.

To take an example from speech act theory: here, the interdisciplinary emerges as the need to localize the speech act in space and time, to ‘contextualize’ it in the widest possible sense of the term: local and temporal (sequential). Likewise, in conversation analysis, the conversational structures need to be pragmatically grounded in the societal relations, rather than having these relations emerge, automatically as it were, in the neo-constructivist conception of society adopted by a number of conversation analysts. In addition, a need recently has arisen to re-orient the debate on the semantics–pragmatics interface, which up to now mostly has been informed by a linguistically based, exclusively semantic approach.

In a wider perspective, not to be pursued in the present context, scientific practice in general illustrates the need of interdisciplinarity (e.g. by its use of metaphoric thinking in biology, physics or even mathematics). What follows here is an attempt to assign the distinction its proper place within pragmatics, and (among other things) to point out its relevance to the ongoing semantics–pragmatics debates.

Of string players and bricklayers: immanence and identity

A question that has pervaded linguistic debates from their very start is the problem of ‘immanence’, understood as the requirement to consider language as a scientific object, presenting itself ‘as a self-sufficient totality, a structure sui generis’ (Hjelmslev [1943] 1993: 7; 1953: 2). On the surface, this statement seems to exclude any influences from, or relationships to, other disciplines. Louis Hjelmslev in fact explicitly excluded the study of what he called ‘the disiecta membra of language’; by contrast, for Hjelmslev, ‘linguistics [is] the study of language and its texts as an end in itself’ (Hjelmslev [1943] 1993: 7; 1953: 2). What is not clear from this quotation was the degree to which the author’s ideas themselves were influenced by other disciplines (such as philosophy, the natural sciences, among these what used to be called ‘natural philosophy’, aka physics) and how his theories show a clear relationship to those other fields of scientific endeavor. And in this sense, the very ‘immanence’ that was postulated as a decisive criterion for any linguistic theory may turn out not to be all that sui generis.

When I started my linguistic studies at the University of Copenhagen in 1953, the famous ‘New Testament’ of Danish structural linguistics, the original version of Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena (from which the foregoing quotations are taken), was just ten years old (Hjelmslev [1943] 1993). To me, coming from a more traditional form of linguistics, commonly known as ‘philology’, Hjelmslev’s approach was as startling as it was inspirational. For the first time, I met a scientist who endeavored to combine results from other disciplines with his own efforts to create a modern philology, a linguistics not bound up with earlier generations’ presentations and representations of linguistic facts. Hjelmslev (1899–1965) was clearly influenced by the thoughts and concepts promoted by the Neopositivist Vienna School, in Denmark represented by the philosopher Jørgen Jørgensen (1894–1969), with whom Hjelmslev kept close contact; thus, the latter’s approach to the science of language was clearly a case of ‘cross-disciplinary’ pollination.

As noted earlier, Hjelmslev’s ambition to constitute linguistics as an ‘immanent’ science, a realm of inquiry that had no other responsibility than to make sense in itself and by itself, showed its cross-disciplinary origins by appealing to the three famous principles of non-contradiction, completeness, and simplicity (Hjelmslev [1943] 1993: 17–19; 1953: 10–11), which adherents of the Vienna School, such as Moritz Schlick (1882–1936; see e.g. Schlick [1936] 1979; for a critical evaluation, cf. Mey 1951), had recognized for a decade. While the need to secure the integrity and independence of the discipline was a cornerstone of Hjelmslev’s theorizing, his dependence on the Neopositivist doctrine gainsaid his pronouncements declaring the need for an ‘immanent’ linguistic research. Ironically, and using a somewhat anachronistic term, his method could be dubbed a mere ‘heuristic technique’, a notion that would become popular especially after the appearance of Chomsky’s early works (1957).

Methodically, Hjelmslev’s was an analytic approach: starting from the total text, he divided and subdivided the textual whole into lesser and lesser units, bound together by relationships of presupposition and other dependencies, to arrive at a complete inventory of what he called ‘glossemes’ (the theory was called ‘glossematics’, and as such it became quite influential, though mostly locally, for a couple of decades – roughly, until Hjelmslev’s untimely death in 1965). By analyzing the language as a complex array of syntagmatic concatenations and paradigmatic categories, glossematics purported to give a semantically neutral,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Pragmatics broadly viewed: introduction
• 2 Interdisciplinarity in pragmatics and linguistics
• Part I Methods and modalities
• Part II Established fields
• Part III Pragmatics across disciplines
• Part IV Applications
• Index