Page 440 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
useful science of language, together with a wish to leave the narrow perspectives of the 'single discipline' behind. Not surprisingly, the effects of language on people's lives, especially in situations of unequal societal power, attracted the interest of these early pragmaticians (such as Basil Bernstein in England, or Dieter Wunderlich in (the then West) Germany); the impact of their work was felt throughout the 1970s and far into the 1980s (for more on this topic, especially Bernstein's work, see below, Sect. 4.6; also see Wunderlich 1970).
1.3.3 The Philosophical Tradition
Originating in the British critical tradition of language investigation (illustrated by names such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and others of the school of 'ordinary language philosophy,' and many more), this tendency was vir- tually unknown outside the UK until the late 1960s. It was only after the publication of Austin's student John Searle's landmark work Speech Acts (1969) that the first inroads into what later became known as pragmatic territory were made by Chomsky's rebel- lious students; to their great surprise, they found the region populated and partly cultivated by people such as those mentioned above (to use Geoffrey Leech's
colorful image):
When linguistic pioneers such as Ross and Lakoff staked claim in pragmatics in the late 1960s, they encountered there an indigenous breed of philosophers of language who had been quietly cultivating the territory for some time. In fact, the more lasting influenceson modem prag- matics have been those of philosophers; notably, in recent years, Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and Grice (1975).
(1983:2)
1.3.4 The Ethnomethodological Tradition
Finally, mention must be made of a 'Johnny-come- lately' (but a rather influential one): the so-called eth- nomethodological tradition. In this tradition, the emphasis had always been on communication rather than on grammar; how people got their messages across was considered more important than the ways in which they constructed their sentences, or whether or not their utterances were syntactically correct or logically consistent.
The ethnomethodologists were clearly, in this respect as in many others, a different breed from the linguists and the philosophers (including those whose main interests had avowedly had been 'ordinary' or 'everyday' language). The notion of language as the object of a scientific investigation that will make poss- ible the description, classification, and definition of language phenomena in an abstract way, with the aid of objective correctness criteria (interpreted as pro- viding univocal answers to questions such as whether an utterance is 'in the language' or not, a laChomsky), is never taken seriously in ethnomethodology. Con-
versely, most of the linguists of this early period never took the ethnomethodologists and their results, especially in the domain of conversation analysis, seri- ously either.
Saying that this research tradition came late in the day, relative to the other tendencies, is of course itself a relative assertion—relative, to be exact, to the point of time at which the linguists first started to recognize the ethnomethodologists, their methods, and their results. While the precise 'moment of truth' cannot be established, it seems safe to say that from the mid- 1970s, references to ethnomethodological research start turning up in the linguistic literature. By the early 1980s, the ethnomethodologists are firmly ensconced in pragmatics; thus, Levinson devotes roughly a quar- ter of the entire text of his book Pragmatics (1983) to their ideas and techniques (ch. 6: 'Conversational Structure'). Names such as Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson became household words in linguistic circles after the publication of their ground-breaking article in the prestigious linguistics
journal Language in 1974; their style of investigation (often referred to by the nickname of the 'Santa Bar- bara School') has been widely adopted also in other research environments.
Still, even in the 1990s, many (mostly pure-theory oriented) linguists deplore this intrusion into their discipline by methods that are not strictly linguistically accountable, inasmuch as they derive their proper object from sciences such as ethnology and anthro- pology.
1.4 The Case of Semantics: An Example
Above, the roles and relative positions of both phil- osophy and 'ethnomethodology' in the development of pragmatics were discussed. Since both tendencies (which, in many pragmaticists' opinions, belong to the most influential, albeit controversial, directions in pragmatics) are dealt with in detail elsewhere, it makes sense to follow up some details in another important tendency in the heretical movement that led to the establishment of modem pragmatics: early 'generative semantics' and the problem of presuppositions.
As Leech remarks, 'its [pragmatics'] colonization was only the last stage of a wave-by-wave expansion of linguistics from a narrow discipline dealing with the physical data of speech, to a broad discipline taking in form, meaning and context (1983:2).
In this connection, Leech refers to a 1968 article by Lakoff, 'On generative semantics,' that supposedly documents the early anti-Chomsky rebellion which was mentioned in Sect. 1.2 (Lakoff 197la). However, it seems more appropriate to consider another article by Lakoff as evidence here: viz., the one entitled 'Pre- supposition and relative well-formedness' (Lakoff 1971b, reprinted in the same volume), rather than the somewhat programmatic article mentioned by Leech. It is in this second article that Lakoff for the first
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