Page 442 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
language with the help of a computer. Not all swim- ming is alike, and not all swimming in one language is called 'swimming' in some other (for example, inani- mate objects such as logs can 'swim' in German, but not, it would seem, in any other Germanic language).
Note also that some languages do indeed have different words for motion verbs, where animals are concerned, as opposed to humans. In the Inuit lan- guage of (west) Greenland, a human arpappuq, an animal pangalippuq. Both mean 'he/she/it runs.'
What occurs here is an instance of a more general case, in which 'extralinguistic factors very often enter in judgments of well-formedness,' as Lakoff remarks (1971b). And it is precisely these 'extralinguistic fac- tors' (often called 'presuppositions') which open the door to apparently ungrammatical behavior on the part of the language users.
Another matter is, of course, what is and what is not 'grammatical.' A favorite party game among linguists is to discuss whether or not a particular expression is 'correct.' Such discussions invariably end with one or more of the participants invoking the authority invested in themselves as native speakers of some dialect of English (or whatever), in which precisely such and such a construction is 'gram- matical' or 'ungrammatical,' whicheverthe case might be. Robin Lakoff comments on this curious phenom- enon as follows:
So one linguist's intuitive judgment was equal to another's, and there was no way to discriminate. 'That's not in my dialect,' you could say to a colleague, but that didn't obligate him to change his mind. Hence Ross's version of the Linguist's National Anthem: 'Oh, see if you can say
(1989:60)
Levinson, in his discussion of the elementary prag- matic issues, remarks likewise that 'it is often in fact possible to imagine contexts in which alleged ano- malies were after all quite usable—the reader can try...'(1983:7).
1.5 Why Pragmatics?
It is a historical fact that, since the early 1970s or so, a great and growing interest in pragmatics and pragmatic problems has been witnessed worldwide. There have been four international conferences (Via- reggio 1985, Antwerp 1987, Barcelona 1990, Kobe 1993); an International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) has been in existence since 1985; the inter- national Journal of Pragmatics has increased its yearly volume from the original 400 published pages to 1,200 in 1993, and its frequency from 4 quarterly to 12 monthly issues; and many other (official and unofficial) publications have appeared (some of which have survived, some not). Add to this an unestablished number of working papers, theses, dissertations, etc., on pragmatic topics, and the picture is complete. Prag- matics has come into its own, and it is here to stay.
However, in order to establish where this interest comes from, how it can be justified, and what it means, it certainly will not do just to register the fact that 'pragmatic' has come to be a fully accepted term in linguistic circles (compared to earlier usage; see above); the query must go deeper.
Levinson (1983:35f.) notes several 'convergent reasons' for this phenomenon. First of all, there are the historical reasons (mentioned in Sect. 1.3): the dissatisfaction with Chomsky's aseptic model of a grammar. But along with (and perhaps above) this, there are other, internal-linguistic reasons, such as the many unexplained (and indeed unexplainable) phenomena having to do with the existence of lan- guage in the real world, a world of real users.
This 'world of users' has come to play the same role in pragmatics as the concept of 'context' has done in more traditional linguistics (even though it was per- haps seldom recognized as such), viz., that of an exis- tential condition. That is, the world of users is, for pragmatics, the very condition of its existence.
As for traditional linguistics itself, the role of the context as explanatory device has been made explicit (one might say 'contextualized') by pragmatics as a user context, a context in which the users are the paramount features of interest, inasmuch as they are the primi motores of the entire linguistic operation, both in its theoretical (grammar-oriented) and its practical (usage-bound) aspects.
If this world of users and usage is confronted with the world of rules, so characteristic of traditional linguistics, it is impossible not to marvel at the gap between the two, as well as at the bizarre fact that the practitioners of traditional linguistics seemingly did not care too much about this situation. This holds both for the purely syntactic rules (see the case of who versus which, discussed in Section 1.4) and for phenomena of a more content-oriented nature: sem- antic rules, as discussed in connection with so-called 'presuppositions,' 'speech acts,' and other phenomena too numerous to discuss here.
Perhaps one of the most effective incitements for the development of pragmatics has been the growing irritation, felt especially by many of the younger, 'non- aligned' linguistic practitioners, with the lack of inter- est among established linguists for what really goes on in language, for what people actually 'do with words,' to borrow from the title of one of the classic works in the speech act tradition, John L. Austin's How To Do Things with Words (1962). The title of Austin's book contains an implicit question, the answer to which is not, of course, that people should form correct sentences or compose logical utterances, but that they communicate with each other (and them- selves) by means of language.
Such an attitude is rather far apart from what one famous representative of the linguistic profession once permitted himself to state in public, viz., that he was
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