Page 444 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
difficult to limit the field in such a way that it can be said where pragmatics stops and the 'beyond' begins (more on this in Sect. 2.4, where a comprehensive definition will be offered. The allusion is to several well-known series of monographs and books pub- lished under the common name of Pragmatics and Beyond by John Benjamins since 1978.)
As outlined in Sect. 1.2, the first, tentative efforts at establishing something like a pragmatic approach date back to the early 1970s. What is being witnessed there is the collapse of earlier theories and hypotheses (in particular, of the 'pan-syntacticism' of the early Chomsky and his followers). Slowly and with inter- mittent success, a new model emerges: pragmatics is in the making, even though initially its practitioners are not even aware of this themselves. Briefly, what is happening is a 'paradigm shift' in the classical sense, as defined by Kuhn (1962).
2.2 Context and User
Levinson has described this process (and, in particu- lar, the growing importance of the 'context') from a moretechnical-linguistic pointofviewasfollows:
as knowledge of the syntax, phonology and semantics of various languages has increased, it has become clear that there are specific phenomena that can only naturally be described by recourse to contextual concepts. On the one hand, various syntactic rules seem to be properly constrained only if one refers to pragmatic conditions; and similarly for matters of stress and intonation. It is possible, in response to these apparent counter-examples to a context-independent notion of linguistic competence, simply to retreat: the rules can be left unconstrained and allowed to generate unacceptable sentences, and a performance theory of pragmatics assigned the job of filtering out the acceptable sentences. Such a move is less than entirely satisfactory because the relationship between the theory of competence and the data on which it is based (ultimately intuitions about acceptability) becomes abstract to a point where counter-examples to the theory may be explained away on an ad hoc basis, unless a systematic pragmatics has already been de- veloped.
(1983:36; emphasis in original)
It should be clear (in accordance with what was said above) that such a development of a 'systematic pragmatics' can of course only be seen as a con- temporary need with the help of hindsight: from the vantagepointof15or20yearslater,itmaybepossible to observe how the old paradigm came under attack, and how the contours of a new one gradually took shape. But at the time when all this happened, all that could be seen was a growing number of unexplained (and, in fact, unexplainable) phenomena, observed first of all on the boundaries of syntax and semantics.
To name a few: there was the emergent interest in the problems of speech acts; the growing awareness of context as a decisive factor (not only in the syntactic domain, where context-free and context-sensitive
rules had been among the staples of mainstream the- ory from the very beginning); and especially, in con- nection with the question of how to define the context, a heightened interest in the issue of what one might broadly call a 'user point of view.'
Here, one encounters notions such as the 'register' (determining whether an utterance is to be considered formal or relaxed, whether or not it connotes social prestige, and so on); the modal aspects of the utterance (having to do with speakers' and hearers' attitudes toward what is said); questions of rhetoric (e.g., 'how to get one's point across'), and similar issues that were almost totally neglected by linguistics (as they had been by mainstream philosophy ever since the demise of the Sophists); and so on.
If one chooses to apply the notion of'shifting para- digm' to the 'pragmatic turn' in linguistics, a number of observations can be brought to the same practical denominator, viz., a shift from the paradigm of theor- etical grammar (in particular, syntax) to that of the language user. As will be seen, the latter is what prag- matics is all about.
2.3 Toward a Definition
2.3.1 The User's Role
A new paradigm of research carries with it, at least implicitly, a new definition of the object of that research. With regard to pragmatics, it is not always easy to see what such a new definition should imply when it comes to establish the boundaries between the 'old' and the 'new' interpretations of the research object. A few of the major questions are: how prag- matics can be defined vis-a-vis syntax and semantics (not to mention phonology); the role of pragmatics in the classical 'hyphenated areas' of research (psycho-, socio-, ethnolinguistics etc.); and newer rep- resentatives such as text linguistics, mathematical and computational linguistics, and the vast field covered by the term 'applied' linguistics.
It seems safe to say that most definitions of prag- matics have been inspired by Charles Morris's famous definition of pragmatics as 'the study of the relation of signs to interpreters' (1938:6), except that in the 1990s, in a less technical, more applied linguistic ter- minology, one would probably use words such as 'message' and 'language user,' rather than 'sign' and 'interpreter.' Pragmatics is the science of linguistics inasmuch as that science focuses on the language- using human; this distinguishes pragmatics from the classical linguistic disciplines, which first and foremost concentrated on the systematic result of the users' activity: language as system and as structure.
Consequently, one could imagine that the proper domain of pragmatics would be what Chomsky had called performance, that is, the way in which the indi- vidual user went about his or her language in everyday life. Such a practice would be in contrast to the user's abstract competence, understood as his or her knowl-
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