Page 448 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
wants to do linguistics in one's own, professionally established way; the moment other people start telling one what to do, one's territorial integrity is in danger. So, in order not to rock the boat, most traditionally oriented linguists prefer to assign pragmatics (especially of the more radical variety, as discussed above) to a quiet corner, preferably a little bit outside linguistics 'proper'; here, pragmaticists can do their own thing, in 'complementarity and interrelation' with the rest, but still clearly distinguished from it. In this way, the delimitation problem can be solved in a comp- lementarist fashion.
This latter alternative seems, in the early 1990s, to be the preferred solution to the boundary problem. Levinson, discussing the relationship between sem- antics and pragmatics, remarks:
From what we now know about the nature of meaning, a hybrid or modular account seems inescapable; there remains the hope that with two components, a semantics and a pragmatics working in tandem, each can be built on relatively homogeneous and systematic lines.
(1983:15)
Taking this notion of complementarity as the basic methodological tool, and, under the guidance of what has come to be recognized as the all-important aspect of pragmatics—the user context—the following defi- nition may be formulated.
Pragmatics is the study of language from a user point of view, where the individual components of such a study are joined in a common, societal perspec- tive. The problems of pragmatics are not confined to the semantic, the syntactic, or the phonological fields, exclusively. Pragmatics thus defines a cluster of related problems, rather than a strictly delimited area of research. (For the 'perspective' approach, see Sect. 3.2.)
3. TasksandFunctionsofPragmatics
3.1 Introduction: Theory and Practice
From a theoretical point of view, the tasks and func- tions of pragmatics can be characterized in different ways, depending on one's view of linguistics as such, and of the place of pragmatics in linguistics. Such a (more abstract) characterization will place emphasis on the function of pragmatics within linguistics, either as a 'component' (just as phonology, syntax, and sem- antics are components of the linguistic system), or as a 'perspective.' By this is suggested something which is not an independent agency in its own right but which pervades the other components and gives them a particular, pragmatic 'accent.'
A practical characterization of the tasks and func- tions of pragmatics takes as its point of departure the traditional problems that linguistic research has grappled with over the years, and for whose solution one looks to pragmatics (such as the problems dis- cussed in Sect. 2.3).
Furthermore, pragmatics is often given the task of trying to solve the numerous practical difficulties that are inherent in the exercise of linguistic functions. Many of these problems and problem areas have been opened up to pragmatics by 'outside agents': problems of conversation and turn-control; problems of argu- mentation; problems of language use in educational settings (applied linguistics); problems of interaction between humans and computers; and, in general, all sorts of communicational problems in anthropology, ethnography, psychiatry, and psychology, the 'public' language, both inside and outside the social insti- tutions and the media, educational settings, and so on.
3.2 Component or Perspective
The 'component' view of linguistics, popular ever since Chomsky's early works (1957, 1965) and main- tained faithfully in generative transformational gram- mar despite all its internal differences, is essentially based on a 'modular' conception of the human mind (the different faculties are thought of as independent but cooperating unit, a conception which is also popu- lar among cognitive scientists and computer-oriented psychologists). In contrast, a 'perspective' on a human activity such as the use of language and the system underlying it tries to emphasize certain aspects of that activity. For instance, the pragmatic perspective on phonology will emphasize the social values that are inherent in a certain phonetic system, as compared to other, perhaps theoretically equivalent, but prag- matically radically different systems. As an example, think of the theoretical statements about Black Eng- lish dialects of the 'inner city' being as 'good' as any other dialect of English (Labov 1966), which make little sense from a pragmatic perspective: one simply cannot 'do the same things' with Black as with Stan- dard English in any other surroundings than precisely the inner city.
The Belgian pragmatician Jef Verschueren has expressed this line of thinking in the following words:
[We are dealing with] a radical departure from the estab- lished component view which tries to assign to pragmatics its own set of linguistic features in contradistinction with phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. If prag- maticsdoesnot belongto thecontrast setofthese...com- ponents of the study of language, neither does it belong to the contrast set of...components such as psy- cholinguistics, socio linguistics, etc. (each of which studies processes or phenomena which can be situated at various levels of linguistic structuring... and each of which typi- cally relates such processes or phenomena to a segment of extra-linguistic reality).
(1987:6)
In the component view of linguistics, each 'module' works within a properly delimited domain, with proper, well-defined objects, and with an established method. Thus, phonology busies itself with the speech
426