Page 450 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
the linguistic and also (and maybe even more impor- tantly) on the hidden levels of societal equality or inequality among people, prejudice and class feeling, education and culture—in short, the whole gamut of societal background information that is necessary to carry on a successful conversation, understood as 'the sustained production of chains of mutually dependent acts, constructed by two or more agents each moni- toring and building on the actions of the other' (Lev- inson!983:44).
The latter approach, needless to say, comes closer to pragmatics as described here (Sect. 2.3 above); in the present context of writing, it is the linguistic dimension of social interaction (see Mey 1985 for an elaboration of this point of view).
3.4 A Division of Pragmatics
In view of the above, the following rough division of the pragmatic field can be offered (it should be emphasized that such a division has more to do with a division of labor than with a strict, conceptual delimitation of fields of research).
3.4.1 Micropragmatics
Micropragmatics is the study of language use in smal- ler contexts. Traditionally, this context is understood as comprising the sentence (and its immediate sur- roundings); thus, the theory of speech acts is essen- tially a study of what people do, or can do, in a limited illocutionary environment. Phenomena such as ref- erence, deixis, anaphora, etc., which by their very nat- ure may point to contexts that are larger than the single utterance, are still seen as 'anchored' in the sentence as the origin of their syntactic and semantic coordinates. Pragmatics is still circumscribed by the conventions of linguistic analysis.
With the discovery of the presupposition not only as a necessary condition for explaining certain linguistic phenomena (see Sect. 2.3.4), but also as the essential link with the larger context of human language use (the 'world'), one begins to see the contours of a larger structure. The users of language are no longer seen as individual agents, demonstrating linguistic behavior mainly for the benefit of the analyst; the question is raised of what these users are trying to do with their words: they are trying to get a point across, just mak- ing conversation, or begging for their lives (with or without success). These viewpoints had already been adumbrated in the study of speech acting under the general heading of 'perlocutionary' effects, but most linguists had been rather reluctant to engage them- selves in what may be termed the field of macro- pragmatics.
3.4.2 Macropragmatics
Here, the emphasis is on what actually goes on in language use; the context of use is not limited in advance, and basically comprises the entire environ-
ment, both linguistic and 'extralinguistic' (to use a term which used to be a highly negative denominator for many linguists). In macropragmatics, the interest is focused on user interaction, in various ways, and in a number of settings. Conversational analysis is one big area of research here, bringing together workers from various 'extralinguistic' fields such as anthro- pology, sociology, and ethnology, as well as from linguistics proper. The various uses of institutional and institutionalized language have also caught the interest of pragmatic workers: one can mention the language use that is found to be typical for the medical environment, educational institutions, the workplace, the marketplace, the rock scene, politics, the media, the computer environment, and so on.
Important thematic areas that are covered in macro- pragmatics are, in general, those that deal with the 'transcendental' conditions for human language use. Thus, the problems of sex-related differences in lan- guageandlanguageusehavebecomeaprominent field of study in the last decades of the twentieth century, as has the general question of the unequal distribution of societal power, in particular as this power relates to national and international politics, or differences due to differences in social privilege.
A special interest of macropragmatics has arisen due to the massive displacement of foreign workers since the Second World War, both in the USA and in Europe, as an auxiliary force in the low-paid indus- trial, agricultural, and service sectors; the need for a language policy in this domain has found expression in worries about the survival and continued dominant position of the mother tongue (compare the 'English as a First Language' movement in the USA), as well as in a concern for the growing numbers of adult speakers of no language at all. These people, having a mother tongue that is in dire need of development and/or repair, since they never received any formal instruction in it, and a second language that is only insufficiently mastered, constitute a prime example of linguistic underprivilege. The same concern for the inequality of linguistic resources, and for the conse- quences of such a state of affairs, has led many prag- maticists to speculate on the question of how language can be used for societal-remedial (so-called 'eman- cipatory'), rather than for repressive, purposes; on 'repressive' versus 'oppressive' use of language, see Sect. 4.2).
As a general cover term, the word 'discourse' (orig- inally introduced in this sense by Michel Foucault; see Foucault 1969: 153-54) is used to indicate the ensemble of the conditions that determine use of lan- guage, yet are invisible to the (linguistically or other- wise) untrained eye. Another, more traditional use of the term 'discourse' is found in the expression 'dis- course analysis,' as used by many to indicate a closer concern for traditional linguistic methods in dealing with everyday language use than is shown, for exam-
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