Page 452 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
whether a speech act always, and necessarily, triggers (or is triggered by) a special lexical unit, mostly a verb, in order to be properly performed. The answer to this question seems to be in the negative, as witness the great variety among languages as far as speech act realization (usually in the form of verbs) is concerned.
Other metapragmatic questions concern the way in which pragmatics should be done, and what should properly be included in the field. These questions have barely begun to be raised, and in the early 1990s there no well-established pragmatic methodology (except for, perhaps, a certain consensus about what it should not be, viz., a return to the methods of classical linguis- tics). In any event, the problem is not one of linguistic theorizing alone: in many of the neighboring disci- plines, such as anthropology, literary theory, phil- osophy of language, and so on, questions of the interpenetration of the various domains of human cultural endeavor have been fruitfully discussed.
The concern with the world as the final, and eventu- ally decisive, context of all linguistic activity has given rise to the study of the societal conditions that govern this 'macrocontext.' In this connection, the all- important question is who the proper 'owners' of the language and whether there is such a thing as a right to speak, on analogy with, for instance, the right to vote, or the right to work? In other words, one may ask whether it makes sense to talk about a 'linguistic democracy/ as many have implicitly assumed, or whether human rights include conversation, as the Chilean author Jenaro Prieto once queried (see Ruiz Mayo 1989:1009).
For a number of (especially Marx-inspired) ling- uists, the problem of the societal reasons behind linguistic inequality is one of the most important ones in pragmatics. In fact, it is the problem, according to these researchers (compare, for instance, Mey 1985, Mininni 1990), that metapragmatics should occupy itself with first and foremost; more is said on this in Sect. 4.
4. Societal Pragmatics
4.1 Linguistics and Society
The question of societal pragmatics is intimately con- nected with the relationship between linguistics as a 'pure' science and the practice of linguistics as applied to what people use their language for, to 'what they do with their words.' Traditionally, in linguistics this split reflects itself in the cleavage of the discipline into two major branches that do not seem to speak to each other: theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics.
Traditionally, too, the former kind of linguistics has carried all the prestige of a 'real' (some would say 'hard') science, whereas the latter was considered the soft underbelly of linguistics, prone to all sorts of outside and irrelevant, because 'extralinguistic,' kinds of influences.
It has been one of the hallmarks of pragmatics, ever
since its inception as an independent field of study within linguistics, to want to do away with this split. Pragmatics admonishes the linguistic 'scientists' that they should take the users of language more seriously, as they, after all, provide the bread and butter of linguistic theorizing, and it tells the practical workers in the 'applied' fields of sociolinguistics, such as lan- guage teaching, remedial linguistics, and the like, that they need to integrate their practical endeavors toward a better use of language with a theory of language use. However, despite much goodwill, many efforts, and a generally propitious climate for such endeavors, the 'unification' of linguistics is not something that is eas- ily achieved. Pragmatics will probably, for a long time to come, be considered by many linguists not so much a 'science' in its own right as an aspect (albeit a valu- able one) of, and a complement (albeit a necessary one) to, traditional linguistics.
The user aspect has from the very beginning been the mainstay of pragmatics. Already in the very first mentions of the term (such as by Charles Morris (1938), following earlier work by Charles S. Peirce), the term 'pragmatics' is closely tied to the user of language; pragmatics is thus clearly distinguished from, even opposed to, both syntax and semantics, as isolated disciplines.
The users had not only to be discovered, however; they had to be positioned where they belonged, in their societal context, 'context' to be taken here not only as the developmental basis for their activity as language users, but as the main conditioning factor that made that activity possible. The question of how people acquire their language turned out to be more of a social than a developmental problem that could only be discussed in a strictly psychological environ- ment (as had been hypothesized earlier). A societal window on language acquisition and language use was opened, and pragmaticists soon found themselves
joining hands with sociologists and educationalists who had been working in these areas for many years. The question naturally arises as to what dis- tinguishes pragmatics from those neighboring disci- plines (among which several others could have been mentioned). The answer is that pragmatics focuses on the user and his or her conditions of language use. By this is meant not only that the user is considered as being in the possession of certain language facilities (either innate, as some have postulated, or acquired, or a combination of both) which have to be developed through a process of individual growth and evolution, but, more specifically, that there are certain societal factors that influence the development and use of lan- guage, both in the acquisition stage and in usage itself. Whereas earlier (according to mainstream, especially faculty psychology) the use of speech was said to develop only if it was stimulated during the so- called psychologically 'sensitive' period, it has become somewhat of a pragmatic tenet that such stimulation
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