Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in interpersonal pragmatics?

This paper discusses a particular strand of interpersonal pragmatics that may be known as ‘discursive’ pragmatics and attempts to delineate what is entailed in such an approach. Some scholars may characterise it as placing emphasis on participant evaluations, others may foreground the analysis of contextualised and sequential texts, while still others consider it to include both of these. In general, though, discursive pragmatics often seems to involve a reaction to, and a contrast with, so-called Gricean intention-based approaches. In this paper I argue that, far from discarding the insights of Grice, Austin and others, a discursive approach to interpersonal pragmatics should embrace those aspects of non-discursive pragmatics that provide us with a ‘tool-kit’ and a vocabulary for examining talk-in-interaction. At the same time, I will argue that the shortcomings of the speaker-based, intention- focused pragmatics can be compensated for, not by privileging hearer evaluations of meaning, but by taking an ethnographic and, to some extent, ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of naturally-occurring discourse data. By providing a critique of Locher and Watts’ (2005) paradigmatic example of a discursive approach to politeness and then a sample analysis of interactional data, I demonstrate how a combination of insights from Gricean pragmatics and from ethnomethodology allows the analyst to comment on the construction and negotiation of meaning in discourse, without having recourse to notions of either intention or evaluation

Requests in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and coastal Spanish

Book synopsis: This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The seminal nature of this volume, its empirical orientation and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in pragmatics and sociolinguistics

Action and Ethics. A Historical Perspective on the Late Frankfurt School (Apel, Habermas, Wellmer)

I shall delineate what I see as the strength and relevance of transcendental-pragmatics within the intellectual setting in the post-war period. I shall indicate how the discussions within transcendental-pragmatics have revealed inherent challenges, while at the same time the intellectual and institutional surroundings have changed unfavorably during the last few decades. And I shall briefly indicate how these inherent challenges and new constellations could and should be met, to the effect that transcendental-pragmatics could reveal its philosophical importance and practical relevance under changed conditions; the catchword here is gradual (melioristic) reasoning

The brain is a prediction machine that cares about good and bad - Any implications for neuropragmatics?

Experimental pragmatics asks how people construct contextualized meaning in communication. So what does it mean for this field to add neuroas a prefix to its name? After analyzing the options for any subfield of cognitive science, I argue that neuropragmatics can and occasionally should go beyond the instrumental use of EEG or fMRI and beyond mapping classic theoretical distinctions onto Brodmann areas. In particular, if experimental pragmatics ‘goes neuro’, it should take into account that the brain evolved as a control system that helps its bearer negotiate a highly complex, rapidly changing and often not so friendly environment. In this context, the ability to predict current unknowns, and to rapidly tell good from bad, are essential ingredients of processing. Using insights from non-linguistic areas of cognitive neuroscience as well as from EEG research on utterance comprehension, I argue that for a balanced development of experimental pragmatics, these two characteristics of the brain cannot be ignored

Interlanguage pragmatics and instructional pragmatics: two vibrant and illuminating research fields

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Questions of context in studies of talk and interaction—Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis

The questions dealt with in this special issue of Journal of Pragmatics are doubly vexed. The first matter at issue is that the papers I have solicited take on some aspects of the debate within, and between, ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) – and, by extension, wider approaches to discourse analysis and perhaps even pragmatics as a whole – as to whether and, if so to what extent, contextual particulars are relevant to the analyst’s task in hand; therefore specifying, to some degree, what that task actually is

Dynamic Semantics

This article focuses on foundational issues in dynamic and static semantics, specifically on what is conceptually at stake between the dynamic framework and the truth-conditional framework, and consequently what kinds of evidence support each framework. The article examines two questions. First, it explores the consequences of taking the proposition as central semantic notion as characteristic of static semantics, and argues that this is not as limiting in accounting for discourse dynamics as many think. Specifically, it explores what it means for a static semantics to incorporate the notion of context change potential in a dynamic pragmatics and denies that this conception of static semantics requires that all updates to the context be eliminative and distributive. Second, it argues that the central difference between the two frameworks is whether semantics or pragmatics accounts for dynamics, and explores what this means for the oft-heard claim that dynamic semantics blurs the semantics/pragmatics distinction