Pragmatics

This entry takes an interdisciplinary approach to linguistic pragmatics. It discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social, and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture-specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. The entry discusses core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. It takes a transdisciplinary view of the field, showing that linguistic pragmatics has its predecessors in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, and sociology

(Re)visions of the Outre-mer

Cinéma colonial is regarded by certain scholars as a highly conventionalised and commercialised film practice that grants spectators a sense of control over the potentially threatening colonial Other, and Belgian director Jacques Feyder has been subject to particularly harsh criticism in this regard. This article argues that Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934), which depicts a young legionnaire’s relationship with a cabaret singer who bears an uncanny resemblance to a previous lover who jilted him in Paris, challenges dominant tendencies in portrayals of gender and colonialism in French cinema of the 1930s. Drawing on the relationship between Laura Mulvey’s theorisation of the male gaze and E. Ann Kaplan’s understanding of the imperial gaze, this article considers two core aspects of Feyder’s film. First, it illustrates how narrative sequences structured around the male protagonist’s point of view simultaneously grant insight into his vision of women and critically distance the spectator from his manipulative relationship with Irma. Second, it demonstrates that the framing of the protagonist’s gaze is linked with broader questions regarding French white objectification of indigenous Algerian women in a fashion that reflexively exposes the ideological underpinnings of cinéma colonial and French colonial culture of the interwar period more broadly in ways that French cinema of the 1930s largely elided