прагматика и медиа дискурс / 语用学关键概念 Key Notions for Pragmatics (2009)

Acknowledgements

A project of the HoP type cannot be successfully started,let alone completed> without the help of dozens. even hundreds ofscholars. First of all. there are the authors themselves, who sometimes had to work under extreme conditions of time pressure. Further, most members ofthe IPrA Consultation Board have occasionally, and some repeatedly, been called upon to review contributions. Innumerable additional scholars were thanked in the initial versions of handbook entries. All this makes the Handbook of Pragmatics a truly joint endeavor by the pragmatics community world-wide. vVe are greatly indebted to you all.

V e do want to specifically mention the important contributions over the years of three scholars: the co-editors of the Manual and the first eight annual installments, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen were central to the realization of U\e project, and so was our editorial collaborator over the last four years, Eline Versluys. Our sincerest thanks to all of them.

The Handbook ofPragmatics project is being carried out in the framework of the research program of the IPrA Research Center I Antwerp Center for Pragmatics at the University of Antwerp. vVe are indebted to the university for providing an etwironment that facilitates and nurtures our work.

Jan-Ola 6stman (University of Helsinki) &

JefVerschueren (University of Antwerp)

Introduction

The pragmatic perspective

JefVerschueren

University of Antwerp

Tile view behind thts series defines pragmatic-S briefly as tl1e cognitive. social, and wltural scie1tce of language and commrmication. 1l1is first volume introducessome of the mostsalient notions that are commonly encountered in the pragmatic literature, such as deixis, implicitness, speech acts, context, and the like. It situates the field of pragmatics in relation to a general concept of communication and the discipline of semiotics. It also touches upon the non-verbal aspects of language use and even ventures a cornparison ·with non-human forms of communication. This introductory chapter is intended to explain why a highly diversified field of scholarship such as pragmatics can be regarded as a potentially coherent enterprise.

This chapter presents some historical notes about pragmatics as a wide and highly interdisciplinary field of inquiry; a discussion of problems related to the delimitation of this field as well as to methodology and the status of evidence in pragmatics; a full explanation of the notion of 'pragmatics' underlying the Hand­ book of Pragmatics. i.e., one that defines pragmatics as a perspective on language rather than as a component of a linguistic theory; and a sketch of a proposal as to how such a perspective could lead to :a general frame of reference within which a diversity of research results can be fruitfully compared and which may itself lead to the formulation of useful research strategies.

Before attempting an historical sketch of the scientific heritage of pragmatics, we mustfirstspecifyinthesimplestpossible terms what its basictaskanditsgeneraldomain of inquiryare.Pragmaticsdoe.snotdeal with languageassuch butwith language useand the relationships between language form and language use. Obviously) using language involves cog titive processes, taking plac.e in a social world with avariety of cultural con straints. This observation is the basis for the multidisciplinary formulation of the brief definition of pragmatics provided above.

\.Yithin the confines of this general field of inquiry, the basic task of pragmatics is to provide an answer to a question of the following kind: \1\f/tar is it to use language? Th understand what is involved in answering that question, and hence what kinds of scientific endeavors feed into the enterprise of trying to answer it, we tnay take as our starting point a somewhat trivial general observation that will later in this text lead to some basic building blocks for theory formation in pragmatics.

6J fVerschueren

tradition, \IVinch {19Sg), whose basic claim was that human behavior cannot be understood without acce.ss to the concepts in terms of which those engaged in the behavior interpret it themselves) and that language provides the necessary clues to those concepts.Giventhe similarity of thefoundations) itisnotsurprisingthatthe two traditions have significantly converged. vVhat they have produced, in conjunction, is for instance a highly dynamic notion of co1ttext which is destined to become a l'najor building block for theory formation in pragmatics in the years ahead (see Auer & diLuzio Eds. 1992, Duranti & Good'A'in Eds. 1992, as well as Peter Auer's contribution to this volume).

Psychology and cognitive science had been involved all along. Buhler's (1934) theory of the psychology oflanguage.especiallybymeans of the distinctionsit makes between various functions of language, has been directly or indirectly present in most pragmatic thinking. Suffice it to enumerate a few random observations on later developments. Winch's (1958) book on 'theidea of a social science' was published in a series called 'Studiesin philosophical psychology',and indeed it had as much to say about the mind as about society. One of the classical collections of articles pertinent to pragmaticseven though its title was Semtmtics- was published by a psycholo­ gist and a linguist and was labeled 'An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, lin· guistics and pS)•chology' (Steinberg & Jakobovits Eds. 1971). Clark & Clark's (1977) textbook introduction to psyciJolit guistics had already fully incorporated whatever knowledge about language use) comprehension, production, and acquisition had been provided by pragmatics by that time, and it has had a thorough influence on much later work. Meanwhile. a clearlycognitive traditiolf was developing in endeav· ors as diverse as the study of patterns of metaphorization (Lakoff& Johnson 1980), inquiries intoaspects of meaning construction at the sentence level and in discourse (Fauconnier 1985; Givon 1989;Talmy 1978), and the writing of cognitive grammars (Langacker 1987). Recently we were reminded that the real airn of cognitive science was ''to prompt psychology tojoin forces withits sister interpretive disciplinesin the humanities and in the social sciences" to study 'acts of meaning' (Bruner 1990: 2), a quintessentially pragmatic concept. At various points in the process, the much older ideas formulated by Vygotsky (see 1986) on the relationships between indi vidual cognition and society were revitalized, with or without reference to language acquisition. Developmentfll psyclrolinguistics has been using and contributing to the growth of pragrnatics for decades (see Bates 1976 & Ervin·Tnpp 1973). and it is in Ochs' (1988) study of language acquisition in a Samoan village that we find one of the fullest examples of how the cognitive, the social, and the cultural combine in matters of language and language use. a matter already dealt with a century earlier in von Humboldt's work, and closely related to the concerns of linguists and anthro· pologists such as \A/horf, K1·oeber. Haas, and Emeneau. A psychological orientation, finally, also providesmeetingpointsbetweendevelopmental and pathological concerns

(as in Bernicot et al. Eds. 2002, or Salazar Orvig 1999), leading back, as it were, to Bateson and \Vatzlawick.

So far we have not mentioned any formative traditions which have their roots in linguistics as such. There are at least three that cannot be ignored, though also those will be shown to have connections beyond the 'purel>•' linguistic study of language. First, there is a distinctly Frenclt school of pragmatics (closely related to the Geneva school already referred to). with roots in the work of Benveniste (1966} and with Ducrot (1972. 1973, 1980) and laterMoeschler (1996} andReboul& Moeschler(2005) as outspoken proponents. Benveniste'swork wasdearly influenced by Britishanalytical philosophy, as is Ducror's by the later developments of speech act theory. Influence in the other direction has been unjustifiabl)• scarce, since numerous original contri· butions have been made: Benveniste's concept of 'delocutivity: further developed by Anscombre (1979) as a tool to explain the self-referentiality of explicit performatives, Ducr·or's notion of tJte 'polyphonous' nature of utterance meaning. resulting fron1 an illuminating distinction between producer, locutor, and enunciator as distinct aspects of the speaker (wiili remarkable parallels to Bakhtin's 'voices'); Ducrots recasting of speech act tJ1eory into the mould of a general theory of argumentation, in the context of which dose attention is paid to the detailed study of the 'small words' which serve as argumentative structuring devices (an endeavor which the French and the Geneva schools have in common). Moreover, some ofilie traditional topics of linguistic prag­ matics, such as presupposition. have been subject to highly insightful analyses in the context ofthis tradition (e.g., Duerot 1972).

Second,Prague scl1oollinguistics (e.g.• Mathesius 1928;Danes Ed. 1974; Firbas 1983; Sgall &Hajicovci 1977)provided some key notions related to information structuringand perspectivization, whichhaveacquiredan established placein the pragmatic study oflan­ guage, such as 'theme-rheme 'topic-conunent and 'focuS: not to mention the contribu­ tions it made to the study ofintonation. The tradition was functionalist in the sense that language wasviewed from the perspective of thegoalsitservesin humanactivit)•.Though much of the work wasdevoted to linguisticdetails, its foundationswerelinked to cyber­ netics v.ith its notion of the goal-directedne.ss ofd)'namic systems. Moreover. there was astylistic component (e.g., Jakobson 1960) which brought the Prague school close to the concems of semioticsin general. And therelationshipwith other discipline. wasregarded as a highl)' relevant issue (as reflected, for instance.in Jakobsen's 1970 account).

Last but not least, we should notforget the tradition of FirtiJian lingwstics, hinging on a ''view ofspeech as a social instrument both for 'sense' and 'nonsense: work and play -practical, productive, creative' (Firth 1964: 15) and, following in Malinowski's footsteps) refusing to look at language outside of a 'context of situation'. Toda)) rnost fwutiorwl approaches ilf linguistics have direcl or indirect historical roots in Firthian linguistics or the Prague school or both (e.g.• Halliday 1973 & Dik 1978; for an over· view, see Dit·ven & Fried Eds. 1987).