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

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intersubjective context; it gets its special role by being intentionally added to informa· tion that is naturally available. Thus, understanding the role ofcontextual information in relation to communication is only possible if there is a clear distinction between communicators and other parts of the environment.

More generally, an emphasis on 1he interconnectedness of interaction and infor· mation in communication is necessary, not in order to downplay information (con· textually available or coded), but to be precise about its status. \J\lhen information and communication are pitted against each other, what is involved is generally a conflict of interest between 'contemt' and 'social interaction cf. the faultline between saying and doing. It is more profitable, however, to see both content and interaction as inte· grated aspects of a communicative relationship. Communication. as discussed, arises as a property of communities, and the status of the informative content of messages will reflect the status of the relevant information in the life of the cornmunity (cf. also Sinha l 988}. If information is emphasi1.ed at the expense of interaction, the risk is that it will create a picture of communication in which the business of life is construed as information·processing.

s.The study of langua,ge as communication

The study of language has been traditionall)r understood as either a philosophical or a linguistic domain. and hence focused on interest in 'knowledge• or 'structure• rather than on communication. \Nben philosophical interest in language began to home in on communicative interaction as the locus of meaning. from the different perspec­ tives of Wittgenstein ( 1953) and Austin ( 1962), this changed the approach to tradi­ tional philosophical issues, but it did not really bring 'live' communication into the focus of philosophical investigation naturally enough, since it is not the obvious province ofphilosophers to undertake empirical investigation of interactive patterns. The notions of'speeciJ ad and 'latJgrwge game' were important in throwing new light on the philosophical core domains of knowledge and understanding. but could not be fleshed out into a full description of language as communication in purely philo· sophical terms.

For analogous reasons modern linguistics, when it took up the issue ofcommuni· cative action a decade or two after philosophy did, could not provide a natural home for the study of communication. Perhaps paradoxicallr. linguistics confronted the issue of communication to some extent as a result of the generative revolution. The emphasis in earlygenerative grammar on setting up underlying structures to separate granunatic.al from ungrammatical sentences more or Jess unwittingly brought into focus all the other reasons why linguistic utterances could be deviant.

Earlier grammatical traditions had had closer relations with social perspec tives. European. Saussurean linguistics saw linguistics as part of a wider discipline

Commuf)lcation ,,

of semiology, dealing with social processes oftransmission and reception ofsigns, and generally took texts rather than sentences as its object of description. Both European and American structuralism also had anthropological as well as linguistic dimensions; in 1964 Hymes could publish Ltmguage ;, culture at d society, bringing the anthropological and the linguistic perspectives together as a forum for 'the eth­ nography ofcommunication: investigating patterns oflanguage use in a culture.

The radical Chomskyan separation between language and communication made theconfrontation necessary in awaythat ithad notbeen before. Attemptstoassert the communicative perspective in the context ofa d)rnamic generative linguistics tended to be seen as, and also to some extent see themselves as. belonging in the periphery ofa domain whose core was constituted b)' language structure. Hymes' advocacy of the notion ofcommunicative competence (1 972) presented it as something superim­ posed upon the Chomskyan notion ofcompetence, not as an alternativeor acritique. Sinclair & Coulthards (1975) analysis ofclassroom interaction could be understood to some extent as a form oflinguistics dealing with larger, interactive structures that could be added on top of the sentence structures that constituted the province of grammar. However, attempts to expand linguistics to accommodate communica· tion met with two opposite but related problems: on the one hand, grammar got over-extended, and on the other, linguistic structures were too narrow to capture communicative phenomena adequately.

Over the past generation there has been a movement towards a revised pic· ture, in which the study of communicative interaction is the overall frame, within which the stud)' oflinguistic elements isone approach among several. Implicit in this approach are reservations about systems and structures that are not observable from this point ofview. Of the various sources of inspiration in the study of language as communication, the most central in terms of the actual practice of analysing com­ munication is probably the one known as 'conversatiot1 mwlysis: which grew out of the etlmometlrodolog>l school ofsmall-group sociology.

The small-group sociological perspective can be seen as a counterposition not only to structural linguistics,but alsototraditional macro-sociological perspectives where explanation is sought in mechanisms that operate in social wholes, looking for, e.g., causes of suicide (to take Ourkheim's classic example) in aggregate factors invisible to the individual. In contrastto thisperspective,ethnomethodologyconcentratesonshow­ inghov1the fabric ofsoc1allife is continuallycreated and re created by people entering intoeverydayinteraction (cf. Garfinkel 1 972). Sinceeverydaylinguisticinteraction isthe phenomenon in which this process is most visible. investigation ofthe dynamics ofthis form ofinteraction is a logical development. The anatorny ofeveryday conversation is analysed in tennsofconcepts like tmn·taking, adjacencypairs, preference organization, etc., and brought out through a rigorous procedure for describing talk as embedded in itsactual interactivecontext including otherforms ofcommunicative behavioursuch as gaze,gesture, paralanguage, etc. (cf. Sacks. Scheglotf& Jefferson 1974).

Communication 13

Tile peculiarity that Bateson pinpoints can be understood as indicative ofa problem in the 'meta' analysis ofsuch signals. Put briefly. the signals in questioncanalsobe analysed as types ofaction; they contextualize the message simply by virtue of the fact that they constitute the context for it (cf. Bateson above, listing 'the context' as a way of provid­ ing 'labels' for messages). Instead of being 'type two' phenomena, they can therefore be understood as 'type zero' in Bateson's framework If. for instance, you 'bristle' at a remark, this is not a highly abstract metalinguistic signal ofhow you classify the previ­ ous speech act - it is a wa}'ofreacting to 1he previous speech act. If> additionally, it is a way of communicating your reaction, it is a form of'displa)l, cf. above.

Rather than being simply wrong, however, the 'meta' analysis is one half of the issue: sometime, clarifications of what is being done take the form of signals that are indeed about utterances ('this is an order!'). The interface problem between sayi11gn11d doing is revealed in the fact that verbal categorizations may have the same role in man· aging interaction as nonverbal acts, in which case they are equivalent from the 'doing' perspective, while remaining distinct from the 'saying' perspective.

This can be brought to bear on the analysis ofmiscommunication, as in Gumperz (1992). For instance. difficulties in intercultural understanding (cf al.o the separate section on intercultural communication) may be due to trouble on both levels. The most basic problem is then the mismatch in terms ofcontext rather than language: the interlocutors do not situate theiractions in relation to thesame presupposed discourse world, including what counts as situational 'shared knowledge: But as they struggle along, this basic difficulty is compounded by the way they go wrongabout the linguis· tically expressed 'colftextunlizatiott cues' that are designed to put the communication on the right track. (On top of this, ofcourse, there may be purely linguistic difficulties.. i.e., problems in de· or encoding the linguistic expressions themselves).

Thus. in addition to the duality betw·een 'saying' mtd 'doing', another duality emerges: the one that involves the role of interpretations that are part of the pre­ defined context vis a-vis interpretations that are part of the interactive process itself. 1l1e development that started 1A'ith the ethnomethodologists has focused on the second type of phenomenon. In revolting against a descriptive strategy focused on frozen structures (whether linguislic or social), the pioneers of communication analysis have rightly stressed the role ofcommunicators in actively constructing the world of discourse as they go along (rather than p ivelr perpetuating social con· ventions and transmitting pre-coded meanings). In doing so, they have brought out a wealth offacts about the dynamics of communicationt showing tile extent to which different parameters are negotiable in the course ofcommunicative interaction. This is true even of the code itself. as evinced by the phenomenon of 'accommodation: cf. Giles ( 1 973), Giles & Coupland ( 1991 ); in the course of linguistic interaction, communicators adjust the way they speak to the other person in ways that contra· diet predictions based on the integrity of a language system as well as rnacro-social parameters of linguistic variation. But the first type of phenomenon, the role of

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pre·defined interpretations, has not been struck off the agenda by the success achieved in focusing on the second.

6.Communication and background

In returning to the role of things that are determined in advance of an actual communicative exchange, a natural point of departure is to a.sk about the potential dangers of a too exclusive focus on what the participants can construct on their own in the course of interaction. In a review of Cook-Gumperz, William A. Corsaro & Jiirgen Streeck ( 1 986}, the author points to a risk in their approach of a totally 'voluntaristic-individualistic' interpretation, according to which the subjects are essen· tially free to make ofa communicative encounter whatever they like (Nercissians 1989).

To U\e extent we approach that extreme. we lose sight again of dle dynamic inter· play bet\.\'een context and communication that \\"as put on the agenda when interactive pnrole wasbrought tobear on the timeless categories ofltmgue> logic and social structure.

The study oflanguage as communication has rightlyoutgrown its earlier position at the periphery of a presupposed 'core' of institutionalized, frozen structures; but a rounded perspective of communicative activity requires an awareness also of the relationship between empirical analysis of online activity and the Wa}' communication si framed by factors that remain in the invisible position ofimplicit and presupposed 'background:

At least two different type,o; of phenomena need to be mentioned. The first type is the actual force ofsocial determination, viewed not as a questionable dogma ofscien tific description but as a face about social life. The way in whktil historical and supra· individual forces shape the way we act and speak has been emphasized among others by exponents ofwhat has been called the antihumanist trend in French thought, most influentially perhaps Bourdieu and Foucault. Bourdieu central concept of ltabitus profiles the process oftransmission whereby collective cultural practices are inscribed in tJ\e embodied practice of members of the culture. without any active, conscious reinterpretation on the part of the individual.

To recognize the existence ofsuch a process does not require acceptance ofdeter minism on the overall level; the point is that the intentional actions of the individual unfold against a non- intentional background that may recede in places but can never be removed (Searle sees his own concept of'Background' as covering the same ground as habitus, cf. Searle 1995: 132). Bourdieu's theory is centrally based on non-verbal, material practices, such as those involved in traditional farmir11g (cf Bourdieu 1972}• but it is a point of his analysis that verbal practices. also U\ose of intellectuals, differ less than intellectualc; would like to think fron1 the practice ofKabylian agriculture. cf

prototype of a conscious, verbally explicit domain. What counto; as knowledge in a

given cultural situation depends on implicit processes of boundary-marking. high­ lightingand prohibition that exercise an essential influence on the processes of under­ standing which take place in that culture (cf., e.g., Foucault 1966: 171 ). To say. in a •humanist' vein. that we can counteract those processes of determination, is not to say that we can understand communication uniformly as a process of creative online (re)construction of everything that matters in the actual context. Therefore, precisely if you are trying to understand the processes of active construction, you need to see them as a figure profiled against a backgroundwhich you also need to understand.

The second phenomenon that may serve as a corrective to too exclusive focusing on online activity is the role offorms ofsystematicity that are 'activel)f' presupposed in communicative activity, functioning as resources that can be drawn upon. It is a design feature of human language that it depends more than other kno\o\'ll forms ofcommu· nication on decomextualiz.ed forms of knowledge and skill. The description of actual communicative events in real time cannot be understood without understanding the presupposed properties ofboth the code that is used and ofthe interactive pattern that the code is used to bring into play.

Beginning with the code. one major set of presuppositions involves •categories: conceptual as well as phonological. Perception and understanding of human language must operate with a pre-defined generic order imposed on the universe in which human communication operates, in order for linguistic communication to be possible.

Tile shared generic order is modified as we go along; what is presupposed is a starting point but from the point ofview of any individual interactive encounter, there are certain limits to how much the categories can be redefined. Conversely. the full store of generic categories would not in tum be conceivable without a communicative practice to sustain it: the relationship goes both ways.

The pre.supposed patterns ofsocial interaction, from soccer football to parliamentary elections, are analogous to those of the code in constituting resources that increase the action potential of the human subjects that master them. They also increase the •identity potential' ofmembers ofsocial groups. Shared social processesassign cultural values to activitie.s and roles; and although thesevalues are not automatically the prop­ erty of the actual people who perform them, the actual people 'inherit' the values to some extent. Much of the significance ofwhat is said in a given cultural context, there­ fore, is defined by the values associated with the practices within which utterances are embedded. Although the participants can renegotiate some of that significance and Habermas (cf. Habennas 1971) has even argued that it is the special privilege of communication to create scope for challenging all pre-defined assumptions the relationship between communicating individuals and pre-existing srstems cannot be fully understood from the point ofview of an individual encounter alone.

Accumulated, institutionalized practices, including language as well as patterns of collective culture, thus sen•e an enablingas well as a constrainingfunction. Specifically with respect to language) the mutually bootstrapping relationship between language and

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cognition means that human language gets a considerable increase in communicative power because it can access a cognitive universe that is not limited to the immediate context. This in turn meaJlS that the concept of what constitutes 'the situation' is in itself made much more complex: although communication remains constituted by events that happen in a local situation, at a concrete time and place, the decontextual· izedresources that are associated with human language and institutionalized practice generall}r mean that the situation ofthe participants include.s a vastly greater world of context-transcending constructs and relationships.

Apart from theirroleas background,historicallyaccumulated institutionalized pat· terns havealsocreated new forms ofcommunication. Although it is rightly maintained thatface· to·face interactiott remains the primary and foundational use oflanguage, this form ofcommunication has been supplernented with a growing number of 'lalfguage games' that are increasingly remote from the archetypal'groomit g' scene.

The invention ofwriting and the technology that supports the exchange and pro· liferation ofwritten messages created a radical change in the nature oflinguistic com­ munication. One ofthe effects ofthis invention is that utterances may persist beyond the primary context ofuse, thus becoming 'reified' to an extent that is impossible with primary oral communication. The notion of 'text' presupposes the possibility ofdis· entangling the linguistic material from the situation-of-use, so that 'the same, text can be looked at by different people and in different contexts. In a community that uses writing, not onJy langue. but also parole can be detached from on-line events. Tracing discussion of the problem back to Malinowski (1935). Haberland ( 1999) shows how this process of reification creates problems for the basic vocabulary of pragmaticsi because pragmatic terms such as text and discourseare often understood negatively in relation to the narrowstructural universe ofthe sentence, thecomplexitiesthataredue to larger social processes ofabstraction and decontextualization are at risk of being overlooked. The perceived detachability of'witat is said' from 'wltat is done' increases radically as a result ofthese processes.

Among the cultural consequences of this change, a major one front the point of view ofcommunication is the reijicatio11 ofa body of written material that comes to be seen as the shared property of members ofa culture. The distinction between his· tory and pre-history reflects the monumental nature ofthis change in the way human communities understand themselve.s before and after this change. The element of permanence and impersonality is an important part of the reversal of priorities that accorded the norms and practices of written language higher prestige than those of spoken interaction, and which saw actual communication as secondary and interior to the impersonal information content oftexts.

However, the realization ofthe ultimately pragmatic nature ofall human knowl· edge has reversed priorities again. Scientific and philosophical writings. once aloof from the welter of human interaction, can now be seen as forms ofcommunication in

Communication n

which the maintenance of a supra-individual collective knowledKe community takes precedence over the link to contextual relevance in the here·and-now. Vve can profit from both Foucault and couverSfltion a1talysis in understanding the pragmatic nature of this process and also by evolutionary biology: the gradual development of scien­ tific conceptualization, as described by Hull (1988}, operates according to mechanisms of selection known front the history ofevolution, and actual scientific 'utterances' are the communicative events that support this evolutionary process. Science, too, is a form ofcommunicative interaction.

7.Intercultural communication

'Ilte notion of background is also central in relation to intercultural communication, an area which has been rapidly expanding in volume and importance during the past decades. The standard assumption of 'mutually shared knowledge and expectations' (a variety of which is presupposed in any 'co-operative prittcipte: cf. Grice 1975) may be regarded as a useful idealization in the case of in-group communication. However) it would be an insufficient foundation for a theot"}r ofcommunication between people from different cultural backgrounds, where there is a predictable clash in what partici· pants take for granted (cf. also the discussion above of·contextualization cues').

Much of the discussion of intercultural communication belongs in the comext of a political climate defined by the dismantling ofempire and ofassumptions ofcultural and racial superiority. with a background in the Second ·world \Var and the UN charter. In order to perform the necessat"}' debunking of the idea of 'primitive' languages and cultures, an obvious avenue was to stress the importance of unilterSflls: other cultures do something similar with words they just do it differently. A salient example was the uncovering of cross linguistically recurrent elements in the area of politeness, cf. Brown and Levinson ( 1978, 1987).

From that point ofview, the problem ofintercultural communication was due to insufficient knowledge of'how to say it: possibly compounded by ethnocentrism and prejudice the classical remedy being enliglltcument in the 18th-century tradition, with an admixture of postmodern deconstmction of sociaJl)r constructed ideologies masquerading as facts. The persistence of more covert forms of prejudice and dis· crimination has been investigated m pragmatics (cf., e.g., Blommaert & Verschueren 199g) and various forms of discourse analysis, (cf.• e.g., Riggins 1 997). Especiallr in the context of immigrants and minorities in western societies, a considerable amount of research has been devoted to pointing out how power mechanisms in the communication process systematically favour members of the privileged culture to the detriment of less prestigious groups, also when no overt, or overtly illegal discrimination takes place (as in 'gatekeeping encounters', cf. Erickson 1975).