The scope of pragmatics

Views about what the field of pragmatics encompasses and what its main thrust should be are controversial. Two principal camps can be identified, one involving a relatively narrow view and the other a relatively broad view.

The narrow view: syntax, semantics and pragmatics

Many notions in pragmatics can be seen in the work of early writers like Plato and Kant, but especially in that on pragmatism by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). However, it was another American philosopher, Charles Morris (1901–1979), drawing on Peirce’s work along with that of Rudolph Carnap, who provided a point of departure for the field of pragmatics. In his Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938: 6–7), he argues for the following three-way distinction:

• Syntax (or syntactics) = mono relationship (relationships between linguistic signs)

• Semantics = dyadic relationship (relationships between linguistic signs and the things in the world that they designate)

• Pragmatics = triadic relationship (relationships between linguistic signs, things they designate, and their users/interpreters)

This has provided linguists with a way of understanding how pragmatics relates to other key areas of linguistics.1 Specifically, it distinguishes pragmatics as the area that deals with context, but also makes clear that it has some aspects in common with syntax and semantics. Morris seems to take a “micro” view of context, mentioning just users and interpreters, and not, for example, social relations or situations. Indeed, this kind of micro context has characterized foundational works in pragmatics such as Grice’s (1975) Conversational Implicature or Sperber and Wilson’s ([1986]1995) relevance theory, with their focus on users’ intentions and interpreters’ inferences.

Pragmatics in this view is often seen as another component in a theory of language, adding to the usual phonetics, phonology, morphology, grammar/ syntax and semantics. Sometimes the objective is to get pragmatics to “rescue” other more formal areas of linguistic theory. This is especially true of scholars whose main interest is not pragmatics: they can dispose of problematic areas into the “pragmatics dustbin”, leaving their theories unsullied by contextual ambiguities, indeterminacies and the like. Scholars whose main interest is pragmatics are often set on bringing formal order to these contextual meanings, a case in point being Searle’s work on speech act theory (e.g. 1969). Although such efforts encounter many problems, as we shall see in the case of speech act theory, for example, many insights can be gained from their attempted solution.

This view of pragmatics is usually identified as the Anglo-American view. The topics typically discussed within it include reference, deixis, presupposition, speech acts, implicature and inferencing – all of which will be extensively treated soon.

The broad view: pragmatic functions

What is often identified as the Continental European view of pragmatics does not exclude the kind of topic areas discussed in the Anglo-American view, but

it encompasses much beyond them and has a rather different perspective – in fact, it might be considered in terms of a particular perspective on language. In this view pragmatics is the superordinate fi eld, with disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and psychology as sub-fields. Thus, the range of topic areas is potentially huge. Moreover, pragmatics is not simply about adding a contextual dimension to a theory of language, but a “general cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on linguistic phenomena in relation to their usage in forms of behavior” (Verschueren 1999: 7). The first part of this quotation indicates that pragmatics is not simply sited within linguistics, but could equally be within cognitive, social or cultural fields of study. The final part of this quotation indicates that pragmatics does not look at linguistic phenomena per se, but only at linguistic phenomena in actual usage (the abstract patterns that characterize many areas of linguistic theory are not to be found here). And finally, note that the last word of the quotation broadens the object of analysis to behavior, which is to say, what people do, whether with language or something else (e.g. a gesture), in social contexts. In practice, this view of pragmatics emphasizes a socio-cultural perspective on the functioning of language. Superficially, the narrow and broad views seem to share an interest in cognition, but there is a difference of emphasis. As mentioned above, the cognitive intentions and inferences involved in generating a speaker’s meaning or reconstructing a hearer’s understanding of it characterize the narrow view. The broader view would not eschew these, but would often encompass broader cognitive notions, such as the way knowledge about situations, social institutions, cultures and so on might influence and be influenced by language.

Regarding our examples, this broad pragmatic view would not ignore the indeterminacies noted and how they might be resolved, but considerably more discussion would be devoted to the fact that they involved jokes. How does the joke work? How is it processed in the mind? Why is it being told here? What are its social functions? What influences whether it is successful or not? (The cat drink joke could well be abhorrent to cat lovers!) Note, of course, that a distinguishing feature of this view is that it is relatively “macro” in its approach to context.

It is important, however, that one should not over-emphasize differences between the Anglo-American and the Continental European views. A topic such as politeness, as discussed, has a foothold in both, as it seeks to explain both some aspects of linguistic structure and some aspects of social function and context. Moreover, one could argue that any comprehensive analysis of linguistic data should do both. More micro linguistic issues are informed by dynamic two-way inter-relations with more macro socio-cultural issues; conversely, more macro issues of sociocultural are informed by dynamic two-way inter-relations with more micro linguistic issues. In fact, we would argue for the importance of bridging the micro and macro and not neglecting the middle ground.