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Linguistics and pragmatics, 25 years after*
Abstract
A l'occasion du vingt-cinquieme anniversaire du journal, les editeurs du Journal of pragmatics reviennent sur les principaux problemes souleves par la pragmatique et en priorite sur les fondements et le statut meme de cette discipline. Si en 1977, il n'etait pas du tout clair que la pragmatique fut reellement une discipline en tant que telle, les As. tentent de voir ici comment elle s'est penchee sur d'autres questions que la linguistique pour s'ancrer dans la realite sociale. Ils analysent ainsi les tendances et problematiques actuelles depuis les conceptions de Grice, d'Austin et Searle.
... Grice's maxims, which have been applied to the study of attachment, are rooted in the field of linguistics. In linguistics, Grice's maxims have been discussed extensively almost from the beginning (see Haberland & Mey, 2002, for a review). One major question is whether it is necessary to have four maxims. ...
... In the field of linguistics, some researchers only distinguish relevance and quantity, whereas others consider relevance as the uniquely significant maxim. Relevance and quantity have therefore received much attention (see Haberland & Mey, 2002, for a review), which may have led linguists to emphasize quantity and relevance. Attachment experts scored also higher on quality and manner than both groups of non-experts. ...
... Dat gehechtheidsexperts meer waarde hechten aan kwaliteit kan het gevolg zijn van het gewicht dat Main et al. (2003) aan dit criterium geven. In de taalkunde hebben kwantiteit en vooral ook relevantie juist de meeste aandacht gekregen (Haberland & Mey, 2002). Een tweede verklaring voor het verschil tussen gehechtheidsexperts en taalkundigen kan zijn dat coherentie voor gehechtheidsexperts refereert aan een onderliggende psychologische component terwijl dit niet het geval is voor taalkundigen. ...
Coherence is a central construct in attachment interviews. Nevertheless, the concept has never been the main focus of a study in the attachment field. The present study examined whether coherence in attachment interviews is defined differently by experts trained in attachment theory, by linguists, and by non-experts. The 72-item Coherence Q-sort (CQS) was used to determine the profile of a prototypical coherent interview. Results indicated that attachment experts could be reliably distinguished from the (combined) other groups: attachment experts emphasized quality and manner more than all other groups, linguists emphasized quantity and relevance more than attachment experts, and higher educated non-experts valued relevance more than attachment experts. Defining coherence in attachment interviews is thus more than just applying Grice's linguistic maxims; expertise in attachment theory is critical for defining interview coherence. Consequences for the coding of the AAI by non-attachment experts, as well as computer coding (im)possibilities are discussed.
... & Mey, 2002& Mey, , p. 1673) because when people communicate, they try to choose what to say to fit the situation in which they are communicating(Gee, 2001). Hence, pragmatics is concerned with the aims language is used for and how this language can be used appropriately in communicative situations(Hatim & Mason, 1991).Pragmatics is the study of the ways hearers evaluate speakers' utterances and infer their intended meanings from context(Jaszczott, 2002). ...
... The evidence from Polish, where categorizing use of adjectives is marked by merely statistical preference for their postpositional usage in noun phrases, supports my view and undermines Kennedy's ''either, or'' stand. Finally, the proposal presented in this chapter fits Mey's observation concerning the transition in perspective on the concept of class in pragmatic research over the first 25 years of Mey and Haberland (2002) observe that while earlier ''class was essentially thought of as a product of historical developments (which it certainly is, too) the shift of perspective has to do with a more developmental view of class, class as 'work in progress'.'' While encoding reflects the product of historical development, selective mode of language use reflects that 'work in progress' as Mey put it-creating classes ad hoc for a given pragmeme. ...
In this chapter, I search for the mechanism correlating linguistic form with content in order to explain (in the sense of the word ‘explain’ used in empirical, i.e., natural and modern social sciences) how sentence meaning contributes to the utterance meaning. I do that against the background of two currently dominating positions on that issue: minimalism and contextualism. Minimalists regard language as a self-standing abstract system and claim that only weak pragmatic effects are involved in interpreting sentences. Contextualists believe that language can be described adequately only within a theory of language understanding and that strong pragmatic effects are also involved in interpreting sentences. The resultant controversy, presented in Sect. 1, has been pronounced by Michel Seymour the most important one in the 20th century. I begin Sect. 2 with Mario Bunge’s argument that since abstract systems cannot change by themselves and only speakers of language do, an explanatory theory of language (one looking at language from the perspective of empirical (socionatural) sciences) must concern language understanding, i.e., view language as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. However, language understanding needs to be incorporated in the theory of language in a more fundamental way than current contextualist models do. These models assume the existence of language as self-standing, abstract structure with a list of symbol-reference pairings (Such assumption is legitimate as long as one regards such an abstraction as only a methodological device.) and model language understanding disregarding its psycho-social development process. Such assumptions, however, lead to a number of insurmountable problems. I conclude Sect. 2 by arguing that to solve these problems, as well as to be consistent with the evidence attesting to the fact that language self-organizes and self-regulates, (also reviewed in this section,), we need a model of language understanding and production to be coined within a developmental bio-psycho-social perspective. In Sect. 3, I propose a specific model of the form-meaning correlation process, based on a novel mechanism of a linguistic categorization, which is compatible with a bio-psycho-social developmental perspective advocated in Sect. 2. On this view, the utterance meaning is dependent both on the approximate conventional meaning of the construction components conveying it, and on the specific social function of the whole construction (a relevant pragmeme), which identifies feasible situation specific contents. The given construct selects one out of these options. I finish the chapter, Sect. 4, by preliminarily testing the mechanism of the form-content correlation process introduced in Sect. 3 both qualitatively and quantitatively to meet the methodological standards of empirical sciences.
... Together with Austin and Searle's theory of Speech Acts, Grice's (1969) Cooperative Principle has been one of the most influential models within the field of pragmatics. Over the years, Grice's theory has been continuously revisited (Horn, 1984;Levinson, 1984;Sperber and Wilson, 1995), and its influence in contemporary pragmatics is still unquestionable today (Mey, 2002). ...
The development of L2 learners' pragmatic competence plays a key role in the achievement of communicative competence. Thus, we have designed an activity for students of English that aims to explain the generation of humour through language applying Grice's model of conversational implicatures to four stretches of discourse from Friends. The analysis of the sample suggests that (1) the Gricean model is still a powerful tool to explain the generation of humorous situations by means of language, and (2) it is a useful device for second language learners to infer the correct meaning of language in real life situations.
... Contaminated speech situations where communication appears ethical at the surface, but is in reality devious and essentially dysfunctional, felicity conditions being deliberately abused at all levels, highlight why it is important to attempt to understand the intentions that motivate an utterance in the first place. Attempting such understanding through analysis of the logical structure of language is, as Haberland and Mey (2002) pointed out, like looking for traces in a petrified product. Any seemingly simple sequence of apparently straightforward and innocent speech acts may, in fact, reflect a psychologically highly complex situation, the true nature of which often remains unknown to the uninformed outsider listening in. ...
The design of procedures for the responsible and effective management of risks to humans and their environment is an important topic in modern environmental engineering. This calls for ethical ground clauses within a communication contract for the global society. How respecting ethical ground clauses of communication may help avoid that the short-term economic interests of a few are placed before the long-term interests of society as a whole is explained on the basis of examples from disaster case studies. The need for rules which ensure that relevant information is effectively transmitted, received, and taken into account promptly is highlighted. Why successfully implementing such rules involves the individual responsibility of all stakeholders, from witnesses or victims to scientific experts and policy makers, is made clear. The ethical ground clauses of a communication contract for the global society provide universal rules for responsible communication. They are defined in terms of general guidelines for sincere, transparent, prompt, and cooperative information sharing, in particular in risk management. Earlier work has shown that implementing such a model for a communication contract in corporate decision making helps promote stakeholder responsibility awareness, and triggers a learning process for initiating and fostering individual and collective behavior that will ultimately lead to responsible decisions and action. These are the prerequisite for avoiding the disastrous consequences of non-action in response to early warnings. They help prevent that relevant scientific data and/or expert knowledge are dismissed or not adequately taken into account. Finally, a communication contract for the global society makes perfect common sense given the fact that faulty communication processes have repeatedly been identified as the major cause of disasters.
Keywords: Environment – Human – Global Society- Risk - Management - Policy making
... In this connection, the author fails to mention that there has been an extensive discussion of these matters in pragmatic circles, and that an alternative view of pragmatics as a 'perspective' , rather than a 'complement' , has been suggested by several scholars in the field (e.g. Mey 1993Mey , 2001Verschueren 1999; see also the seminal contributions by Haberland & Mey in Journal of Pragmatics 1977, 2002. More recently, Recanati has argued for the adoption of a truth-value oriented pragmatics (2010), where he advocates an integration of formal semantic and pragmatic viewpoints. ...
... Contaminated speech situations where communication appears ethical at the surface, but is in reality devious and essentially dysfunctional, felicity conditions being deliberately abused at all levels, highlight why it is important to attempt to understand the intentions that motivate an utterance in the first place. Attempting such understanding through analysis of the logical structure of language is, as Haberland and Mey (2002) pointed out, like looking for traces in a petrified product. Any seemingly simple sequence of apparently straightforward and innocent speech acts may, in fact, reflect a psychologically highly complex situation, the true nature of which often remains unknown to the uninformed outsider listening in. ...
... It is, therefore, an option for a Pragmatics of Social Transformation, bound to the political dimension of the linguistic use (Why has this utterance been produced? Mey, 2002). On the one hand, it is a matter of valuing the critical approaches in Linguistics; on the other hand, still more importantly, one should comprehend that language is a form of socio-historical cognition, whose eminently interactive character enables one to "assume an strategic position in the context of the circulation and the war of social voices" (FARACO, 2003, p. 83) 2 ...
... The evidence from Polish, where categorizing use of adjectives is marked by merely statistical preference for their postpositional usage in noun phrases, supports my view and undermines Kennedy's ''either, or'' stand. Finally, the proposal presented in this chapter fits Mey's observation concerning the transition in perspective on the concept of class in pragmatic research over the first 25 years of Mey and Haberland (2002) observe that while earlier ''class was essentially thought of as a product of historical developments (which it certainly is, too) the shift of perspective has to do with a more developmental view of class, class as 'work in progress'.'' While encoding reflects the product of historical development, selective mode of language use reflects that 'work in progress' as Mey put it-creating classes ad hoc for a given pragmeme. ...
... Por essa estrada, a nova Pragmática emancipatória passa a instrumentalizar nossa proposta com uma nova configuração aos estudos linguísticos, levando em conta não só nossa responsabilidade como linguistas diante da relevância social de nosso trabalho, como também as relações entre linguagem e sociedade (NOGUEIRA DE ALENCAR, 2010), além de mostrar possibilidades de um estudo científico sobre a lingua(gem) solta das amarras sistêmico-imanentes. O que queremos é reforçar não só a "necessidade urgente de garantir que o trabalho feito em pragmática seja socialmente relevante, dando atenção à necessidade dos estudos da linguagem para a sociedade" (HABERLAND; MEY, 2002MEY, , p.1671, mas também que a prática científica só possa ter o direito de existir a partir de sua intervenção na sociedade (MARTINS FERREIRA, 2008). E, nessa intervenção social, não podemos negar que a prática científica está fincada em uma posição política e vinculada a uma "partilha do sensível", porquanto política não constitui simplesmente a luta pelo poder, mas implica sempre uma certa partilha do sensível, uma redefinição das formas de ver e organizar o real; isto é, começa a pensar a política como instituição de um tempo diferente, que pelo agenciamento do sensível pode dar visibilidade a coisas que não a tinham, e abrir assim um espaço onde a gente considerada apenas boa para trabalhar descobre em si uma potência para falar e atuar conjuntamente (PELLEJERO, 2009, p. 20). 3 ...
This paper proposes a modus operandi for a non-hegemonic Pragmatics in relation to mainstream theories, i.e., internalist theories (self-sufficiency of language as a system) and externalist ones (social aspects as connected to language, but non-constitutive of it). Two lines of argument are proposed to cope with a New Emancipatory Pragmatics: (1) a new Pragmatics which shows the conceptual incompatibility between the Austinian theory and that interpreted by Searle and (2) an emancipatory Pragmatics in search of a creative intellectual emancipation and the distribution of the sensible. From these two perspectives, theoretical arguments are presented within and about the diverse domains of Pragmatics.
... It goes without saying that if modes of presentation reflect the interests of the hearers (as well as of the speakers), then an intersection of the interests of R and R 0 should be taken into account in the choice of mode of presentation (as Sperber, 1996 has it, communication normally slightly transforms the message). As should now be obvious, my methodological approach in this paper is to accept that since users and their language are at the core of all things pragmatic, the world of users is the very condition for doing pragmatics (Mey, 2001:29;Haberland and Mey, 1977;Haberland and Mey, 2002). ...
This paper deals with the social practice of indirect reports and treats them as cases of language games. It proposes a number of principles like the following:Paraphrasis/Form PrincipleThe that-clause embedded in the verb ‘say’ is a paraphrasis of what Y said, and meets the following constraints: should Y hear what X said he (Y) had said, he would not take issue with it, as to content, but would approve of it as a fair paraphrasis of his original utterance. Furthermore, he would not object to vocalizing the assertion made out of the words following the complementizer ‘that’ on account of its form/style.Furthermore, it connects such principles with Relevance Theory considerations.
... However, by reintroducing the human factor, we are able to reposition this weight, away from the theoretical level, where pragmatics is light but unbearable, to the level of practice, where pragmatics translates into the difcult, but necessary task of incorporating the needs of the user into the practical applications of our pragmatic theorizing. (Haberland andMey 2002: 1681) Reintroducing the human factor is indeed the way to go, a way that leads us to indeed explore the practical and ethical implications of our pragmatic theorizing. May we suggest that the unbearable lightness of pragmatics be countered by acknowledging the weight of the many gures that humans keep staging in their discussions? ...
This paper proposes to explore the mechanisms by which speaking, writing and, more generally, interacting pragmatically contribute to the mode of being and acting of social forms, whether these forms be identities, relations or collectives. Such an approach to pragmatics, which we propose to call constitutive, amounts to showing, both theoretically and empirically, that human interactants are not the only ones who should be deemed as “doing things with words” (Austin 1975), but that other
figures
— which can take the form of policies, statuses, tools, groups, collectives, etc. — can also be identified as being
active
in a given situation, especially through the way they are mobilized and staged in interaction. According to this approach, interactions can therefore be considered dislocated loci where specific con-figurations are (re-)produced and embodied. As we will see, such a constitutive view also allows us to deal with issues of power, authority and responsibility, three questions that tend to be relatively marginalized in pragmatic studies, especially when a performative and interactive viewpoint is adopted.
... In fact, Infantidou's appeal to relevance theory recalls Capone's (2001: 15-23) recruitment of Levinson's reductionist Q-, I-, M-Principles. Without entering the debate on the relevance (let alone desirability) of relevance theory, and yet another way of ''redoing Grice'' (Haberland and Mey, 2002: 1674), it seems clear that to account for the epistemic/evidential dimensions of modality, we have to dig deeper for our explanations than those that such pragmatic maxims might provide. In fact, the discussion must and can only take place well beyond a mechanistic view of language and with speakers firmly in view, that is with the ''human condition'' playing a central part in our theorizing (Haberland and Mey, 2002: 1681). ...
This is the second part of a two-part article which critically reviews eight recent works in the field of mood and modality. Part I explored three different theoretical approaches – generative, cognitive–pragmatic, and typological – with the main focus on languages other than English. It also examined an in-depth account of the modal verb system in Danish. In Part II, the emphasis is on (mostly corpus-driven) work in relation to (primarily) English and on non-verbal as well as verbal carriers of modal meanings. Thus, description and analysis move purposefully towards a more comprehensive account of the field, to embrace modal expressions such as modal lexical verbs, modal adverbs, and modal adjectives. The pragmatics of modality; the discursive functions of modal expressions, especially modal adverbs; and the treatment of modality in modern descriptive grammars of English are also covered. The article reflects mounting interest in recent years in modality studies. Whilst broadening the scope of modality studies to include treatment of non-verbal modal expressions is to be welcomed, comparatively little attention has so far been given to how different types of modal expression may combine in text to create modal synergy. Following a case study investigation into pragmatics and modality, the paper ends by outlining an agenda for further research within a discourse and pragmatic perspective.
... As Gibbs (2003: 3) remarks, in terms of what researchers today call 'embodiment', ''language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action''. The thrust of this side of Nuyts' research seeks to explain the connections between mind and body and language and body, a connection which is articulated in a pragmatic perspective by Haberland andMey (2002: 1680): ''The basic material orientation of all our cognitive and volitional processes [is] due to the fact that we 'inhabit' a body, and therefore, cognition is specifically geared to, and informed by, the body 'perspective'. The theory of pragmatic acts [can be] defined as the total activity that a human unfolds in an embodied situation''. ...
This two-part article critically reviews eight recent works in the field of mood and modality. Part I explores three different theoretical approaches – generative, cognitive–pragmatic, and typological – with the main focus on languages other than English. Within the framework of generative grammar, research issues include: the epistemic-root interpretations of modal verbs; transitive–intransitive (dyadic–monadic) alternations; modal verb complementation, and the interaction of the modals with other systems, including negation, and alternate ways of encoding modality. The cognitive–pragmatic approach hones in on epistemic modality, and focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that become activated once speakers express evaluations of given states of affairs, involving various modal expression types. Reflecting mounting interest in grammatical typology as a whole, typological approaches to modality recognize this domain as a valid cross-language grammatical category, similar to tense and aspect, and establish a range of typological categories, which include propositional modality (epistemic and evidential) and event modality (deontic and dynamic). Part I also includes a descriptive account of the modal verb system in Danish. In Part II, the emphasis is on work in relation to (primarily) English, much of which is corpus-driven, and on non-verbal as well as verbal carriers of modal meanings. Thus, description and analysis move purposefully towards a more comprehensive account of the field, to embrace modal expressions such as modal lexical verbs, modal adverbs, and modal adjectives. The pragmatics of modality; the discursive functions of modal expressions, especially modal adverbs; and the treatment of modality in modern descriptive grammars of English are also covered.
... Birgitta Dresp-Langley to identify the intentions that motivate utterances or speech acts by analysing the logical structure of speech sequences is, as Haberland and Mey (2002) put it, looking for traces in a petrified product. Any simple sequence of seemingly straightforward speech acts may reflect a psychologically complex speech situation, the true nature of which may remain unknown to the outsider listening in. ...
Global society issues are putting increasing pressure on both small and large organizations to communicate ethically at all levels. Achieving this requires social skills beyond the choice of language or vocabulary and relies above all on individual social responsibility. Arguments from social contract philosophy and speech act theory lead to consider a communication contract that identifies the necessary individual skills for ethical communication on the basis of a limited number of explicit clauses. These latter are pragmatically binding for all partners involved and help ensure that the ground rules of cooperative communication are observed within a group or an organization. Beyond promoting ethical communication, the communication contract clarifies how individual discursive behaviour can be constructively and ethically monitored by group leaders in business meetings. A case study which shows what may happen when ground clauses of ethical communication are violated is presented. The conclusions of the study highlight why attempting to respect the communication contract is in the best interest of all partners at all levels within any group or organization.
Hartmut Haberland (b. 1948) is a German-Danish linguist whose main contributions to applied linguistics, within the areas of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, include being founder, in 1977 (with Jacob L. Mey), and coeditor of the internationally recognized Journal of Pragmatics.
Jacob L Mey (b. 1926) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Southern Denmark. Previous appointments include the University of Oslo, Norway, the University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., Yale University, New Haven, Conn., Tsukuba University, Japan, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., City University of Hong Kong, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, S.P., Brazil, Universidade de Brasília, Brasília, DF, the University of Haifa and Haifa Technion, Israel, as well as numerous other institutions of research and higher learning.
This paper has two aims. First, it presents a brief overview of the history of pragmatics, as well as of the circumstances of the appearance and spread of pragmatics in Hungary. On 15 May, 2012, a round table was organized by the Society of Hungarian Linguistics in Budapest which aimed to provide a possibility to demonstrate pragmatists' results before the Hungarian linguistics community and to initiate professional research cooperation within the field of pragmatics. The second goal of this paper is to give a short introduction to the present special issue on Hungarian pragmatics research, containing articles that are the written versions of the Budapest round-table talks.
Much research in pragmatics focuses on the social anchoring of language and on speakers as members of social groups. This focus contrasts with the approach that deals with the language system removed from context and with the individual, the ideal speaker-hearer - a line of research in which pragmatics is directed away from the social toward the individual and toward cognition, as in Searle's work on speech acts and in Relevance Theory.
Drawn upon Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, we propose a pragmatic perspective of organizational communication, which unites research in media richness, sensemaking, and conversation analysis. We conducted a comparative study of face-to-face versus computer-mediated reference transactions in an academic library and found that communicative context impacts the way people use language, and people consciously utilize linguistic signals to create a communicative context, especially a context of politeness.
This paper attempts to show that a cognitive perspective of the Gricean concept on the conversational maxims opens new perspectives on two problems which have not been dealt with in detail in the original model and in most successive work on conversational implicature: speaker activity and a cognitive underpinning of the maxims of conversation. As pinpointed in section, the first problem is the need for a shift in focus towards the actual production of linguistic utterances fulfilling or flouting the maxims in particularized conversational implicature. The second problem is explaining how the adherence or non-adherence to the maxims can be conceptually accounted for on the basis of some general cognitive principles. While section is devoted to a cognitive re-evaluation of the speaker's perspective, section will discuss some recent pragmatic developments, such as Levinson's notion of pragmatic marking in generalized implicature, which can be applied to particularized conversational implicature and fruitfully underpinned by more general cognitive principles. Section will present an outline of some basic cognitive principles involved when speakers fulfill or flout the maxims. In the course of the paper it becomes clear that both current pragmatic research and cognitive analysis contribute to a new understanding of Grice's ideas.
The present paper aims to demonstrate how a refined version of the Gricean theory of non-observance of maxims based on the Schutzean notion of imposed thematic relevance can be applied to shed some light on the intercultural issue of the relative imbalance in native (or ‘expert’ non-native) vs. (‘non-expert’) non-native communication. This demonstration will be accompanied by examples from the British comedy series Fawlty Towers, where the relationship between Basil Fawlty and his Spanish dogsbody Manuel offers a neat caricature of the issues at stake. The paper argues that the (often) higher number of occurrences of deviations from (native speaker) norms (=non-observance of ‘maxims’) in non-native speech causes an over-attentiveness in the hearer and an increased interpretational activity which often ‘does not pay off’, something which, may trigger negative reactions and support the growth of linguicism. This tendency, it is claimed, can perhaps be countered by raising the awareness of the general public as well as that of political representatives as regards the specific drawbacks of being a second/foreign language speaker in a globalized world.
The importance of non verbal communication within the human interface, the point at which interaction occurs, is becoming of increasing significance for natural language pragmatics and the design of interactive systems based upon it. This dimension of communication is essential for an understanding of 'co-presence' (Good 1996), which is an essential component of human understanding. Co-presence denotes simply how we are present to each other, be this in the same physical space or in differing physical spaces. Being present may be described as a precondition for communication, and the nature of this precondition has a bearing on how we coordinate with each other.
Heller et Martin-Jones ont regroupe, dans un ouvrage intitule Voices of authority: Education and linguistic difference, des etudes contemporaines sur les themes de la domination symbolique, de l'education et de la difference linguistique. L'A. examine ici les implications pratiques et theoriques des questions soulevees dans l'introduction proposee par Heller et Martin-Jones a cette collection d'etudes, en s'arretant en particulier sur la notion de langue legitime et d'inegalite face a l'education
A distinction between ‘text’ and ‘discourse’, based on suggestions by Bronislaw Malinowski (1935) and Konrad Ehlich (1979, 1981), is proposed and contrasted with the distinction between ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ as made by Jacob Mey (1993). A few remarks on the term discours in the French tradition are added.
There is a popular belief that women's speech is more indirect than men's speech. However, there has been little empirical evidence to support this claim. Moreover, indirectness is often treated as a unitary concept, when in fact there are several types of indirect speech. Presented here is a completed study exploring the relationship between gender and indirectness, focusing on one type of indirectness, what Grice (1975) refers to as flouting the maxims of conversatio. Results of this study indicate that the men flout more than the women do in the situations examined.Finding empirical evidence that men speak more indirectly than women do in certain situations confronts a societal myth that the reverse is tru. Within Sperber and Wilson's (1986) theory of indirectness, which has a cognitive rather than a social basis, one would be less likely to expect social variables to interact with degrees of indirectness. The results of my study show that there are differences in the degree to which men and women flout the Gricean maxims, thus providing evidence supporting a theory with a social component.
This article is both a review of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance and a broader critical discussion of linguistic pragmatics, from which Relevance has arisen. Four separate sections focus on Communication, Assumptions, the Metaphor of the Black Box and the Principle of Relevance itself. The authors conclude that the reductionist model of the human mind as an information-processing device, developed by Sperber and Wilson, is irredeemably asocial and therefore relevant to neither communication nor cognition.
Anaphora clearly involves syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Although it is generally acknowledged that pragmatic factors are predominant in discourse anaphora, it is equally widely held (especially among Government-Binding (GB) theorists) that only syntactic and semantic factors are crucial to intrasentential anaphora. In this article, I shall argue, in the spirit of an ongoing debate about the ‘division of labour’ between grammar and pragmatics regarding anaphora (Reinhart, 1983a, b, 1986; Kempson, 1984a, b, 1988a, b; Levinson, 1987a, b, 1991; Yan Huang, 1987a, 1989), that contrary to this popular but erroneous view, the contribution of pragmatics to anaphora is much more fundamental than has been commonly believed, even at the heart of intrasentential anaphora, at least with respect to languages like Chinese. Such a position, if established, would seem to decrease the plausibility of Chomsky's (1981, 1982, 1986) claim that anaphora, and zero anaphora in particular, have a privileged access to the alleged underlying principles of the innate Universal Grammar (UG), the biologically determined endowment of the human mind.(Received September 09 1989)(Revised March 15 1991)
This article focuses on interethnic interactions in which adolescents of Asian descent put on strong Indian English accents when addressing Anglo teachers and adults, and it discusses the extent to which these code switchings constitute acts of resistance within a racist society. The article recognises the ambiguity in the relationship between resistance and just “messing about” (Gilroy & Lawrence, 1988: 136–137), but rather than invalidating a political interpretation, detailed interaction analysis reveals subtleties in oppositionel meaning that make the term “resistance” seem rather crude. Code switching into Indian English conjured a very specific political problematic, it provided recipients with an opportunity to display their own political position, and it could even lead to the consolidation of amicable Black—White pupil—teacher relations counterposed to wider patterns of race stratification.
Youth, race and resistance: a sociolinguistic perspective on micropolitics in Eng-land Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference
- Rampton
- Ben
Rampton, Ben, 2001. Youth, race and resistance: a sociolinguistic perspective on micropolitics in Eng-land. In: Heller, Monica, Martin-Jones, Marilyn (Eds.), 2001. Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference. Ablex, Westport, CT. pp. 403–418.
How to do things with words Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Dis-course Analysis
- John L Austin
Austin, John L., 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Chouliaraki, Lilie, Fairclough, Norman, 1999. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Dis-course Analysis. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
A Natural History of Negation A neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora
- Horn
- R Laurence
Horn, Laurence R., 1989. A Natural History of Negation. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Huang, Yan, 1991. A neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora. Journal of Linguistics 27, 301–335.
The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora: A Study with Special Reference to Chinese Review of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition
- Huang
- Yan
Huang, Yan, 1994. The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora: A Study with Special Reference to Chinese. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jucker, Andreas, 1997. Review of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Second edition (1995). Journal of Pragmatics 27, 112–119.
Towards a Socio-cognitive Account of Flouting and Flout-based Meanings. PhD dissertation, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Logic and conversation
- Greenall
- Ann
- Klungervik
- Jorid
Greenall, Ann, Klungervik, Jorid, 2002. Towards a Socio-cognitive Account of Flouting and Flout-based Meanings. PhD dissertation, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Grice, H. Paul, 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, Peter, Morgan, Jerry (Eds.), Syntax and Seman-tics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41–58.
Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Impli-catures Whose Language? A Study in Linguistic Pragmatics. Benjamins
- Levinson
- Stephen
Levinson, Stephen C., 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Impli-catures. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Mey, Jacob L., 1985. Whose Language? A Study in Linguistic Pragmatics. Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.
Journal of pragmatics 1, Editorial: Linguistics and Pragmatics. [With a] Postscript (1995)
- Haberland
Review of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Second edition (1995)
- Jucker
Symbolic domination and postcolonial contestation: resources and conditions. (Review of Heller and Martin-Jones, Eds. 2001)
- Mey