Linguistic pragmatics is defined as the science of language use, and “[i]n the same way as human actions change existing reality, linguistic actions also change the world” (Marmaridou 2000: 22). Linguistic pragmatics and general pragmatics share almost identical goals: general pragmatics examines pragmatic principles, mechanisms and universals in the context of action theory, rationality and inten- tionality, while linguistic pragmatics focuses on their instantiation in language and language use. Hence linguistic pragmatics overlaps with general pragmatics, shar- ing its generalized principles, mechanisms and universals, and departs from the generalized framework by concentrating on language as a general construct and on languages as particularized instantiations.
In linguistics, language tends to be examined in its own right, accounting for language use, but not for the model user. The language system comprises the con- stitutive subsystems of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. These may be assigned the status of autonomous modules, as is the case in the formal para- digms, they may be conceived of as connected subsystems, as is the case in sys- temic functional grammar (Halliday 1994), or as dialectically connected subsys- tems with fuzzy boundaries, as for instance the cognitive paradigm (Givón 1993, 2005), where language use is connected dialectically with the language system and
the model user. Language is seen as a dynamic construct changing through pat- terned use in context, in which grammatical and pragmatic aspects of interpretation interface (Ariel 2008: 257–259).
The dialectical connectedness between language’s constitutive subsystems requires the explicit accommodation of pragmatic interfaces. The pragmatic per- spective adopted towards the object to be examined does not consider the object in isolation but rather its connectedness with its conditions of use and with the user. This is reflected in grammaticalization or grammaticization (Traugott 1988) and in pragmaticalization (Aijmer 1997). Pragmatic principles shape the lexicon, as is re- flected in Horn’s division of pragmatic labour, viz. his hearer-oriented Q-principle and speaker-oriented R-principle (Horn 1984), and their impact on the structure and use of lexical items, e.g. pragmatic strengthening, scalar implicature or polar- ity items. It is also manifest in deictic expressions and tense and aspect markers, whose meanings are constant but whose referents vary with the speaker and the hearer, and with time and place of the utterance, and on the style, register or pur- pose of a speech act (Ariel 2008; Huang 2007). Furthermore, pragmatic principles have a strong influence on the information status of constituents within and across sentences regarding focus, topic (or theme) and comment (or rheme). Deviations from the default generate implicatures, such as emphasis implicating a set of alter- natives (Birner and Ward 1998; Lambrecht 1994).
4.1. Speech act
Speech act theory is connected intrinsically with J.L. Austin’s groundbreaking lectures on ordinary language philosophy, edited posthumously (Austin 1971). Austin scrutinized the then prevailing view that language describes the world in terms of true and false, pointing out its shortcomings if applied to natural (or or- dinary) language. He compared and contrasted the constative view, according to which sentences are true or false, with the performative approach, according to which sentences are used to perform speech acts, and came to the conclusion that model users do not just describe the world, but rather do things with words, even when describing the world. This is further refined by J.R. Searle’s modifications and refinement in his research on speech acts (Searle 1969, 1991), systematizing the cognitive, linguistic and social contexts, in which speech acts are performed by differentiating between constitutive rules, which are a necessary part of the language game and make speech acts count as particularized speech acts, e.g. promise, threat or rejection, and regulative rules, which are normative in nature. Considering language use from an action-theoretic frame of reference has paved the way for investigating linguistic meaning as well as speaker-intended mean- ing. It has shifted the focus of investigation from the rigid framework of formal semantics to the action-theoretic premises of rationality, intentionality and com- munication.
Speech act theory’s basic unit of investigation is the speech act, and depending on the frameworks employed, speech acts are divided into locutionary, illocution- ary and perlocutionary acts (Austin 1971), or propositional and illocutionary acts (Searle 1969), and their respective sub-acts, viz. reference and predication in the Searlean paradigm, and the phonetic act, phatic act and rhetic act in Austin’s frame of reference. Speech acts and their constitutive acts are performed simultaneously, and a speech act may be realized as a direct speech act, as an indirect speech act and as a conventionally indirect speech act. To account for a speech act’s perlocu- tionary effects as regards the social and interpersonal planes of discourse, speech acts have been further refined and redefined as face-threatening acts, in which the impact of a speech act’s perlocutionary effects on the interpersonal plane is calcu- lated with respect to the model person’s, to employ Brown and Levinson’s termi- nology, negative and positive face wants (Brown and Levinson 1987).
Speech act theory is anchored in action theory on the one hand, and in language and language use on the other. Speech acts are described in various ways: they are classified as explicit performative utterances, viz. utterances in which the speech act contains a performative formula realized by a first-person pronoun and a speech-act verb, e.g. I/we hereby close the meeting or we hereby request you to pay your dues; they are classified as first-order speech act and second-order speech act, accounting for the differentiation between direct and indirect speech acts; they are classified as micro speech act and macro speech act, accounting for the larger unit of genre (van Dijk 1981; Fetzer 2002), and as nth order speech acts, capturing the
multi-layered nature of performing speech acts in context. Furthermore, speech acts are categorized with respect to possible directions of fit between language and the world, that is the words-to-world direction of fit for assertion, the world-to- words direction of fit for directive and commissive, the double direction of fit for declaration and the empty direction of fit for expressive (Searle 1979). In addition to the illocutionary-point anchored taxonomies, speech act verbs are classified and systematized according to the way they are used in a particular language (cf. Col- lavin this volume).
Speech act theory combines language-internal and language-external factors by systematizing them in the framework of felicity conditions, which are classified with regard to propositional content conditions, preparatory conditions, essential conditions and sincerity conditions. While propositional content conditions gen- erally specify restrictions on the content of the proposition, preparatory, essential and sincerity conditions explicate language-external conditions concerning the language game as well as speaker- and hearer-specific requirements.
Speech acts are neither true nor false but rather felicitous or infelicitous. To be felicitous, they need to be produced (and interpreted) in accordance with general- ized felicity conditions, viz. normal input and output conditions, the essential and sincerity conditions, and with particularized felicity conditions, viz. proposition content condition.
“Speaking a language” is seen as “engaging in a (highly complex) rule-gov- erned form of behavior” (Searle 1969: 12). The rule-governed behaviour is spec- ified in speech act theory’s felicity conditions and in the requirement that the model user in her/his role as speaker intends that her/his utterance will produce in a model user in her/his role as hearer a belief that the sincerity and essential conditions ob- tain by means of the recognition of the intention to produce this belief, and that the speaker intends that recognition to be achieved by means of the recognition of the utterance as one conventionally used to produce such beliefs. Secondly, that the semantic rules of the language spoken by the model users are such that the utter- ance is uttered sincerely and such as is required just in case all of the previous con- ditions obtain.
4.2. Implicature
The cooperative principle counts as a universal principle in pragmatics, where it represents the solid base to which communication in general and the formulation and interpretation of communicative action in particular are anchored. This holds especially for the calculation of context-dependent communicative meaning and the necessary processes of inferencing required for the contextualization and en- richment of underspecified conversional contributions. To use Ariel’s words, “[u]nderdeterminacy is an inherent characteristic of human language, since no natural language sentence can encode interlocutors’ intended statements fully” (Ariel 2008: 265). In a similar vein, but more explicitly, Levinson (1995) argues that intentionality is a fundamental premise of natural-language communication. In his words, “human interaction, and thus communication depends on intention- ascription. Achieving this is a computational miracle: inferences must be made way beyond the available data. It is an abductive process of hypothesis formation, yet it appears subjectively as fast and certain – the inferences seem determinate, though we are happy to revise them when forced to do so” (Levinson 1995: 241). Underdeterminacy and the necessary processes of inferencing are connected with the Gricean paradigm and its differentiation between what is said and what is meant, which both refer to utterances produced in context (Grice 1975); and they are also connected with Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995). In both frames of reference, communication is seen as a context-dependent endeavour, in which communicative meaning may go beyond the level of what has been said. Hence, what is said cannot be equated with pure linguistic meaning but rather is “closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) […] ut- tered” (Grice 1975: 44). Unlike the rather controversial status of ‘what is said’ in semantics and pragmatics, ‘what is meant’ has always been equated with ‘what is implicated’.
Relevance Theory differentiates between a code model of communication and an inference model. While the former is conventional, the latter is inferential and
hence pragmatic by definition. Sperber and Wilson define inference as follows: “Inference is the process by which an assumption is accepted as true or probably true on the strength of the truth or probable truth or other assumptions. It is thus a form of fixation of belief” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 68). Their theory uses de- monstrative inference as is employed in various types of logic, and non-demon- strative inference, which is employed in the process of inferential comprehension. Unlike local deductive reasoning, inferential comprehension is global and based on inductive rules.
Pragmatic inferencing occurs at various levels of comprehension. It is con- nected with the differentiation between explicature, which is “a combination of lin- guistically encoded and contextually inferred conceptual features” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 182), and different kinds of implication, viz. trivial implication, ana- lytic implication, synthetic implication and contextual implication. Against this background, implicature “is a contextual assumption or implication which a speaker, intending her utterance to be manifestly relevant, manifestly intended to make manifest to the hearer. We will distinguish two kinds of implicatures: impli- cated premises and implicated conclusions” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 194–195). Implicated premises “must be supplied by the hearer, who must either retrieve them from memory or construct them by developing assumption schemas retrieved from memory”, and implicated conclusions “are deduced from the explicatures of the utterance and the context. What makes it possible to identify such conclusions as implicatures is that the speaker must have expected the hearer to derive them, or some of them, given that she intended her utterance to be manifestly relevant to the hearer” (1995: 195). With these tools, Relevance Theory explicates the relevant in- ferencing processes involved in communication. They delimit themselves from the Gricean paradigm where, from their perspective, “the successes of human non-de- monstrative inference must be explained by appealing not to logical processes of assumption confirmation, but to constraints on the formation and exploitation of as- sumptions” (1995: 81), viz. the cooperative principle and the maxims.
Grice (1975: 43–44) differentiates between implicate and the related nouns im- plicature (cf. implying) and implicatum (cf. what is implied). He distinguishes be- tween two basic types of implicature: conventional implicature and conversational implicature. The latter is subdivided into generalized conversational implicature and particularized conversational implicature. Generalized conversational impli- cature is also referred to as default implicature or pragmatic regularities (Bach 2006). This is in line with Levinson’s claim that “utterance-types carry generalized implicatures […]: rational speakers meannn both what they say (except in non-lit- eral uses of language) and what that saying implicates; different layers of meaning all come under the umbrella of meaningnn” (Levinson 2000: 373). While conven- tional implicature is connected closely with linguistic form, for instance with con- nectives (e.g., but), implicative verbs (e.g., manage, forget to), honorifics or non- restrictive relative clauses, conversational implicatures are essentially connected
with certain general features of discourse, viz. the Gricean conversational maxims. Both conversational and conventional implicatures can be suspended: conven- tional implicatures are detachable, but not cancellable and conversational implica- tures are cancellable but not detachable (for a thorough analysis of implicature, cf. Huang this volume).
Conversational implicatures are generated or triggered by model users exploit- ing a maxim. That is to say, a model user gets in a conversational implicature if s/he flouts a maxim, blatantly failing to fulfil it. Grice (1975: 49–50) characterizes the notion of conversational implicature as follows:
A man [or person, A.F.] who, by (in, when) saying (or making as if to say) that p has im- plicated that q, may be said to have conversationally implicated that q,PROVIDED THAT
(1) he is to be presumed to be observing the conversational maxims, or at least the co- operative principle; (2) the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so inTHOSE terms) con-
sistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition in (2)IS required.
The conversational implicature is characterized by some degree of indeterminate- ness because it is, by definition, defeasible, non-detachable, calculable and non- conventional (cf. Bach 2006; e.g., Levinson 1979, 1983). Moreover, “conversa- tional implicatures are universal and reinforceable” (Ariel 2008: 13). That is to say, they can be asserted explicitly without bringing about a redundancy effect. It needs to be pointed out, however, that the universality claim only holds for the inferential mechanism and not for the relevant background assumptions.
Implicature is a cognitive mechanism anchored to model users in their roles as speakers or producers of conversational contributions, and inference is a cognitive mechanism anchored to model users in their roles as hearers. Cognitive processes can be local, they can be global or they can be both. Not only natural model users, but also non-natural intelligent agents may perform the cognitive operations of im- plicating and inferring, thus drawing invited inferences. For the operations to be felicitous, compatible contexts for reasoning and drawing analogies are required (cf. e.g., Bouquet et al. 1999; Cohen, Morgan and Pollack 1992).
In Gricean pragmatics, the conversational maxims are seen as specifications of some unmarked communicative context representing the ground on which the con- versational implicature is calculated. For this reason, deviations, however com- mon, are seen as special or marked and signify that the speaker intends to com- municate conversationally implicated meaning. The signalling is only possible against the background of the Gricean premise of a reflexive intention, which is succinctly explicated by Levinson: “[w]hat distinguishes a Gricean reflexive inten- tion from other kinds of complex reflexive intention is that the communicators’ goal or intention is achieved simply by being perceived: recognition exhausts or realizes the intention” (Levinson 1995: 228).
5. Outlook
Neither general pragmatics nor linguistic pragmatics examine its objects of inves- tigation in isolation but rather focus on their conditions of use, the connectedness with their surroundings, and the necessary and sufficient conditions which assign the object, e.g. intentionality, rationality, model user or action, the status of a par- ticular object and make it count as that object. While general pragmatics concen- trates on the analysis of these fundamental premises of practical action, identifying their necessary and sufficient conditions, linguistic pragmatics establishes the ex- plicit connection between those foundations and their language-specific and lan- guage-use specific constraints and requirements.
Pragmatics is more of a perspective towards an object under investigation than the examination of the object as such. For this reason, it needs to touch on and in- terface with neighbouring disciplines, in particular philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics and the social sciences. In spite of the diversity of the field, the key research question of pragmatics is concerned with communicative action, particularly with the expression and interpretation of meaning in context. To tackle that question felicitously, pragmatics needs to accommodate extra-lin- guistic world knowledge, cultural and social stereotypes, and situation of dis- course on the one hand, and word meaning, sentence structure and the cognitive system, especially inference and abduction on the other. The generalized knowl- edge is stored as typed world knowledge and typed discursive knowledge. These defaults represent pillars, against the background of which the argument from ig- norance holds:
The argument from ignorance, it thus emerges, is an integral part of the inferential mechanism by means of which implicatures are recovered in conversation. This argu- ment permits us to conclude that conversational principles and maxims are being ob- served on the grounds that there is no reason to believe that they are not being observed. Such a conclusion is at all possible because these principles and maxims have the status of presumptions in communication – principles that stand in the absence of counterin- dications. (Cummings 2005:109)
Presumptions or defaults concern both linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge, which need to be stored as social and cultural world-knowledge defaults on the one hand, and as linguistic and discursive defaults on the other. Only then is it possible to account for a pragmatic perspective which accommodates the inherent dialogic and pragmatic principles of speech act and uptake, speech act type and cognitive reality, and speech act type and situation (mis)match, which is calculated against the background of the argument of ignorance. If a conversational contribution is in accordance with the presumptions, no counterindications are found. Consequently, the contribution is assigned the status of a match and interpreted accordingly. If a conversational contribution is in disaccordance, there are counterindications and a particularized process of inferencing is generated to calculate nonce meaning.
The dialogue-oriented pragmatic mechanisms of inferencing and abduction require not only a dynamic framework accounting for the parts-whole connected- ness, but also a conscious model user who is accountable for her/his actions (Fetzer 2004). At the same time, s/he makes use of automatic processing and default inter- pretations which figure as salient and strong interpretative probabilities, unless counterindications in the context signify a non-default match. Only an integrated framework, making allowances for methodological compositionality and synthes- izing relevant findings (Fetzer 2004; Jaszcolt 2005; Marmaridou 2000) may cap- ture the multifaceted nature of pragmatics.
Notes
1. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer and the editors of this volume for helpful com- ments on the first version of this article, and I would like to thank Varol Akman and Teun van Dijk for discussing previous versions of this chapter.
2. The seemingly clear-cut distinction between semantics and pragmatics, though useful for analytic reasons, is highly idealized and has been strongly contested (cf. Bublitz 2009).