“Intersubjectivity” involves not only (1) the speaker (addresser) and (2) the hearer (addressee), but also (3) the channel (contact) between them, (4) the sign (mess- age) that is sent from the former to the latter, (5) the (intersubjectively) shared code(s) for interpretations of the sign, and (6) the (intersubjectively) understood referent(s) of the sign, located in the micro- or macro-context of the interaction be- tween the speech- or communicative-event participants, such as the speaker and addressee. This is, of course, the contextual, pragmatic matrix of communication, including language, which was articulated in the Praguean functionalist theory of Jakobson (1960), mentioned in Section 4. As part of the code, linguistic structure is embedded in this functional matrix of communication. In other words, structure emerges through communicative practices; there is no structure (langue) without pragmatics (parole). According to this Jakobsonian theory, as noted earlier, there are six basic functions of communication, corresponding to the six aspects of the contextual matrix: viz., (1) emotive, (2) conative, (3) phatic, (4) poetic, (5) meta- lingual (metalinguistic), and (6) referential functions.11 Although linguistic struc-
ture, as part of the code, is primarily used to interpret the sign (token) to identify (i.e., intersubjectively construct) its referent(s) and thus primarily involved in the metalinguistic, poetic, and referential functions (respectively corresponding to the code, sign, and referents), it inevitably interacts with the other functions as well, because it exists only as part of the code pragmatically used for intersubjective in- terpretations of the sign indexically exchanged in the context of communication. Thus, language, including linguistic structure, i.e., (morpho)phonology, (mor- pho)syntax, and semantics, should be understood, theorized, and analyzed by tak-
ing into proper consideration the six functions, as well as the six aspects, of com- municative practices (cf. Silverstein 1976a, 1976b, 1993).
But, of course, the contextual, functional matrix of communication, articulated in the six-functions model, is not limited to, or centered around, linguistic structure. For example, the code includes not just linguistic structure, but also “maxims”, “in- terpretive rules of thumb”, “passing theories”, metapragmatic frames, and models of interpretation vis-à-vis (not necessarily linguistic) signs, including gestures, fa- cial expressions, and other “paralinguistic” phenomena (cf. Bolinger 1968), all of which occur in specific, sociohistorical contexts of communicative practices (see Section 7; cf. Mey [1993] 2001: 206–235). And such contextualized practices index12 not just referents (in the referential function) and the semantic and prag-
matic “codes” being used (in the metalinguistic function). They also index the so- cial identities of, and power-relations among, communicative-event participants (e.g., in the emotive and conative functions). That is, contextualized practices index not just referents, but also social identities and power-relations, which can be “read” in the emergent “texts” of sociocultural practices of communication. Such texts are not to be understood as static “objects”, but as the dynamically emergent, socioculturally interpretable organizations of referential and non-referential (in- teractional) practices (mainly corresponding to the poetic, phatic, and “meta- pragmatic” functions), that is, organizations studied in conversation analysis (cf. adjacency pairs; Levinson 1983: 284–370), discourse analysis (cf. “frames” of in- teraction; Goffman 1974), linguistic anthropology (cf. Silverstein and Urban 1996; Blommaert 2005), and, of course, pragmatics (cf. Mey [1993] 2001).
Thus, in a sense, the Praguean/Jakobsonian functional theory provided a gen- eral framework in which today’s empirical approaches to language, listed immedi- ately above, operate (also see Section 2). As this indicates, the rise of structuralism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served to prepare the proper the- orization of the functional, contextual matrix of language, which would emerge in the 1970s after the formalist lapse from the 1940s to ’60s. This lapse, however, made obscure the pragmatic, functionalist foundation of structural linguistics. In- deed, by the late 1960s, when Generative Semanticists, who were immediate pre- decessors of linguistic pragmaticians, started to rebel against formalist struc- turalism (Chomskyan generativism) and delve into the realm of pragmatics, North American linguistics had become more closely linked to the philosophy of lan- guage, especially logico-analytic philosophy, than to the early twentieth-century functionalist traditions of structuralism, so that, in trying to find theoretical tools to deal with pragmatic phenomena, Generative Semanticists discovered and adopted the theories of speech act, implicature, and presupposition, articulated by Ordinary Language philosophers like Austin, Grice, and Strawson (see Section 3, above; cf. Levinson 1983). The publication of Austin’s (1962; second edition, 1975) William James Lectures, originally delivered in 1955 at Harvard, which is located in the same city as MIT (Cambridge, Mass.), i.e., the home of generativism, made the
theories of the Ordinary Language philosophers more visible to generativists inter- ested in pragmatic matters (also cf. Grice 1967; Chapman 2005: 100). And Searle (1969) provided a desideratum, i.e., the desired systematization of speech act the- ory, making it amenable to the linguists’ formal, syntactic treatment of pragmatic phenomena.13 As Generative Semantics yielded to linguistic pragmatics in the
1970s, the early years of the new discipline were marked by the preoccupation with the issues articulated by the Ordinary Language philosophers, and many of the cul- ture-specific assumptions of their philosophy, i.e., post-Lockean modern British philosophy, concerning human communication, seem to have been directly bor- rowed into linguistic pragmatics.
Here, recall that Locke, a founder of modern British empiricism, discussed, like Saussure, the “arbitrary” nature of human language (communication), but, un- like the latter, Locke meant by the term the volitional, intentional, “willful” char- acter of the individual’s use of language, whereas Saussure meant the conventional (non-volitional), extensionally unmotivated (intensional) yet socially existing (i.e., Durkheimian) association of the signifiant and the signifié. As this indicates, Brit- ish and Anglo-American philosophy, especially the empiricist tradition thereof (see Section 2), has tended to theorize “communication” (more generally, human practice) in terms of volitional, intentional actions or, in sociological terms of Max Weber, the “purposive” function (cf. Silverstein 1976b; Apel 1994: 63). Ordinary Language philosophy, an empiricist philosophy of language and communication concerned with “what we do with words” and “what is meant”, is no exception. It sees language and communication as purposive activities, as explicitly articulated by G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright, and Grice, who tried to explain the so- cial, interactional fact of communication in terms of what we intend to do or what we intend to mean, that is, individual’s conscious intention (cf. Chapman 2005). Notwithstanding, as Weber and other social scientists have shown, actions have consequences (perlocutionary effects) which are unintended by agents (subjects), and which may be more important, in terms of historical consequences (i.e., prag- matic effects), than actors’ mere intentions (cf. Silverstein 1976b). Further, any practice at least partially consists of unintentional, non-conscious elements; ob- viously, we are not conscious of everything we do. For example, we, as ordinary language users, are usually more aware of surface “segments” (continuous, seg- mentable units), such as phonemes, words, and expressions, than of allophones and discontinuous syntactic units (cf. Lucy 1992); yet, the latter two are often part of dialectal/sociolectal varieties and thus index their users’ social identities, pertain- ing to class, gender, status, etc., and power-relations among them, as can be readily seen in the sociolinguistic literature, Labovian or otherwise. Thus, there are non- purposive pragmatic functions in discourse, which are too important to be left out in any theory of pragmatics.
In addition, cross-cultural comparisons suggest that many societies place much less value on speakers’ intentions in the evaluation of (sociocultural) “meanings”
of their linguistic practices than the culture of Ordinary Language philosophers does, a point poignantly raised and substantiated by linguistic anthropologists, who have been critical of the intentionalist and individualist “bias” of the modern “Standard Average European” speech act theories ever since the 1970s and early ’80s.14 Subsequently, partly as a result of this cross-cultural (anthropological)
critique, linguistic pragmatics has come to appreciate and focus on cross-cultural differences in “speech acts” and, more generally, linguistic practices and their metapragmatic understandings, the latter now discussed under the rubric of “lan- guage ideology”.15
No less important, the individualist assumption of the speech act theories was undermined by empirical studies of discourse, which showed that the meaning(s) of an action (speech act) cannot be determined out of context, i.e., without con- sidering a series of interactions which contains the action (cf. Hancher 1979; Le- vinson 1983). This means that, to the extent that the “meaning(s)” of an action is determinable, it is determined by the contextualized interaction of speech-event participants, not solely by the individual speaker’s intention. Contributions of con- versation analysis (cf. Levinson 1983: 284–370) and discourse analysis (cf. Mey [1993] 2001: 191), focusing their attention on interaction rather than on solitary in- dividual actors’ minds, have been important in this “interactional turn” (social turn) of pragmatics, which has characterized the discipline since the 1980s or so (cf. Thomas 1996). Pragmatics today is much more interaction- or discourse-cen- tric than in the 1970s, when the new discipline was more intention- and individual- centric under the influence of Ordinary Language philosophy and modern British empiricism.
7. Genealogy of “performative utterances” and other multi-functional