Pragmatics offers a unique, function-based perspective on all aspects of human (linguistic) communication (cf. Verschueren 1999; Fetzer 2002). It is concerned with all facets of a communicative act or a series of acts, such as the speaker, his/ her background knowledge and contextual assumptions, the lexical and grammati- cal constituents of an utterance, the hearer’s interpretations and patterns of infer- encing, etc. All these are studied against a network of social factors, preconditions, norms and expectations that govern communication, both within a culture and across cultures. Since communicative acts involve linguistic units, whose choice is dictated by language-internal rules, as well as their interpersonal, social and cul- tural embedding, pragmatic studies bridge the system and the use side of language. They examine what is lexically and grammatically available for a speaker to ac- complish a communicative goal, and at the same time explore the ways in which the linguistic potential is realized in a specific social context.
Since the arsenal of language forms and the catalogue of social embeddings in which these forms are used in communication are virtually infinite and heterogen- eous, ‘pragmatic’ scholarship naturally draws upon a number of diverse disciplines in linguistics (and beyond). It is generated collectively by phonologists, morphol- ogists, syntacticians, discourse analysts – but also psychologists, sociologists and other scientists in the Humanities – as long as their work has a functional-com- municative bent. Pragmatics is thus defined by its perspective more than by a set number of its objects of investigation.2 It offers explanations which apply to dif-
ferent lexical and structural levels of language – word, phrase, sentence, discourse.
3. Context
The conception of pragmatics as a (functional) perspective foregrounds and en- dorses its preoccupation with context. Different types of context are naturally sa- lient at different levels of communication (utterance, series of utterances, dis- course, genre) but there are also manifestations of different aspects of context at any specific level. Hence, context is a fundamental concept to account for in de- scribing the micro-macro dialogue in pragmatic studies.
In a nutshell (cf. e.g. Bazzanella 2002), one can speak of a ‘static’ and a ‘dy- namic’ conception of context. The static view (cf. e.g. Halliday and Hasan 2000; Cummings 2005) sees context as a set of variables (linguistic, cognitive, social) that ‘surround’ strips of text. They constitute an a priori, static infrastructure of re- sources which are there for interlocutors to determine the meaning of utterances at hand. On the dynamic view (cf. e.g. Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Bublitz 2003, 2006), context is never ‘given’ and interlocutors keep creating current contexts for current utterances – the moment a sentence is uttered “it becomes part of the envi-
ronmental resources on which the contextual interpretation of the following as well as the preceding utterances has to draw” (Bublitz 2003: 383).
As the next section will show in detail, the dynamic view of context is especially important in elucidating the relationship between micropragmatics and macroprag- matics – the prerequisite being, of course, the move from a discourse-participant to a discourse-analytic perspective. The complementarity of micropragmatics (‘prag- matics of the utterance’) and macropragmatics (‘pragmatics of the discourse’) con- sists in the micro-level analysis getting verified from the macro standpoint, a pro- cedure often leading to the redefinition of the original analytic track. Text and con- text are, not only in interlocution but also in analysis, constantly matched with and against each other, both prospectively and retrospectively. Any micropragmatic analysis of an utterance, reshaped as a result of macropragmatic considerations of the discourse to which the utterance contributes, is thus an example of ‘reinterpre- tation from hindsight’ – endorsed by the dynamic view of context. Such a reinter- pretation is often indicative of the change in the number and kind of textual cues which are used before and after the reshaping takes place. It is likely that in the ‘original’ micro-pragmatic analysis the reliance on the most prominent textual cues will be significant, since the macro factors and constraints are, as yet, disregarded. However, the ‘reshaped’ micro-analysis may well see some of the initial cues brushed aside, often for the benefit of the cues originally neglected (see section 4.). All in all, the dynamic notion of context is a vital concept for micro- and macro- pragmatics since it allows speculations over, a) the extent to which the interpre- tation of meaning is guided by text; b) what factors may cause such an interpretation to be insufficient; c) at which level of analysis such a deficit becomes visible.
The dynamic conception of context recognizes one more important premise for the existence of the micro-macro dialogue, i.e. the different degrees of accessibil- ity of contextual cues, at different stages of interpretation.3 The linguistic cues
(often referred to as ‘co-text’) are immediately accessible, but some of the cogni- tive and social cues might not be. This, altogether, makes discourse participants ab- stract from the ‘holistic’ context (the context which is often defined at the macro level, according to the characteristics of an attitudinal frame, genre, speech event, discourse type) the cues that seem actually relevant to a given communicative situ- ation (micro-level). The above process has been extensively described in terms of a number of methodologies, which account for the relation between context and sub- contexts (cf. Goffman 1986), figure and ground (cf. Langacker 1987, 2001), frame and framing (cf. Bateson 1972; Fetzer 2007), generalized (default, unmarked) con- text and particularized (marked) context, global context and local context, etc. Their common assumption is that the concept of context is best investigated from a parts-whole perspective, which elucidates its function of delimiting content. Such a perspective is naturally in line with the perspectivist view of pragmatics in gen- eral and, at the same time, congruent with the scope of micropragmatics and mac- ropragmatics.
4. Micropragmatics and macropragmatics: conceptual origins