4 - From Proto-pragmatics to Pragmatics

Summary

This chapter begins with more historical discussion, in which we sketch the prehistory of the study of the pragmatics and trace a route in the development of expressive meaning from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Following an expression coined by Nerlich and Clark, we use the term ‘proto-pragmatics’ to refer to those thinkers who were the first to take the role of context and emotion in language use seriously. The point of so doing is to show that our attempt to introduce affect into the centre of theories of utterance interpretation is actually an act of reintroduction, rather than an original move. The sidelining of affect by theories of communication has not happened in the absence of opposition. We also suggest parallels between the work of Charles Bally of the Geneva school and the work of those involved in the so-called ‘Ordinary Language Approach to Philosophy’ going on in the 1940s at Oxford, whose adherents committed themselves to the study of natural language use rather than the logical formulae of formal languages