8 - Beyond pragmatics

Summary

Discussing the first-person pronoun I, Silverstein (1977: 142) argues that it is the role of speaker in a speech event that is denoted by the pronoun. Grammarians analyzing such forms are therefore “in the realm of social anthropology.” The same applies to illocutionary forces, deference behavior in speech and sociolinguistic variation, all considered (parts of) social actions by Silverstein. Now, by an automatic reflex almost, a statement that some phenomenon is part of social anthropology is taken to entail that not only is it extragrammatical, it is actually “beyond pragmatics,” at least as pragmatics is conceived in the restricted, Anglo-American tradition. Phenomena studied by sociocultural linguistics and psycholinguistics were simply stipulated to be outside the domain of pragmatics, although in practice, researchers found it quite difficult to conceptually tease these apart from pragmatics (see Levinson, 1983: 27–29). Sociolinguistics, for example, sets out from the obvious assumption that language is a social phenomenon, performed by social actors, and relates language use to social class, ethnic group, color, gender, interpersonal relationships, etc. Such assumptions are not too different from the contextual definition of pragmatics (see 2.1.1), where attention paid to the users of the language makes a phenomenon pragmatic. Thus, it seems that if pragmatics handles contextual factors in communication, it should include sociolinguistics, since the context perforce has a social dimension. This is indeed the European research tradition (and John Benjamins has been publishing a thriving book series called Pragmatics and Beyond since 1980). Silverstein adopts neither position.