W~Jtj~liJfjE~ ~ 12 %(2010 ~) pp. 54-68
B.+~Jtl~"f:$;© 2010 ~[Special Lecture]

Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics
as a Perspective of Linguistics 1

Hartmut Haberland
Roskilde University

The discussion of pragmatics as a component or a perspective of linguistics was started in the 1970'es
in Haberland and Mey (1977). I am not going to claim that "Continental Pragmatics" (as Stephen
Levinson called the perspective school in 1982) has the correct approach and that some other (should
we call it "Insular Pragmatics"?) is wrong. My claim is that they complement each other and thatboth are needed in their own way. I give examples of how the "pragmatic question par excellence",
viz. "How did this utterance come to be produced?" (Haberland and Mey 1977: 8) can be reformulated
in order to highlight current issues in pragmatic investigations and to help us formulate some (new)questions, not all of which have an easy answer.
Keywords:

1.

pragmatics, dialogue, text, entextualization, transcription, metapragmatics, pragmatic act

Introduction

I want to take my point of departure in a recent polemic between Kanavillil
Rajagopalan on the one hand and Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber on the other, whichappeared in the journal Intercultural Pragmatics in 2005. Wilson and Sperber commenton the present situation of tough competition for academic resources-like academic
positions, research grants and journal pages. The recent increased emphasis on journal
impact factors and the individual scholar's track record of being quoted (preferably inthe right journals) has made this competition even tougher. In this situation, one might
be tempted "to claim that what you are not interested in is simply not interesting, thatthe kind of research you do should be the top priority, that other approaches are scientifically flawed, and that you are the future while others are burdens from the past."(Wilson and Sperber 2005: 101) Although it will become obvious that I find myself

1 I would like to thank the organizers of the 12th Annual Meeting of the Pragmatics Society ofJapan in December 2009 for inviting me to give the lecture on which this paper is based, and for their
hospitality during the conference. The lively discussion after the lecture has left its traces in this paper
and I only refrain from acknowledging any particular contribution to it lest I forgot to mention somebody. After the conference, I had the opportunity to discuss a number of points touched upon in thispaper with Jacob Mey and Janus Mortensen.

54Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

55

among those who consider pragmatics as a way of doing linguistics rather than a subdiscipline of linguistics, it is not my aim to set up two camps in linguistic pragmatics
by claiming that "the other side" is doing the wrong thing, or that those who have a different position are not doing pragmatics at all or doing it the wrong way. What I do
claim is that different concepts of what pragmatics is can lead to different researchquestions, and hence to different answers to the questions asked.
As Wilson and Sperber (2005: 101) rightly point out, the "perspective" camp is nota beleaguered and threatened minority "struggling to find a voice", and they maintainthat "advocates of the social approach have run most of the pragmatics institutions andjournals right from the start" (20005: 101), referring to Jacob Mey as one of the founders and for many years Chief Editor of the Journal of Pragmatics and Jef Verschueren
as the founder of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). As of September
2010, Jacob Mey has been terminated as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of
Pragmatics, and he has started a new journal Pragmatics and Society (Mey, Haberlandand Fischer 2010), while Jef Verschueren continues to be Secretary General of IPrA.
But neither are the followers of the sub-discipline approach a beleaguered minority
without access to publication channels and international conferences. The two schools
happily coexist, which does not mean that they always agree about everything.

2.

Discipline vs. perspective

A discussion of whether Pragmatics should be considered a sub-discipline of linguistics or rather a perspective of linguistics started in the 1970s, continued through the
90s and flares up only occasionally today. Basically the discussion is an exercise inmetapragmatics, defined by Claudia Caffi as "the theoretical debate on pragmatics andits central concerns, its epistemological foundations, and the definition of its relevant
object and scope." (Caffi 1998: 581) In a debate of this kind, it is not particularly interesting to decide who is or has been right, but rather to see where and why people differ.
If one looks at one of the standard textbooks of pragmatics, such as George Yule's
Pragmatics, one could read the chapter headings as a listing of sub-disciplines of thediscipline of pragmatics, which together comprise the discipline of pragmatics as a subdiscipline of linguistics:"Deixis and distance, Reference and inference, Presupposition and entailment,
Cooperation and implicature, Speech acts and events, Politeness and interaction,
Conversation and preference structure, Discourse and culture" (Yule 1996, chapter headings)
However, most of these fields are not only sub-disciplines of linguistics, but are also
dealt with within philosophy, logic, sociology, cultural studies, ethnography and evenpsychology. So if pragmatics, according to Yule, is a subdiscipline of something, thissomething is not necessarily linguistics.

56

Two of the scholars that have had the greatest influence on pragmatics are John
Searle and Harvey Sacks. Neither of them would ever have considered himself a linguist, and quite emphatically so. This has to with the fact that throughout the 20th century, language studies were a field too broad to be left to the linguists. The Danish
structuralist Louis Hjelmslev even asked for language to be given back to linguistics,
since linguistics was the only field that studied language as language and not in relationship to something else. Therefore, the broad characterization of pragmatics implicit
in Yule's textbook already places pragmatics in an interdisciplinary framework andtherefore, at least partly, outside linguistics. And a field cannot be a subfield of something that actually is narrower than itself.
Likewise, the characterization of pragmatics by Verschueren, Ostman, Blommaert
and Bulcaen in the 1995 Handbook of Pragmatics, where pragmatics is defined as "thecognitive, social, and cultural study of language and communication" (Verschueren etal., 1995: ix), goes beyond a mere listing of sub-disciplines, which is fully in line with
Verschueren being the first who talked about the "pragmatic perspective" in the late1980s. Verschueren and his co-authors explicitly do not talk about "the study of cognitive, social and cultural aspects of language and communication", but about the study oflanguage and communication from a cognitive, social and cultural point of view. Thus
they do not single out certain aspects of language and communication which are studied
by pragmatics. Rather, they formulate the all-embracing (or "catholic") position that
pragmatics is the study of all of language and communication, taking its point of departure in cognition, society and culture.
But if pragmatics is not just an assembly of loosely connected study areas having
to do with language and something else outside it, there must be a unifying question for
all pragmatics. One of the first attempts to formulate this question was made in the
Editorial of the first issue of the Journal of Pragmatics in 1977, where the authors(Jacob Mey and myself) write, "Linguistic pragmatics [... ] characterize[s] a new way oflooking at things linguistic, rather than marking off clean borderlines to other disciplines." (Haberland and Mey 1977: 5)
In the 1977 Editorial we went on to say that "the pragmatic question par excellence is therefore not: What does an utterance mean? but: How did this utterance cometo be produced?" (Haberland and Mey, 1977: 8) In 2002, we expanded on this by writing that "we tried to redirect the analytic view away from finding traces of life in a petrified (but for that reason durable and analyzable) product-the 'text' in the sense ofHaberland (1999)-to a concern with the 'live' conditions under which the utterance
had been produced. But this implied also that we at least had to open our eyes to thepossibility that pragmatics was not so much a sub-discipline of linguistics (and a relatively new one at that time), but rather a fundamentally different way of looking atthings linguistic. Or, in Mey's words (2001: 8-10), that pragmatics was not so much acomponent as a perspective of linguistics." (Haberland and Mey 2002: 1672)
At first glance, one might wonder why the rather terse formula of "How did thisPragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

57

utterance come to be produced?" should characterize the perspective model of pragmatics. But this formulation of the pragmatic question par excellence put itself firmly
within a tradition that justifies pragmatics as a discipline that goes beyond the disciplineof semantics by also being study of meaning. Not of meaning of isolated sentence
types abstracted from the context in which they can be and have been used, but the
study of what concrete and actually produced sentence tokens in use mean to those who
produce and understand them. (I understand Jacob Mey's later extension of linguistic
pragmatics to the study of pragmatic acts, which are not necessarily speech acts (Mey
2001), as a radicalization of the original approach, born of the realization that meaning
is not restricted to what we do with words, but is embodied in everything we do, withwords or otherwise.)In this way, the characterization of pragmatics in Haberland and Mey 1977 does
not carve out an object from language to be studied by the discipline of pragmatics.
Rather, it looks at all communication, but does this by asking a new question.
Pragmatics has always the speaker (and hearer) in mind, and will always look at language not as an object but something that is done and done in context. Semantics
carves out a chunk of language and studies it: for some views, this chunk is about whatwords mean and how they combine to meanings of larger constructions like sentences.
Pragmatics does not merely carve a different bit out of the whole of language and study
it (like how the context of uttering is relevant to the truth-value of a sentence type).
Pragmatics asks a new question, by looking at all of the communication situation, itsparticipants and its elements. The question is: how come that this utterance (and not
any other) fits the particular communicative needs of the participants in a situation?
The original reason that we talked about linguistic pragmatics in the 1970s wasthat there was a strong awareness that traditionally the term pragmatics did not belong
to linguistics but to semiotic, logic and philosophy. One of the first to point out that
there is more to meaning than what is dealt with by semantics was Charles Morris, who
himself was not a linguist. For Morris, pragmatics studies "the relation of signs tointerpreters" (Morris 1938: 82). Along similar lines, Rudolf Camap states that "if in an
investigation reference is made to the speaker, or to put it in more general terms, to theuser of the language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics." (Camap 1942: 9)
For Morris and Camap, pragmatics is not a sub-discipline of linguistics but the third
sub-discipline of semiotic, after syntax (the study of the relationship between signs) andsemantics (the study of the relationship between signs and objects). In these earlyattempts at defining pragmatics by distinguishing it from semantics, semantics is seen
as a study of language that can proceed without taking into account that sentences areuttered and interpreted by speakers. But taking speaker and listener, or, in more generalterms, the user of language into account, also means that we have to look at the context
in which sentences are uttered, as in this (much later) definition by George Yule:"Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a listener (orreader) .... Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning." (Yule 1996: 3)

58

But from here it is not too far to a definition that describes pragmatics as a linguistic discipline with clear borderlines: "The most promising are the definitions that equate
pragmatics with 'meaning minus semantics', or with a theory of language understandingthat takes context into account, in order to complement the contribution that semantics
makes to meaning." (Levinson 1983: 32) For Levinson, this approach is clearly distinct
and preferable to that what later became known a the perspective school, which hecalled "Continental Pragmatics" (1983: 6). In the early 80's, he saw "Continental
Pragmatics" represented in the publications of the Journal of Pragmatics, in contrast to
work by himself, Gerald Gazdar, and many others. The advantage of Levinson's definition is that it makes it relatively easy to distinguish between problems that belong within pragmatics and those which do not.
This advantage is also obvious in Gazdar's often-quoted definition of pragmatics as
the "study of meaning minus truth conditions" (1979: 2). The argument runs roughly
like this: 2
The meaning of 'and' is normally truth-conditional:
p
q

T
T

But in some cases this doesn't work:(1)(2)

She took arsenic.
She fell ill.

Both (1) and (2) may be true in some possible world, but both (3) and (4) areusually not true in the same possible world (at least not at the same time),(3)(4)

She took arsenic and fell ill.
She fell ill and took arsenic.

Here the meaning of 'and' is not truth-conditional:
q

T
T

pA q

contingentp

According to Gazdar, we have a problem to be dealt with by pragmatics, since it
belongs to meaning but is not governed by truth-conditions. One possible way to ana-

2 The argument is spelled out in Gazdar (1979: 69-83) using different examples from the one chosen here.

Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

59

lyze sentences like (3) and (4) is by referring to Grice's maxim of order. Hence, pragmatics 'cleans up' what unruly parts of meaning cannot be dealt with by truth conditions.
I would like to mention in passing that there was another strong, formal tradition
in pragmatics within logic, originating from Bar-Hillel. Bar-Hillel proposed that "pragmatics be concerned with indexical expressions, whose meanings can only be determined relative to user and context of use." (Morgan 1977: 57) This is not very far fromthe studies of deixis in linguistics, or Roman Jakobson's 'shifters'. In this tradition,
pragmatics is just the studies of deixis (as linguists would put it) or indexical expressions (as philosophers would prefer, Levinson (1983: 55)).
Another formal approach, due to Stalnaker, takes exactly the opposite position
from Gazdar's: pragmatics cleans up the context references before semantics can do its
job. A sentence "together with some features of the context ... determines a proposition; this in turn, together with a possible world, determines a truth value. An interpreted sentence, then, corresponds to a function from contexts into propositions, and a
proposition is a function from possible worlds into truth values." (Stalnaker 1972: 385)
The advantage of all these definitions of pragmatics in linguistics and logic is theirneatness. But I would still prefer a maybe messy, but more open approach.

3. Some aspects of pragmatics
Going back to the pragmatic question par excellence: "How did this utterance
come to be produced?", I want to go through a number of areas of language study andtry to show how applying this pragmatic question can generate new research questions
rather than trying to find better answers to old questions.

3.1.

Dialogue
Historically, one of the first pragmatists was the Greek sophist Protagoras, a contemporary of Plato and Socrates. From the fragments of his works that have been preserved, we can see that he was interested in context. For me, the original pragmaticstatement is the Protagorean Man is the measure of all things reported by Plato in his
dialogue Theaitetos (St. I 152a). There, Socrates discusses the truth of the statement'Six is more.' For Protagoras, it depends on the context whether or not this is a true
statement: six is more than four but less than twelve. For Plato (or his spokesperson
Socrates), on the other hand, 'Six is more' is neither true nor false, but simply devoidof sense. Here, already in the early history of Western thinking (long before the disciplines of linguistics and semiotic had developed), we have a clash of two approaches:
Protagoras was interested in rhetoric, Plato in philosophy; Protagoras looked at speechacts in context, Plato only at context-independent statements.
But context leads us immediately to the fundamental role of dialogue. Protagoras

60

distinguished four types of speech (Myo~): wish, question, answer and command. 3 In
his classification of speech, Protagoras has no place for those statements that Plato wasso very interested in. Protagoras does not even recognize an independent category'statement'. For him, there are no statements, only answers to questions. And answers
only occur in dialogue.
This echoes (or preludes on) the question par excellence of pragmatics: How did
this utterance come to be produced? This also means: As an answer to what did thisutterance come to be produced? Seen from a point of view of dialogue, the basic pragmatic question lets us investigate why an utterance was made as a reaction to an utterance of the partner in dialogue. Asking this question can lead to a study of adjacency
pairs, but can also open our eyes to issues like cooperation, accommodation and power
structures in interaction.

Entextualization
Next I want to look at the concept of text. We start again with the pragmatic question: "How did this utterance come to be produced?" But what is an utterance? Wetake part in linguistic activities all the time, but how could we analyze them, if there
were not a cultural technique that made it possible to (literally) look at language repeatedly. This is the production of texts. Text is "divorced from its context of action andsituation" (Malinowski 1935: 8), but this being divorced from the context has the advantage that a text is transportable in space and time, which an utterance is not. Turningan utterance into a text can be done by memorizing it or writing it down, but also byother types of recording (on tape or other electronic media). This idea was expressed
first by the Polish-British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, but also later by theGerman linguist Konrad Ehlich, who wrote, "I talk about a text when an utterance of a
speaker S is retained after the original speech situation. For this, it needs fixation andstorage. For a text, it is always possible to remove it from its speech situation." (Ehlich
1979: 426, my translation; see also Haberland 1999). 4
With texts, the speech situation is 'stretched' or 'tom apart' (Ehlich 2007): speakerand hearer originally had to be in the same place and the same time. After the invention of writing, writer and reader can be in different places in different times. Other
techniques (telephone, radio, film, tv, audio and video recordings, internet chat rooms)
create other possibilities of 'stretched' speech situations either in time, or space, or

3.2.

both.

quoted in Diogenes Laertius IX, 53; cf. also Haberland (1985: 381)
This, of course, also reminds of Bakhtin, who wrote " ... any sentence, ... can be repeated anunlimited number of times . . .. But as an utterance (or part of an utterance) no one sentence, even if it
has only one word, can ever be repeated: it is always a new utterance (even if it is a quotation)."(1986: 69).
3

4

Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

61

But reducing language from something that occurs to something that can beretained, transmitted and analyzed is also an action. This act, too, can be addressed
through a variant of the pragmatic question par excellence: How come that this speech
event has been reduced to a text? 'Entextualization', the creation of text from utterances, occurs not only in research, but also in society's institutions; it is "the process bywhich circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context andreifying it as a bounded object" (Bucholtz and Park 1999). Entextualization takes place
not only in research of different kinds (including linguistic), it is also practiced in society's institutions, where it is both one of the basic ways in which institutions can function at all and one of the mechanisms for building and maintaining authority.
Text can be created by entextualizing utterances, but many texts are not createdfrom utterances. They are not transcripts of something spoken (like in research interviews and in parliaments and law courts), but are composed without a pre-existing,'entextualizable' model. Thus it appears that transcription and composition are two different modes of producing a text.
But even texts produced in composition can be seen as containing an implicit dialogue, although only one side of the dialogue is represented in the text, while the voiceof the readers remains implicit. Text can be seen as implicit dialogue: "In a live dialog
the burden of exposition or argument by means of question and answer is distributed
between the participants, whereas in a composition the burden of this discourse rests
upon one person alone - the composer. This means that, while the basic semanticallycomplete unit of discourse in a dialog will be an explicit question plus a direct answer,
in a composition the basic semantically complete unit of discourse will be an answer
that contains its question- that is, an assertion." (Gray 1977: 286)
In terms of Ehlich's 'stretched' or 'torn apart' speech situation, one could say thatthe author is no longer present when the reader approaches the text. The paradox liesin the fact that the text's understanding is co-constructed by author and reader, althoughauthor and reader are not present together in the same situation (which should make coconstruction impossible). Thus, the dialogue that the text represents is only implicit.
The author has to anticipate the reader's questions, and the reader has to reconstructwhat the author thought were the questions that the reader would ask. "In order to be a
succesful author, you have to have cooperative readers." (Mey 1999: 242)
In good texts, which are cohesive and coherent (in the sense of de Beaugrande andDressler 1981), this cooperative co-construction runs smoothly and apparently effortlessly. In bad texts, the implicit dialogue is lost in the translation from the author's
thoughts into a manifest text.
In a pragmatic approach to text production, Gray's concept of implicit dialogue
provides us with ways of finding an answer to the question, "How did this piece ofcomposition come to be produced?"Transcription
One special kind of entextualization is transcription. This is a very specific type oftext production which linguists mostly associate with field work and the transcription ofdata practised by conversation analysts and ethnographic linguists. 'Inscription of
speech into writing' plays a part in non-academic institutions that we more often associate with politics or the power apparatuses of society like legislative assemblies(parliaments) and courts. There, the taking of minutes or records has a history that
predates modern recording techniques. Before 1771, publication of the debates of theWestminster Parliament was a criminal offence (this form of entextualization must havebeen practised, otherwise there would not have been a need to sanction it). From 1809,
Thomas Curson Hansard legally published the Parliamentary debates.
Transcription is also a matter of politics. The process that transforms an utterance
into a text is a reduction. It is a process of selection and therefore always 'partial', inboth senses of the word.
The variant of the pragmatic question par excellence that comes up in connection
with transcription is, "Why was this utterance transcribed in this way?" What are, then,its implications for the institutions that use transcripts (as discussed by Bucholtz andPark 2009)? Celia Roberts expressed this very clearly in 1997 when she wrote, "Asreaders, we can ask of any transcription: How did it come to be produced? Whose
story is it? How much story does it tell?" (Roberts 1997: 170, my italics) (A similar
point was made by Judith Green, Maria Franquiz and Carol Dixon: "Transcribing,therefore, is a political act ... a transcript is a text that 're' -presents an event; it is not
the event itself. Following this logic, what is re-presented is data constructed by aresearcher for a particular purpose, not just talk written down." (Green, Franquiz andDixon 1997: 172)) The problem has often been that researchers have tended to forget
about the data once a transcript was available. This makes it difficult to keep comparing
the representation of the event with what it represents. Hence, reduced and partial as
the transcript may be, it appears as if it were the data itself, not just its representation.

3.3.

Language alternation
Now let us have a look at another aspect of the pragmatic question par excellence,"How did this utterance come to be produced?" We live in a multilingual world. We
all know this, but students of language have often ignored it. The monolingual speechsituation has largely been accepted as the norm. Cases like code-switching (or language
alternation in a broader sense) have been considered marginal, typical for specific societies. But more generally, in a multilingual society, every utterance implies a choice
between languages: why has an utterance been produced in this language and not in
another?
While multilingualism has traditionally been regarded as limited to particular societies, we have to realize that encounters involving several languages occur more andmore in our world of increased transnational contacts. Multilingual communication is
3.4.

Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

63

not restricted to what we traditionally consider multilingual societies. The following
dialogue is part of a phone call between Denmark and Japan in 1995.5 The European
customer C has called a ryokan in Tokyo to make a reservation for a room, and is talking to the owner A:
1
2A:
3 C:

(telephone rings)~iv', ?'RO)~:l*iB~.::.'"~v'iT£b0), .:: ~ t? o A q=. v"T*~O) NN ~To
7/7-7 iP t? 'l:~'i" 7Nt"""Cf.J* L..t:.v'lv~TiJ{,[ ... ]

~

20A:
21 C:
22A:
23 C:
24A:
25 C:
26A:
27 C:

~± v', Mifff~i" ot·-? <b £b fJ il{ t -? .:::~·~~,i-toe:· -? <b £b fJ il{ t -? oX. X., 4'7 7 7 A <b .::.'"~v' i Til{o-t"-? ~T ~o £b 0), 7 7 7 A O)iJ}~~j:fpJ ~~TiJ~o~iv', il}~~± zero three, three eight two two, two two five two.

Q:=, :=A==, ==.n.=~L..t:.oc·-? <b £b f) i,){ c -? .:::-~-"' i L..t:.o~iv',~J:~'?oThe interesting point is the language shift in line 24. After a long conversation in
Japanese, involving negotiation about booking a room (omitted here), A remarks (in line
22) that the ryokan now has a fax machine. Mter C's question about the number, A
gives it to C but in English. Why does the ryokan owner suddenly shift into English, alanguage that he cannot even be sure that the customer knows (at least, C has not indicated earlier that he knows English)? And why does C repeat the fax number in line 25
in Japanese, thereby both signalling uptake of the information given in line 24 but also
refusal to accept the language shift? The variant of the pragmatic question par excellence that concerns us here is, "Why was this utterance produced in this language andnot in another?"

3.5. Metapragmatic acts
Claudia Caf:fi has introduced the term "metapragmatics", and we have already mentioned the first of her three senses of this term, viz. the one dealing with the theoreticaldebate on pragmatics and its central concerns, its epistemological foundations, and thedefinition of its relevant object and scope.
Leaving out Caffi's second sense, 6 I will focus on the third sense of metapragmat-

5 The example is taken from Haberland (2007: 134), where a rendering in Latin script and a glossing is provided.
6 "This [second] kind of metapragmatics, which can be related to the problems of the universals ofhuman communication, is transcendental in a Kantian sense inasmuch as it deals with the constitutive

64

ics, which has to do with the judgments of appropriateness regarding one's own andother people's communicative behavior. These judgments feed the 'know-how' of controlling and planning, as well as giving and receiving feedback on, the ongoing interaction. (Caffi 1998: 581)
Combining Caffi 's third sense of metapragmatics and Mey's concept of "pragmaticact" (Mey 2001: 212) allows us to introduce the concept of a 'metapragmatic act'.
Metapragmatic acts are those acts in which we both explicitly and (mostly) implicitly
monitor what we and others are doing in interaction. Frequently this is done throughsomething we say but also often through interruptions, comments or repairs. Like otherpragmatic acts, metapragmatic acts do not necessarily include specific speech acts.
Metapragmatic acts can be realized by silence and even by language shift: the language
shift in line 24 of the example of section 3.4 can be interpreted as a metapragmatic act.
So can the ensuing failure to take up the language shift in line 25. It is not obvious,
though, what these act actually do, i.e. what they are acts of We still have not answered
the question why A shifts into English (accommodating to the customer?) in line 24 andwhy C stubbornly sticks to speaking Japanese in line 25. In fact, C's answering Ns
giving the fax number in English by repeating it in Japanese can both be interpreted as
an act of acknowledgment and an act of repair.
Another example of a metapragmatic act is the following, taken from a study of a
Greek mother tongue class in Sweden (Konstantinou 2008: 121£.). A and B are students and T is their teacher:
1 A:

(tr)
2
3 T:

(tr)
4A:

5 B:
6 T:
7 A, B:

Kat:: Kav- (0.5) Kat KaVU).U:: npaKnKij cr'to pEO'E\jft6v
Kekanke kaname praktiki sto
resepsi6n
A::nd diand we.did practice at.the reception
and we did our on the-job-training at the reception(2.5) .hh hhh
E'tcrt bE MyETati pmE\jft6vj (turns her gaze to the class)etsi oe lejete
resepsi6n
so not is.called reception
Isn't that what it's called? reception?
runo8oxfl il
ipooo9i
reception
Luno8oxfliJ
runo8ox:xfl ~ 1
reception
Lhahhaha: Jelements of human knowledge." (Caffi 1998: 581)

Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

65

In this excerpt, the students insist on 'purist', but actually unidiomatic language use.
They reject the teacher's correct use of a French loan (resepsi6n) for 'front desk' (of ahotel) and replace it by an autochthonous Greek word (ipoom;{), a lexical item appropriate in a hospital, but not in a hotel. This is a metapragmatic act, a "labelling of preceding actions ... or subsequent ones" (Caffi 1998: 585).
Actually, there are several metapragmatic acts within the excerpt: in line 2, A's
hesitation is followed by an inbreath (tentatively: "I said something wrong"), in line 3,
the teacher's asserts that the expression was correct (meaning "go on, you're OK"), andin lines 4 and 5, the two students suggest a repair ("this is the way we should talknow").
Metapragmatic acts are regulative acts in speech communication, but unlike speechacts in the narrower sense, they do not have to have a propositional content. Hesitationin line 2 is an act, as is the inbreath in the same line. The utterance in line 3 is an
explicit metapragmatic act which also happens to be a speech act (a rhetorical question),and finally, the repair acts in line 4 are metapragmatic acts which also are metacommunicative acts: providing a 'better' word, a repair.
Metapragmatic acts reflect norms. In this case, an act of 'repair' (actually of selfrepair) comments on the norm of purity: this is a language class, one should avoid loanwords. The norm is 'languages have to be kept apart at all cost', even at the cost ofusing the wrong expression.
Here, too, asking for the meaning of an utterance does not make much sense, atleast not in the sense of a meaning carried by some propositional content. Among theacts quoted above, some have no propositional content at all; a single word has only
lexical meaning, but uttering it as a repair makes sense. Asking why this metapragmatic act has been performed, in contrast, is another variant of the pragmatic question par
excellence.

4.

Conclusion

There are three possible objections I would like to address.
The first was formulated by Professor He Ziran in Guangzhou after a lecture that I
gave during the Pragmatics summer school in July 2006. He asked, "But isn't it much
more difficult to teach pragmatics as a perspective rather than a discipline?" My answer
is that the existing textbooks (especially Jacob Mey's "Pragmatics") show that this does
not have to be the case for graduate students.
The second objection is: does the perspective approach not simply amount to characterizing pragmatics as a "critical rather than purely academic endeavour" (Verschueren
1999: 869)? Not necessarily. It all depends on the questions. If you look at language
use from the point of user and context, it might be more difficult to avoid the sociallyrelevant ("critical") questions, but there is no guarantee that they will be asked. So"perspective" pragmatics is not necessarily "critical" pragmatics.

66

The third question is, does the perspective approach not blur the borderline
between pragmatics and sociolinguistics?
This has to be taken seriously, since sociolinguistics often has been characterized
by questions similar to the pragmatic question par excellence. In 1972, Labovdescribed the basic sociolinguistic question as "posed by the need to understand why
anyone says anything" (1972: 207). Beatriz Lavandera elaborated on this by asking,"What does anyone say anything for?" (1978: 171) Florian Coulmas (2005) has characterized sociolinguistics as the study of speakers' choices. All this shows that both pragmatics and sociolinguistics share an interest in understanding why people communicate
in the way they do and what choices they make. Similarly, the concern with social
rather than referential meanings as expressed by the Dutch sociolinguists Rene Appel,
Gerard Hubers and Guus Meijer (1976: 23) goes beyond semantics as the study of
speaker-independent meanings exactly like pragmatics goes beyond semantics by taking
the speakers and users of language into account. But sociolinguistics is concerned withchoices and meanings as patterned within a social group or between social groups,
while pragmatics looks at the single speech act or pragmatic act itself. This act occurs
in society, is shaped by it and contributes to society's reproduction, but it not necessarily indexical of the speaker's group membership. So there is still a division of labor
between sociolinguistics and pragmatics even if one adopts the 'perspective' approach,even though the borderline is certainly less sharp than in the case of the sub-discipline
approach (which actually is motivated by the desire for clear-cut methodological borders). But pragmatics still is different from sociolinguistics. There are many things
that pragmatists do and that sociolinguists do not. The microanalysis of conversation,
the analysis of the relationship between discourse and text, and the description of language alternation in communication can be helpful for sociolinguistic analyses, but are
not sociolinguistics in themselves. The communities of practice for sociolinguists andpragmatists may overlap, but they do not coincide.

References
Appel, R., G. Hubers and G. Meijer. 1976. Sociolingui'stiek (Sociolinguistics). Utrecht: Het
Spectrum.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. "The Problem of Speech Genres." In C. Emerson and M. Holquist (eds.)
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 60-102. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Bar-Hillel, Y. 1954. "Indexical Expressions." Mind 63, 359-379.
Bucholtz, M. and J. S.-Y. Park. 2009: "Introduction. Public Transcripts: Entextualization and
Linguistic Representation in Institutional Contexts." Text&Talk 29: 5, 485-502.
Caffi, C. 1998. "Metapragmatics." In J. L. Mey (ed.) Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, 581586. Amsterdam: Elsevier
Cou1mas, F. 2005. Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers' Choices. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
de Beaugrande, R. and W. Dressler. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longmans.

Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

67

Ehlich, K. 1979. Verwendungen der Deixis beim sprachlichen Handeln: Linguistisch-philologische
Untersuchungen zum hebriiischen deiktischen System, 2 vols. (Use of deixis in linguistic
action. Linguistic-philological investigations into the Hebrew deictic system). Frankfurt am
Main: Lang.
Ehlich, K. 2007. "Text und sprachliches Handeln. Die Entstehung von Texten aus dem Bedtirfnis
nach trberlieferung" (Text and linguistic action. The emergence of texts out of the need for
tradition). InK. Ehlich: Sprache und sprachliches Handeln, Band 3: Diskurs- NarrationText- Schrift. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. [1983]
Gazdar, G. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form. New York:
Academic Press.
Gray, B. 1977. "From Discourse to Dialog." Journal of Pragmatics 1: 3, 283-297.
Green, J., M. Franquiz and C. Dixon. 1997. "The Myth of the Objective Transcript: Transcribing
as a Situated Act." TESOL Quarterly 31: 1, 172-176.
Haberland, H. 1985. "Book Review: Klaus Heinrich, Dahlemer Vorlesungen I. Tertium datur:
Eine religionsphilosophische Einfiihrung in die Logik." Journal of Pragmatics 9: 2-3, 377417.
Haberland, H. 1999. "Text, Discourse, discours: The Latest Report from the Terminology Vice
Squad." Journal of Pragmatics 31: 7, 911-918.
Haberland, H. 2007. "Language Shift in Conversation as a Metapragmatic Comment." In W.
Bublitz and A. Hubler (eds.) Metapragmatics in Use, 129-140. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Haberland, H. and J. L. Mey. 1977. "Editorial: Pragmatics and Linguistics." Journal of
Pragmatics 1: 1, 1-16.
Haberland, H. and J. L. Mey. 2002. "Linguistics and Pragmatics, 25 Years After." Journal of
Pragmatics 34: 12, 1671-1682.
Konstantinou, L. 2008. Language Alternation in the Family and the Mother Tongue Class: A
Study of Interactional Practices of Greek Background Residents in Sweden. Ph.D. thesis,
Roskilde University.
Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lavandera, B. 1978. "Where does the Sociolinguistic Variable Stop?" Language in Society 7: 2,
171-182.
Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malinowski, B. 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic, vol. 2. London: Allen and Unwin.
Mey, J. L. 1999. When Voices Clash: A Study in Linguistic Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Mey, J. L. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mey, J. L., H. Haberland and K. Fischer. 2010. "Editorial." Pragmatics and Society 1: 1, 1-8.
Morgan, J. L. 1977. "Linguistics: The Relationship of Pragmatics to Semantics and Syntax."
Annual Review of Anthropology 6, 57-67.
Rajagopalan, K. 2005. "Linguistic Pragmatics: A Discipline Bedevilled by its own History?
-Implications for Intercultural Studies." Intercultural Pragmatics 2: 1, 93-97.
Roberts, C. 1997. "Transcribing Talk: Issues of Representation." TESOL Quarterly 31: 1, 167172.
Stalnaker, R. C. 1972. "Pragmatics." In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural
Languages, 380-397. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Verschueren, J. 1999. "Whose Discipline? Some Critical Reflections on Linguistic Pragmatics."

68

Journal of Pragmatics 31: 7, 869-879.
Verschueren, J., J.-0. Ostman, J. Blommaert, and Ch. Bulcaen (eds.). 1995. Handbook ofPragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. 2005. "Reply to Rajagopalan." Intercultural Pragmatics 2: 1, 99-103.
Yule, G. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.