Table Of ContentPragmaticizing Understanding
Pragmaticizing Understanding
Studies for Jef Verschueren
Edited by
Michael Meeuwis
University of Ghent
Jan-Ola Östman
University of Helsinki
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pragmaticizing understanding : studies for Jef Verschueren / edited by Michael Meeuwis,
Jan-Ola Östman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Pragmatics. 2. Semantics. 3. Discourse analysis. I. Verschueren, Jef. II. Meeuwis,
Michael. III. Östman, Jan-Ola.
P99.4.P72P7354 2012
401’.45--dc23 2011052401
isbn 978 90 272 1191 0 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 1192 7 (Pb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7483 0 (Eb)
© 2012 – John Benjamins B.V.
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John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
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Table of contents
On how to pragmaticize understanding 1
Michael Meeuwis and Jan-Ola Östman
Does the autonomy of linguistics rest on the autonomy of syntax?
An alternative framing of our object of study 15
Michael Silverstein
Classifying illocutionary acts, or, a tale of Theory and Praxis 39
Marina Sbisà
Spatial indexicalities and spatial pragmatics 53
Peter Auer
Pragmatics as a facilitator for child syntax development 77
Susan Ervin-Tripp
Pragmatics, linguistic competence, and Conversation Analysis 101
Charles Antaki
Pragmatics and dialogue phenomena: Are they essentially connected? 113
Yorick Wilks
Roots of the wakimae aspect of linguistic politeness:
Modal expressions and Japanese sense of self 121
Sachiko Ide
“Laura! Laura! Wake up”: The politics and pragmatics
of intertextuality and appropriation 139
Robin Lakoff
Knowledge, discourse and domination 151
Teun A. van Dijk
The public face of language: Why spelling matters 197
Jenny Cook-Gumperz and John J. Gumperz
vi Pragmaticizing Understanding
The compleat angle on pragmatics: A personal note 213
Jacob L. Mey
Tabula Gratulatoria, with a message from Sandy Thompson 219
Index 229
On how to pragmaticize understanding
Michael Meeuwis and Jan-Ola Östman
Ghent University / University of Helsinki
1. An understanding of pragmatics
Understanding is at the core of all scholarly research in the humanities and in
the behavioural and social sciences. We may try to work in the direction of find-
ing rationally explainable ‘truths’ in the way a natural scientist needs to go about
investigating his or her objects of study, but for most of us in the ‘soft’ sciences,
the very attempt at dissociating the object of study from the studying subject is
sooner or later doomed to failure. And that is precisely what is so challenging
and what fills our daily work with surprises – and, yes, with deeper and deeper
understanding(s).
Understanding the history of the discipline of pragmatics is not an exception.
The question of whether pragmatics constituted a subfield within linguistics was
for long a central and important one, and we probably never received a true-or-
false answer to it. But it is the pre-understanding of pertinent questions asked in
the second half of the twentieth century that paved the way and built the ground
on which the field of pragmatics stands today. The early impetus for getting into
the functions of language and language use came from outside linguistics: in
the late 1960s, linguists like Haj Ross ‘by chance’ happened upon what scholars
in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology were doing with lan-
guage, and made this known to mainstream linguists. Sure, there had been an
interest in language function before the generative semanticists ‘rediscovered’ its
relevance – just think of Boas, Malinowski, and Sapir – but it was the generative
semanticists and the children of ordinary language philosophy who started the
avalanche of systematic research in the field in the 1960s. At the time, language
use and function were already an integral part of research in other disciplines – it
was only the linguists, many of whom were more concerned with form than with
function, who were late.
2 Michael Meeuwis and Jan-Ola Östman
In those late 1960s and the early 1970s, things really caught on all over the
world. In the U.S.A., as mentioned, generative semanticists (Ross, McCawley,
R. Lakoff, G. Lakoff, Postal, among others) went far beyond syntax and sentence
semantics, John Searle developed his speech act theory on the basis of J. L. Austin’s
seminal work, and H. P. Grice introduced notions like the co-operative principle,
maxims, and implicatures. In Europe, stylistics and text linguistics were receiv-
ing more and more attention, gradually approaching methods of analysis that
today we associate with discourse analysis. Sociolinguists went beyond William
Labov’s correlational approach, into attitude research and cues in discourse.
Going along with ‘the linguistic turn’ taken in other disciplines, sections of an-
thropology more systematically went in a linguistic direction, and sociology and
ethnomethodology gave birth to conversation analysis. In the late 1970s, Jacob
Mey and Hartmut Haberland started the Journal of Pragmatics, and in the early
1980s, in the annus mirabilis 1983 to be more precise, the first major textbooks
appeared, namely Stephen Levinson’s Pragmatics (1983) and Geoffrey Leech’s
Principles of Pragmatics (1983) – both of which have stood the test of time and
are still widely used today.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a young Belgian scholar started to work
out his own ideas as to how the different attempts at approaching language from
the perspective of its use and functions could be unified. Jef Verschueren was in
contact with John and Claire Benjamins; together, they started an important en-
deavour in publishing that helped make pragmatics known to the world as a disci-
pline sui generis, amongst others through the book series Pragmatics and Beyond,
whose first volumes appeared as early as 1980. The “and beyond” part was meant
to make one thing clear from the very start: there should be no predefined limits
in terms of where and how far the discipline was to be taken, as long as things
were done systematically.
But perhaps more important than the publications was the idea of estab-
lishing an international organization through which practitioners of pragmatics
could physically (and, later, virtually) meet. The first seed for the International
Pragmatics Association (IPrA) was planted at a summer school meeting between
scholars from the east and the west of Europe at the Inter-University Centre in
Dubrovnik, former Yugoslavia, in 1984. One year later, IPrA’s first international
conference was organized in Viareggio, Italy, and in 1986 IPrA was formally es-
tablished under Belgian law. The most recent conference, held in Manchester in
July 2011, lasted six days and hosted some 1,100 participants, with presentations
in 17 parallel sessions. IPrA at present has over 1,600 members in over 60 coun-
tries. And behind all this is the association’s Secretary General, Jef Verschueren –
and, let us not forget, his family and friends, as helpers at conferences, and his
wife Ann Verhaert, the Executive Secretary of IPrA. IPrA is as true a centre of
On how to pragmaticize understanding 3
pragmatics as are all the world-famous universities where pragmatics is taught
and practiced. In fact, there are few people these days who would not associate
Jef Verschueren with pragmatics – while many of us also associate pragmatics
with IPrA. It is difficult to imagine what pragmatics would have been like with-
out Jef and IPrA: certainly stuff on language function and language use would
have been written, but it is doubtful to what extent scholars in different areas
within pragmatics would have been able to keep up with what is going on in the
field generally without the Association.
2. The pragmatics of understanding
It should be obvious to anyone familiar with Jef’s work that the title we have cho-
sen for this volume is a reflection of one of his most influential books published so
far, Understanding Pragmatics (Verschueren 1999). But to be sure, our title is more
than just a pun. It is above all meant to emphasize the leading role Jef has played
in furthering the discipline along a conviction that a proper comprehension of the
processes through which participants in interaction arrive at, or fail to arrive at,
(an) understanding (of) one another is only possible when such processes are ex-
amined for their contextual, situational, contingent, use- and user-specific, con-
ditions. Indeed, Jef’s major contribution is his message that in order to unravel
communicative (mis)understanding, we need to emphasize its pragmatic nature,
i.e. ‘pragmaticize’ it. We also owe to Jef the insight that this pragmaticization of
(mis)understanding cannot be carried out successfully if predicated on a modular
viewpoint, in which the traditional layers of linguistic structuring (phonology,
morphology, syntax, and semantics) are simply complemented with an extra one,
pragmatics. Instead, pragmatics needs to be introduced as a perspective, embrac-
ing and encompassing all types of linguistic choices conversationalists make.
Pragmaticizing understanding is, therefore, not only something the authors we
invited to contribute to this volume do in the chapters to come. It is first and fore-
most something Jef has been doing and has been teaching us to do throughout the
entirety of his professional career.
Who, then, are the authors we invited, and why them? The volume brings
together scholars who played a key role in the early history and development of
the discipline of pragmatics ‘very broadly conceived’, as Jef would typically put
it. They are people who we see as having had a major impact in the formative
years of the field, and who are still very actively involved in doing research in the
pragmatics of understanding today. While the authors had a free choice of topic,
we encouraged each of them to incorporate their individual views of, and per-
sonal relations to, the history or future of pragmatics, and what they felt to be the
