NOTES
G: No, ko acuerdo ‘āpa ‘i a tãtou
7.2 SUMMARY
It was pointed out in the introduction that this volume has the following three central threads that bind the chapters into a complex whole:
1. Languages are used by their speakers in social interactions; they are first and foremost instruments for creating social bonds and accountability relations.
The means by which languages create these bonds and relations vary across languages and cultures.
2. Speech is part of the context of the situation in which it is produced, language has an essentially pragmatic character and ‘meaning resides in the pragmatic function of an utterance’ (Bauman 1992: 147).
x Speakers of a language follow conventions, rules and regulations in their use of language in social interactions.
x The meaning of words, phrases and sentences is conveyed in certain kinds of situative contexts.
x The speakers’ uses of language fulfil specific functions in and for these speakers’ communicative behaviour.
3. Pragmatics is the transdiscipline that studies these language- and culture-specific forms of language use.
186 Understanding pragmatics
The anecdote reported on the first pages of the volume was taken as exemplary for
‘understanding pragmatics’ because it introduced the central concerns of this transdiscipline. From the point of view of the six disciplines taken as being most relevant for pragmatics it was shown at the end of every chapter how this anecdote illustrates not only cultural differences in language use and understanding, but also how cultural, situative and interpersonal context and culture-specific conventions contribute to meaning in actual language use.
Keeping these fundamental insights in mind, the six chapters are briefly summarized as follows:
Chapter One pointed out that philosophers and linguists doing pragmatics understand:
x speech as the performing of actions in specific contexts; these actions have meaning and force and achieve certain effects which co-constitute and create social reality;
x that speech is primarily ‘an instrument for the creation of accountability relations’
(Seuren 2009: 140); and
x that one of the primary functions of a language is social binding where the resulting pact or ‘social contract’ is based on conventions and on the social competence of its speakers.
Chapter Two revealed that psychologists and linguists doing pragmatics emphasize:
x that deictic verbal references in speech constitute a collaborative task for speakers and hearers who interact with each other;
x that gestures that accompany speech are especially designed for addressees to establish not only social bonds but also to convey more or less complex additional information in social interaction; and
x that these references and gestures vary across languages and cultures.
Chapter Three illustrated how human ethologists and linguists doing pragmatics have shown:
x that humans have developed complex behaviour patterns which were differentiated through processes of ritualization into communicative behaviour signals;
x that these signals are used to develop social contact with others and to establish and maintain a social bond between the senders of the signals and their partners in social interactions;
x that some of the more complex signals have become social rites which increase the predictability of human behaviour and provide security and order in human interaction and that they are therefore highly important for group maintenance;
x that humans have developed highly complex and very culture-specific rituals with important functions of bonding which convey harmony, sympathy, trust and solidarity;
Understanding pragmatics 187 x that the familiarity with such forms of ritualized behaviour is the prerequisite for
getting access to a group because all its members have to be on ‘common ground’
if they want to interact adequately with each other;
x that given all these signals, rites and rituals, speech is just one part – although an important one – of human interaction, which is fundamentally multimodal in nature; and
x that despite the huge variety of these signals, rites and rituals it is possible to hypothesize that they could all be based on a finite set of conventionalized basic interaction strategies that might be universal.
Chapter Four emphasized that ethnologists and linguists doing pragmatics point out:
x that they understand speech as a mode of behaviour, a mode of action in which the meaning of an utterance is constituted by its function in certain contexts;
x that one of the primary forms of language is realized in phatic communion, a form of language use that has primarily bonding functions;
x that the situative context and the interactants’ common cultural knowledge provide the necessary information for understanding phatic expressions as a means to consolidate the relationship between the interactants;
x that the meaning of an utterance, thus, can only be understood in relation to the speech event in which it is embedded;
x that the rules that guide the communicative behaviour of members of a specific speech community can vary immensely; they have to be learned to achieve communicative competence within this community;
x that achieving linguistic and cultural competence in a speech community requires the understanding of how it structures, patterns and regulates its ways of speaking;
x that research on the interrelationship between language, culture and cognition treats language primarily as an instrument of thought; however, although language contributes in shaping thinking for non-verbal problem solving instances, it remains problematic to argue that it is only language that influences thought in general.
Chapter Five reported that sociologists and linguists doing pragmatics agree:
x that social interaction constitutes an institutional order with norms, rights and obligations that rule and regulate the interactants’ conduct and behaviour;
x that there are procedures and conventions regulating rights and obligations that provide interactants with rules and rituals for ‘playing’ their interaction ‘game’; the rules are based on social contract and social consensus;
x that participants in interactions are aware of the norms valid in their society and that they cooperate in maintaining the ritual and moral ‘interaction order’ of their social life;
188 Understanding pragmatics
x that the study of interaction must consider the whole social situation, the specific contexts in which they are rooted and on which they depend;
x that members of a community use commonsense practices and shared rules of interpretation as a means of practical reasoning to constitute, understand and make sense of their social world; and
x that conversation in interaction is a highly – and probably universally – ordered and structurally organized activity ‘in which participants co-construct meaning and social action in an exquisitely timed choreography of interlocking communicative moves’ (Mark Dingemanse [p.c.]); the understanding of the meaning of these moves in specific speech communities, however, requires cultural knowledge.
Chapter Six has shown that politically aware linguists point out:
x that an adequate description of a language demands knowledge of the social structure of its speakers; therefore, language must be studied in its social context with a strong emphasis on the specific speech situation and the social background and significance of the communicative interaction and the speakers involved;
x that language varieties are emblems of social identity; they not only mark group membership and solidarity, and thus have important bonding functions, they also index a speaker’s position within her or his speech community with respect to social rank; moreover, they also segregate others who lack an adequate command of the verbal skills that are characteristic for the group members’ verbal interactions;
x that language use and language ideology are crucial for the creation of sociocultural identity and normative for the regulation of social relations between specific speech groups in public interactions;
x that linguistic ideologies also have the function to legitimize power relations between group members and the distribution of power within a speech community as a whole. They control the political conditions within speech communities and proper conduct and behaviour of their members;
x that the understanding of a society’s linguistic ideologies is crucial for a proper understanding and adequate linguistic analysis of a number of verbal interactions and phenomena to be observed in group relations within a speech community.
These characteristic features of some of the core domains of the discipline provide ample evidence for the fact that linguistic pragmatics is rather a ‘transdiscipline’ that brings together and interacts with a rather broad variety of other disciplines within the humanities. These disciplines share with pragmatics the fundamental interest in human social (inter)action and the joint creation of meaning. Being a transdiscipline, pragmatics is also cross-linguistically and cross-culturally oriented; therefore it focuses on culture-specific and language-specific differences in actual language use and understanding. Here the question of how cultural, situative and interpersonal
Understanding pragmatics 189 context and culture- and language-specific norms and conventions contribute to meaning (and understanding) in actual language use are central.
The cross-linguistic/cross-cultural orientation of pragmatics has revealed that the theories developed in this field are predominantly rooted in West-European and Anglo-American traditions. Thus, in some cases, theories which claim to have universal validity – like the theories of Searle and Grice discussed in Chapter One – are falsified when they are confronted with non-Indo-European languages. This has led to increased ‘skepticism in relation to the universality of theories and findings’ within pragmatic circles which resulted in the recent emerging of the ‘“emancipatory pragmatics” movement ... which focuses precisely on the cultural embeddedness of analytical concepts and which ... consciously applies specific non-western notions of language use in theory building and empirical research’ (Verschueren 2011: 5). In the final section of this book some basic ideas of this new movement are presented in a brief outlook on future developments within pragmatics.