Volume 8, Issue 1

Austin rejected the objectification of “meanings” and was also critical of the identification of meaning with truth-conditions. Much of his work appears to be inspired by a conception of meaning as use. In particular, apparently at least, his “performative utterances” are utterances whose understanding amounts to the understanding of their use. But Austin did not endorse the tendency, common in Ordinary Language Philosophy, to explain the meaning of linguistic expressions in terms of their use alone. His distinction between locutionary meaning and illocutionary force was designed to avoid such a reduction. But it is unclear whether (and if so, how) speech act theory can escape paying the price of a new objectification of meaning (as consisting of “propositions” to which “forces” apply).

Recovering what speakers intend to communicate is widely recognized as the fundamental goal of linguistic understanding. Most scholars within linguistic pragmatics assume that intentions are private mental acts that operate prior to the performance of linguistic actions, and that listeners, once again, must somehow infer people’s inner intentions to understand what they mean in context. This article outlines some of the experimental evidence suggesting that intentions are critical in communication. However, my main goal is to suggest that intentional meaning is not necessarily a prior mental act that occurs before people speak, nor is the recovery of a person’s so-called intentions the main goal of linguistic interaction. I describe a self-organizational approach that explains how linguistic utterances may be enacted in an intentional way without there being underlying intentions driving these actions. This perspective offers a vision of pragmatic linguistic action that encompasses the totality of people’ s behaviors when coordinating with others.

This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, focusing on the links between the process of utterance understanding, which is in the scope of pragmatic theories, and consenting to beliefs (influence), which is in the scope of Discourse Analysis (section 2). Next (section 3), we introduce an extended notion of presuppositions which we name discursive presuppositions, which are unexpressed contents but nonetheless propositions that need to be incorporated in the background and thus consented to in order to provide not meaning proper but relevance to the utterance. Last section (section 4) is dedicated to the examination of two examples where discursive presuppositions are exploited in persuasiveness.

The study of pragmatic disorders is of interest to speech-language pathologists who have a professional responsibility to assess and treat communication impairments. However, these disorders, it will be argued in this paper, have a significance beyond the clinical management of clients with communication impairments. Specifically, pragmatic disorders can now make a contribution to the diagnosis of a range of clinical conditions in which communication is adversely affected. These conditions include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the autistic spectrum disorders, schizophrenia and the dementias. Pragmatic disorders are already among the criteria used to diagnose some of these conditions (e.g. ADHD), although they are not described in these terms. In other conditions (e.g. the dementias), pragmatic disorders have potential diagnostic value in the absence of reliable biomarkers of these conditions and similar initial presenting symptoms. Using clinical data, and the findings of empirical studies, the case is made for the inclusion and/or greater integration of pragmatic disorders in the formal classificatory systems that are used to diagnose a range of disorders. A previously unrecognised role for pragmatic impairments in the nosology and diagnosis of clinical disorders is thereby established.

This article introduces what I will call �cinematic discourse� as a potential candidate for pragmatic analysis. Cinematic discourse, as defined here, is not language use in film (dramatic dialogue, fictional conversation, scripted interaction) but the audiovisual discourse of film narration itself: the discourse of mise-en-scene, cinematography, montage, and sound design used by filmmakers in narrating cinematic stories. Cinematic discourse is filmmakers' main expressive vehicle and primary form of communication with, and influence over, film viewers. The article describes how staging, camera work, editing, and other conventional cinematic depictive practices are used to capture attention, shape perspectives, guide perceptions, and steer viewers' inferences about the unfolding narrative. The first half of the article describes different modes of cinematic depiction and their metapragmatic functions; the second discusses issues of cinematic focalization and attention, film co-text as context, cinematic pragmatic acts, audiovisual inferences, film deixis, and camera discourse roles. The goal of the article is to broadly outline some features of cinematic discourse that warrant attention in media pragmatics and to point out challenges that would have to be met in the future in developing pragmatic approaches to investigating these.

The paper attempts to look at silence from the point of view of Grice's maxim of quantity, viz. if one has nothing to say, then one is silent. This will be examined against the background of studies that have been published over the last decades especially anthropological research on tribes in Africa (Igbo and Akan) and North America (Western Apaches), and studies on Finnish silence.

This study on the Speech Act of Promising builds on an article by Egner (2005) which claims that in many African Societies a promise is most often made not to be committed to its content but to be polite and save one's own or the addressee's face. While Egner opts for a Speech Act Theory approach to explain the phenomenon and comes to the conclusion that the speech act of promising may occur minus commitment, thus refuting the standard SAT claim, I have opted to treat the issue within Relevance Theory and claim that a true speech act of promising cannot be without commitment since it is a performative and institutional speech act which has to be committed by its very nature. I have rather explained that the concept PROMISE can be used as an ad hoc concept PROMISE* which conveys a speech act of "saying that" and which is a broadened version of the encoded concept to make commitment optional and include issues of politeness and face saving. While Egner claims that a committed speech act can be determined by linguistic indication most of the time I claim that the intended interpretation falls out naturally from the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure which is: "Follow the path of least effort in determining cognitive effects and stop when your expectation of relevance is fulfilled". Unlike Egner I claim that at the root of using non-committed promises as a face saving device are shame oriented cultures that need these kinds of mechanisms for politeness more than guilt oriented cultures.