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The interface between pragmatics and conversation analysis

  • Paul Drew
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Pragmatics and its Interfaces
This chapter is in the book Pragmatics and its Interfaces

Abstract

In his authoritative account of Pragmatics, Levinson (1983) included conversation analysis (CA) as firmly part of pragmatics. Others have perhaps been more cautious about whether CA is really relevant to the pragmatics programme. Despite the differences and divergences between CA and pragmatics, they share a number of key interests, especially in three of the foundational areas of pragmatics – namely implicature (e.g., from Grice 1975), speech acts (social action) (e.g., from Austin 1962 and Searle 1969) and presupposition and well-formedness (e.g., from Lakoff 1971). I will show examples that demonstrate the distinctiveness of CA’s approach to these core pragmatic aspects of language use – in the spirit of demonstrating how CA’s approach complements and does not detract from approaches in pragmatics.

Abstract

In his authoritative account of Pragmatics, Levinson (1983) included conversation analysis (CA) as firmly part of pragmatics. Others have perhaps been more cautious about whether CA is really relevant to the pragmatics programme. Despite the differences and divergences between CA and pragmatics, they share a number of key interests, especially in three of the foundational areas of pragmatics – namely implicature (e.g., from Grice 1975), speech acts (social action) (e.g., from Austin 1962 and Searle 1969) and presupposition and well-formedness (e.g., from Lakoff 1971). I will show examples that demonstrate the distinctiveness of CA’s approach to these core pragmatic aspects of language use – in the spirit of demonstrating how CA’s approach complements and does not detract from approaches in pragmatics.

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