Repository | Book | Chapter

Pragmatics emerged among the sciences of language at the end of the 1960's in reaction to certain totalizing models in linguistics: structuralism (primarily in Europe) and generative grammar (initially in the United States). Certain disciples of Chomsky became dissatisfied with autonomous syntax and later with generative semantics: they decided to break away from their mentor. Whereas Chomsky continued to talk a lot about very little, they defied him by speaking very suggestively about an excessively broad range of phenomena. Pragmatics — which Bar-Hillel considered as a "wastebasket discipline" in the fifties — nevertheless gained respectability. The history of pragmatics spans, of course, much more than three decades. The Stoic conception of language, in the shadow of the great Greek tradition and therefore intensely subversive, had in fact a pragmatic aim. The term pragmatisch appears in Kant: it expresses a relation with a human goal, this goal being only determinable within a community. This characterization naturally inspires the pragmaticism of the Neo-Kantian Charles Sanders Peirce1. It is this Kant-Peirce lineage that led to Morris and Carnap's rather bland conceptions of pragmatics, after the heavy losses incurred by positivism and behaviorism. In any case, despite the constant presence of a pragmatic approach in the history of thought, this reassessment of pragmatics (against the triumphs proclaimed by structuralism and generativism) was experienced as a significant breakthrough. A whole range of pragmatics came to the attention of linguists. To employ the rather simplistic criteria of intellectual geography, one can classify them into two very distinct groups: Anglo-Saxon and "continental" (European, if you like) pragmatics. Anglo-Saxon pragmatics reconstructs the meaning of discursive sequences from the properties of the situation in which this sequence is produced. According to continental pragmatics, on the other hand, meaning is essentially determined by the "life of discourse", or, in the words of Benveniste, by subjectivity in discourse. One can then oppose a situational pragmatics to an enunciative pragmatics. These two classes of pragmatics undoubtedly overlap with two intellectual mentalities that are wellknown in the social sciences: Anglo-Saxon versus "continental", some kind of objectivism (bracketing the speaking subject) versus some kind of subjectivism (refusing to reduce the subjective to a situational or objectifiable position formalized, for example, as referential indices).

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-1773-9_1

Full citation: