The Handbook is used as a basis for the online version: the Handbook of Pragmatics Online has been expanded and revised annually since Future versions will add further records and will include updates, rewritings and extensive revisions of already existing records. The Handbook of Pragmatics Online is available from www. The Handbook is also available in combination with the Bibliography of Pragmatics Online at a discounted rate. This Handbook surveys pragmatics from different perspectives, presenting the main theories in pragmatic research, incorporating seminal research as well as cutting-edge solutions.
It addresses questions of rational and empirical research methods, what counts as an adequate and successful pragmatic theory, and how to go about answering problems raised in pragmatic theory. In the fast-developing field of pragmatics, this Handbook fills the gap in the market for a one-stop resource to the wide scope of today's research and the intricacy of the many theoretical debates. It is an authoritative guide for graduate students and researchers with its focus on the areas and theories that will mark progress in pragmatic research in the future.
Each chapter introduces the topic and follows with a description of its theoretical underpinnings, an overview of existing literature, appraisal of current practice, concluding with a discussion of future directions for research and key readings. The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics is an essential resource for those with an interest in second language acquisition, pragmatics, and language teaching. It would seem that whatever else might come into its meaning, what is essential is that English speakers use this sentence when confronted with a dog, and not when confronted with, say, a horse.
However, is this true? For a start, we can think of cases where competent speakers might utter This is a dog when confronted with a horse — as a result of bad sight, of jocularity, irony, or poetic inspiration, etc.
Hence we are back at the conundrum of what establishes the connection between This is a dog and dogs. The usual rabbit that philosophers and lin- guists pull out of their hats here is the concept of disposition. This is a dog means that this is a dog and not, say, a horse because speakers are disposed to utter it when confronted with a dog. This disposition sometimes provokes the overt utterance, but more often than not it remains covert.
What does it mean that a speaker has a covert disposition to utter This is a dog? It amounts to the counterfactual claim that the person would utter it were it not for some hindrance.
What would substantiate such a claim? But at present we are party to no such mechanisms. Alternatively, we can interpret the claim as not a claim about an inner mechanism, but rather about empirical regularities. But for such a claim to have empirical content to be, for example, testable we would have to be able to specify the relevant factors. Otherwise the claim would be empty: any evidence would be compatible with it. Are we able to give an exhaustive catalog of things or events that stop one exclaiming This is a dog in the presence of a dog?
Can we say, for example, that principal factors are unwillingness to talk, preoccupation with other matters, or not noticing the dog in question? Hardly; we can clearly think of any number of others. Hence it seems that invoking the concept of disposition here is a mere illusion of explanation. Does this mean that there is, despite appearances, no intelligible connection between This is a dog and dogs after all?
I do not think so; but I think that we tend to look at this connection in the wrong way. What I think is the case is that the connection is normative rather than causal.
This is to say that the link between the occurrence and the utterance is not a matter of any causal mechanism connecting the two, but rather of the fact that to utter This is a dog when a dog is in focus is correct. What is a non-causal, normative connection? What is important for us is that playing football amounts to enjoying a spectrum of actions that are not available for us outside of its framework: get into an offside position, foul an opponent, or joy of joys!
How do such actions become available for me? Obviously because I, as well as my team-mates and our opponents, submit to the rules of football — it is the rules, and in particular the collective submission to them, that open up the space for the new kind of actions.
And the thesis I want to put forward and discuss is that linguistic actions, actions that we tend to describe as cases of meaningful talk, transfer of information, or stating facts or whatever else one can do with meaningful language , arise analogously: namely as a result of our collective recognition of the rules of language.
This recognition means nothing over and above the fact that we take certain linguistic utterances for correct, and others for incorrect. This may be the case on several disparate levels — an utterance may be, e. Thus, a rule in this sense is a matter of a collective awareness, of an awareness that something is correct and something else is incorrect, leading to the appropriate behavior praising the correct and trying to do away with the incorrect.
Let us start from the question of how we recognize the presence of a normative link of the kind discussed above. After all, as Quine reminded us, we all learn to speak by means of observing our elders and peers and as what we can perceive is exclusively behavior — hence, we can say, there cannot be anything in meaning that was not in behavior before. When learning a language we may witness a demonstration of using This is a dog as accompanying pointing at a dog. However, though this can indicate the existence of a link, it cannot intimate the nature of the link, let alone that it is a normative link.
Given our genetic tendency to imitate, we may come to utter This is a dog when pointing at a dog ourselves; but nothing apparently stops us from uttering it when pointing at things other than dogs — say, all furry things, or even at anything whatsoever. The decisive step here is that we must learn that using it when pointing at something not a dog is incorrect. How do we learn this? This is important, for this may help clarify one of the most frequent misunderstandings regarding the normativity of meaning: the normativity does not rid us of our freedom in using language and hence does not contradict the obvious fact that using language is a spontaneous activity — it merely restricts the freedom, still leaving a vast number of possibilities.
We will return to this later. And this may bring us to a suspicion that we have not done away with the concept of disposition we deemed suspicious above, but merely shifted it one level up: for do we not need the concept for the characterization of the concept of normative attitude? After all, not everybody who uses language incorrectly faces correction by others!
Am I criticizing my colleagues for pulling rabbits out of their hats only to end up pulling one out myself? Am I suggesting that behind or above human behavior and the whole network of causal relationships, in which it is embedded there looms some different, supernatural stratum of reality where we can encounter correctnesses?
Of course not, though admittedly it may sometimes be useful to invoke this picture as a metaphor. The point is rather that there are no such things as correctnesses. Why they seem to be here is that we seem to state facts about them; but what looks like declarative statements about such correctnesses — I will call the statements normatives — are not always really declaratives. This is a normative. There are two ways of employing a statement of this kind. First, one can state the fact that this kind of rule is in force in some community.
And true normatives are normatives posed precisely from this perspective. It follows that to say that rules exist is strictly speaking a metaphor: they do not exist, of course, in the way rocks, trees, or dolphins do. To say that a rule exists is to take some true normatives people use for ordinary declaratives.
It seems to be our human way to do this; but we should be aware of the fact that this is a sense of existence different from the one in which we use the word when we talk about the existence of spatiotemporal particulars and their constellations. And here we come to the mystery of how correctnesses, or proprieties, can exist relatively independently of our attitudes, and yet without being situated in some independent stratum of reality. The point is that any verdict we reach regarding correctness is at best tentative, it belonging to the nature of the concept that the verdict is considered as always amendable by our successors.
It is like a track that we must go on extending to ever new horizons. However, this is due to the fact that the term is largely ambiguous; and some of its senses do refer to normative phenomena. I think there are at least three senses of the term relevant for the theory of language. When we encounter a problem concerning the way language hooks onto the world, we often invoke the term in the second sense.
So far so good; but aside from giving the relationship a label nothing has been explained yet. However, the next step often is that we do not really need to explain anything, for the concept of convention is more or less self-explanatory. And it is clear that if we use the term to account for how language hooks onto the world, then it cannot be generally convention in the third sense of the word: language cannot be based on this kind of convention, for language is presupposed by this kind of convention.
If my habit is to go for a walk every evening, it may be surprising that I do not go out today, but it is in no sense wrong.
Habits, to be sure, may evolve into norms. Once people start to take the habitual as not merely what usually happens, but rather what should happen, there emerges a norm — or, you may want to say, the habit becomes a norm.
But here the latter step is crucial. For consider chess or football, which we use as our models of our discursive practices.
People may acquire the habit not to take the ball into their hands; but the game cannot really get off the ground until this starts to be felt as what should not be done and until those who keep doing this start to be penalised. Hence the habitual substrate is surely not everything that makes up norms. But sooner or later, then, we must face the question of how this kind of conventionality comes into being. His solution of this problem is based on two assumptions: conventions come into being to solve coordination problems, and the solution of such problems can evolve spontaneously along the lines envisaged by game theory.
I think that despite the fact that Lewis laudably brought the nature and emergence of conventions into the focus of attention and showed how some tacit conventions may emerge spontaneously thus breaking from the vicious circle into which we would fall if we wanted to base language on explicit conventions , his approach is not general enough.
Consider chess or football again. Can we say that their rules are a matter of conventions? Obviously, we can; in fact it would seem that the rules of games or sports are prototypes of what we would call conventional. As we saw, there might be some terminological disputes over whether we should say that the rules themselves are conventional, or whether they evolved from conventions, but this is not important now.
This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts.
Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought,. The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics provides a state-of-the-art overview of the wide breadth of research in pragmatics.
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