Pragmatics and its Interfaces

321 Pages·2018·6.129 MB·English

by  Cornelia Ilie, Neal R Norrick

Pragmatics and
its Interfaces
edited by
Cornelia Ilie
Neal R. Norrick
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&bns)
issn 0922-842X
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and
its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work
covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within
language sciences.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/pbns
Editor Associate Editor
Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker
University of Augsburg University of Zurich
Founding Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Paul Osamu Takahara
University College London Japan Women’s University Kobe City University of
Foreign Studies
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka
University of Trondheim Aichi University Sandra A. Thompson
University of California at
John C. Heritage Miriam A. Locher
Santa Barbara
University of California at Los Universität Basel
Angeles Teun A. van Dijk
Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Susan C. Herring University of Athens
Barcelona
Indiana University
Srikant Sarangi
Chaoqun Xie
Masako K. Hiraga Aalborg University
Fujian Normal University
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University
Marina Sbisà
Yunxia Zhu
University of Trieste
The University of Queensland

Volume 294
Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Edited by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick
Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Edited by
Cornelia Ilie
Strömstad Academy
Neal R. Norrick
Saarland University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/pbns.294
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress.
isbn 978 90 272 0116 4 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6376 6 (e-book)
© 2018 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Introduction: Pragmatics and its interfaces 1
Neal R. Norrick and Cornelia Ilie
Sociolinguistics vs pragmatics: Where does the boundary lie? 11
Janet Holmes
Discourse pragmatics: Communicative action meets discourse analysis 33
Anita Fetzer
The interface between pragmatics and conversation analysis 59
Paul Drew
Pragmatics vs rhetoric: Political discourse at the pragmatics-rhetoric
interface 85
Cornelia Ilie
Narrative studies versus pragmatics (of narrative) 121
Neal R. Norrick
Translation studies and pragmatics 143
Juliane House
The interface between pragmatics and gesture studies 163
Gerardine M. Pereira
Pragmatics and anthropology: The Trobriand Islanders’ ways of speaking 185
Gunter Senft
Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory 213
Michael Haugh and Jonathan Culpeper
Corpus linguistics and pragmatics 241
Christoph Rühlemann and Brian Clancy
vi Pragmatics and its Interfaces
The interface between pragmatics and internet-mediated
communication: Applications, extensions and adjustments 267
Francisco Yus
Pragmatics, humor studies, and the study of interaction 291
Nancy D. Bell
Index 311
Introduction
Pragmatics and its interfaces
Neal R. Norrick and Cornelia Ilie
Pragmatics, largely conceptualized as “the science of linguistic social behavior in
various situational and institutional contexts” (Mey 2013), is both the outcome and
the source of cross-disciplinary interfaces. Emerging at the crossroads of several
disciplines (semiotics, linguistics, philosophy of language, rhetoric) and ongoingly
evolving through interdisciplinary diversification (e.g. legal pragmatics, literary
pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, clinical pragmatics), pragmatics has continu-
ally attracted considerable academic interest, being studied from various theoretical
perspectives and through the contribution of several disciplines, with a focus on the
interplay of overlapping and complementary discipline-specific features.
This volume offers state-of-the-art overviews of the cross-disciplinary role and
impact of pragmatics in relation to several areas of study that it interfaces with.
Pragmatics has contributed significant insights to a range of disciplines, just as these
disciplines have contributed to it. Obvious interfaces are those between pragmatics
and hyphenated areas of study such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and cor-
pus linguistics, but of course also traditional areas like anthropology, philosophy
of language, rhetoric, translation theory, narrative and humor studies. At the same
time, pragmatics shares interfaces with conversation analysis and politeness theory,
with the study of institutional discourse and language in political contexts as well
as language learning. The ongoing explosion of new computer-based media and
scholarly approaches to them is rapidly creating new interfaces for pragmatics.
Borrowing and cross-pollination between disciplines is natural, as well as necessary,
but at times it seems important to take a pause and reflect on and problematize the
role of pragmatics at these interfaces. In an age when disciplinary boundaries are
being blurred, we need to explore the relationship and interplay between pragmatics
and related or complementary fields of enquiry with the goal of broadening and
deepening our understanding of the contributions and boundaries of pragmatics as
such. Such explorations involve conceptual, theoretical and methodological consid-
erations that problematize current cross-disciplinary research issues. Relevant pa-
rameters of comparison are the use of quantitative versus qualitative methods based
doi 10.1075/pbns.294.01nor
© 2018 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Neal R. Norrick and Cornelia Ilie
on naturally occurring, situated interaction versus experimentally elicited data, the
orientation to micro-level versus macro-level issues, the adoption of synchronic
versus diachronic perspectives, the use of a bottom-up versus top-down approach.
Several core concepts and tenets of pragmatics have lately been examined in
their interplay with comparable counterparts in neighbouring disciplines. Some of
the earlier studies confined themselves to interlinguistic, rather than interdiscipli-
nary, approaches, such as Horn and Ward (2006/2004), where strands of inquiry
pertaining to pragmatic theory have been used to account (synchronically or dia-
chronically) for grammatical phenomena (intonation, syntax, semantics, lexicali-
zation) and aspects of linguistic competence (language acquisition). Other studies
have chosen, for example, to address micro-level pragmatic issues by resorting
to wider cultural and societal disciplinary perspectives (Capone and Mey 2015),
or to deal extensively with only one interface, such as pragmatics and literature
(Sell 2014), pragmatics and law (Capone and Poggi 2016), pragmatics and clinical
disorders (Cummings 2017), pragmatics and intercultural studies (Kecskes and
Assimakopoulos 2017). Further studies, such as Barron, Gu and Steen (2017), con-
tain chapters that take a one-sided interdisciplinary approach, choosing to examine
the applicability of pragmatics to other disciplines by focusing on the ways in which
these disciplines (e.g. ethnography, neurolinguistics, clinical linguistics) have bene-
fited from the use of pragmatic analytical tools. Unlike the abovementioned studies,
the present volume takes a bidirectional rather than unidirectional approach to the
interfaces of pragmatics, since it is not restricted to presenting either the impact of
pragmatics on other disciplines or the impact of other disciplines on pragmatics,
but an interpenetration of both, in that all its chapters deal with reciprocally inte-
grative interdisciplinary approaches by examining the range of differences, overlaps
and complementarities between pragmatics and neighbouring disciplines, pointing
to significant contributions of pragmatics to other disciplines, and of other disci-
plines to pragmatics. The interplay of these two-way interfaces of pragmatics are
being highlighted in terms of theoretical prerequisites, empirical data collection,
analytical focus and end-goals, by examining the range of differences, overlaps and
complementarities between pragmatics and neighbouring disciplines: sociolinguis-
tics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, rhetoric, narrative studies, transla-
tion studies, gesture studies, anthropology, politeness theory, corpus linguistics,
internet-mediated communication and humour theory.
Our students often ask about the delimitation and interrelations of pragmatics
with the range of allied disciplines: Many basic notions in pragmatics go back to
Natural Language Philosophy, but where are the differences, and what difference
do they make in concrete analyses? Is discourse analysis a part of pragmatics or the
other way around? Does pragmatics work qualitatively while sociolinguistics works
quantitatively? Isn’t interactional sociolinguistics roughly the same as pragmatics in
Introduction 3
practice? Where does conversation analysis (and CA) fit in? If you study variation
in responses to invitations across age groups, are you doing pragmatics, politeness
theory or sociolinguistics? Doesn’t rhetoric study the same sorts of texts and inter-
actions as pragmatics? Then what’s the difference? Does the object of study deter-
mine the discipline or rather the research perspective? These and similar questions
form the focus of these contributions based on investigation of interfaces.
This volume seeks to identify, analyse and clarify the relationships between
linguistic pragmatics and its neighboring disciplines. It originated in a discussion
at the 13th meeting of the International Pragmatics Association in New Delhi
in 2013 about where pragmatics was headed and where deficits lay. The present
co-editors agreed at the time to co-operate in organizing a panel at the following
IPrA conference scheduled for 2015 in Antwerp, Belgium. That panel ultimately
brought together an international group of scholars representing areas of research
where Pragmatics interfaces, intersects, overlaps with neighboring disciplines with
the goal of more clearly defining the contribution and boundaries of pragmatics
as such. Fortuitously, we were able to enlist scholars representing interfaces be-
tween pragmatics and hyphenated areas of study such as sociolinguistics (Janet
Holmes), corpus linguistics (Christopher Rühlemann), the traditional areas of
rhetoric (Cornelia Ilie), translation studies (Julianne House), narrative studies
(Neal R. Norrick) and humor studies (Nancy Bell), gesture (Gerardine Pereira)
and the new-comers Conversation Analysis (Paul Drew) and politeness theory
(Michael Haugh and Jonathan Culpeper), Gender Studies (Louise Mullany), the
study of institutional discourse (Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen) and language in
political contexts as well as new computer-based media (Susan Herring). On the
way to this volume, the list of interfaces and the ranks of authors have undergone
sea changes, some to extend and diversify the scope of the coverage and some for
personal reasons. Gunter Senft was originally anticipated as a panelist at the 2015
conference for the topic of anthropology and its interface with pragmatics, and we
are happy to have enlisted him as a contributor to this volume on that topic. Due
to health concerns, Susan Herring could only participate in the conference panel
virtually via skype, and she felt she could not author a chapter for this volume, but
we found the most obvious and perfect replacement for her in Francisco Yus, who
has recently become the most important voice in the area of computer mediated
communication. We deeply regret that Louise Mullany was not able to produce
a written contribution for this volume, and we are sorry that we thereby lack the
gender component she could have supplied. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen was to
have contributed a chapter on language in political contexts, but much of this ter-
rain has been covered by Cornelia Ilie’s contribution on rhetoric versus pragmatics,
with her focus on political language, and the new chapter we were fortunately able
to add on pragmatics and discourse analysis by Anita Fetzer. The final line-up