Early Systems of Formal Pragmatics

Abstract

The present paper is devoted to pragmatics, so I think it should be stressed at the very beginning that I myself simply do not know what exactly pragmatics is, and still worse — I am afraid nobody does. In fact, the dispute on the aims, methods, scope and limits of pragmatics started as early as in the late thirties, and continues up to now. The discussion is far from being concluded, and that is just why you can still find there in the literature opinions like this one, formulated by professional pragmaticists in the eighties — fifty years after:

Pragmatics is one of those words (…) that give the impression that something quite specific and technical is being talked about when often in fact it has no clear meaning. (cf. Searle et al., 1980)

Well of course, those who want to be offered a purely technical and operational definition, would not be satisfied at all with either, say: pragmatics is the study of language use, which is too wide and obviously too vague, or — and even less so — with Montague’s one: pragmatics is the study of indexical expressions, which, in turn, is too narrow. But it might be doubted if such a definition is really necessary: we can all do quite well without being presented with any precise definition of the term ‘logic’, to give just one example. It will be much better then to follow Stalnaker’s (1970) advice and define pragmatics by simply pointing at its branches, so as to obtain, e.g.: pragmatics is the study of

• speech acts

• deixis

• presupposition

• implicature

• discourse structure.