Pragmatics as Social Science

Abstract

Drawing on scholarly works that are both ethnographically-based (such as Stephen Levinson and Elinor Ochs’s) and socially-based (such as Jacob Mey and Joana Pinto’s), this paper takes a particular stance on linguistic pragmatics. Originally named by Peirce and established as a perspective – rather than a discipline – pragmatics gathers researches from different traditions around the world. In departmental terms, people working on language from a pragmatic perspective may be affiliated with areas such as sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, applied linguistics, neurolinguistics, etc., yet a family resemblance unites them: pragmatics seen as social science, which stands for both a field ethnographically oriented to the role, ideologies and agency of language users, and science “in society,” politically situated. The paper revisits language ethnographies in Oceania and Africa, in addition to semantically-oriented scholarship. I conclude, with Rajagopalan, that a diversity of problems investigated in pragmatics are refinements from subjects’ situated action.