Introduction

In this Chapter we shall be centrally concerned with the organization of conversation. Definitions will emerge below, but for the present conversation may be taken to be that familiar predominant kind of talk in which two or more participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs outside specific institutional settings like religious services, law courts, classrooms and the like.

It is not hard to see why one should look to conversation for insight into pragmatic phenomena, for conversation is clearly the prototypical kind of language usage, the form in which we are all first exposed to language – the matrix for language acquisition. Various aspects of pragmatic organization can be shown to be centrally organized around usage in conversation, including the aspects of deixis explored in Chapter 2 where it was shown that unmarked usages of grammatical encodings of temporal, spatial, social and discourse parameters are organized around an assumption of co-present conversational participants. Presupposition may also be seen as in some basic ways organized around a conversational setting: the phenomena involve constraints on the way in which information has to be presented if it is to be introduced to particular participants with specific shared assumptions and knowledge about the world. The issues touch closely on the distinction between given and new (see e.g. Clark & Haviland, 1977), and concern constraints on the formulation of information (that is, the choice of just one out of the indefinitely many possible descriptions of some entity – see Schegloff, 1972b), both of which are important issues in conversational organization.

Introduction

In these conclusions we shall try to tie together some of the loose strands of thought that have run through this book, by considering the relation between pragmatics and other disciplines. One discipline will stand noticeably absent: philosophy, the ‘prodigal provider’, cannot easily re-absorb the empirical studies that it has spawned (but cf. Atlas, 1979). The general tenor of this book has been the description of how, from original, mostly philosophical concepts, a series of empirical modes of investigation have developed, which jointly form the climate of the Anglo-American tradition in pragmatics. As the quotation indicates, Austin foresaw, and indeed hoped for, just this development of a field that he, perhaps more than any other single individual, did most to promote.

Introduction

In the previous Chapter we discussed conversational implicature as a special kind of pragmatic inference. Such inferences cannot be thought of as semantic (i.e. as pertaining to the meanings of words, phrases and sentences) because they are based squarely on certain contextual assumptions concerning the co-operativeness of participants in a conversation, rather than being built into the linguistic structure of the sentences that give rise to them. We turn in this Chapter to another kind of pragmatic inference, namely presupposition, that does seem at least to be based more closely on the actual linguistic structure of sentences; we shall conclude, however, that such inferences cannot be thought of as semantic in the narrow sense, because they are too sensitive to contextual factors in ways that this Chapter will be centrally concerned with.

The reader should be warned of two things at the outset. The first is that there is more literature on presupposition than on almost any other topic in pragmatics (excepting perhaps speech acts), and while much of this is of a technical and complex kind, a great deal is also obsolete and sterile. The volume of work is in part accounted for by a long tradition of philosophical interest which, because it is much referred to in the linguistic literature, will be briefly reviewed in 4.1.

Introduction

Of all the issues in the general theory of language usage, speech act theory has probably aroused the widest interest. Psychologists, for example, have suggested that the acquisition of the concepts underlying speech acts may be a prerequisite for the acquisition of language in general (see e.g. Bruner, 1975; Bates, 1976), literary critics have looked to speech act theory for an illumination of textual subtleties or for an understanding of the nature of literary genres (see e.g. Ohmann, 1971; Levin, 1976), anthropologists have hoped to find in the theory some account of the nature of magical spells and ritual in general (see e.g. Tambiah, 1968), philosophers have seen potential applications to, amongst other things, the status of ethical statements (see e.g. Searle, 1969: Chapter 8), while linguists have seen the notions of speech act theory as variously applicable to problems in syntax (see e.g. Sadock, 1974), semantics (see e.g. Fillmore, 1971a), second language learning (see e.g. Jakobovitz & Gordon, 1974), and elsewhere. Meanwhile in linguistic pragmatics, speech acts remain, along with presupposition and implicature in particular, one of the central phenomena that any general pragmatic theory must account for.

Given this widespread interest, there is an enormous literature on the subject, and in this Chapter we cannot review all the work within linguistics, let alone the large and technical literature within philosophy, from which (like all the other concepts we have so far reviewed) the basic theories come.

The purpose of this Chapter is to provide some indication of the scope of linguistic pragmatics. First, the historical origin of the term pragmatics will be briefly summarized, in order to indicate some usages of the term that are divergent from the usage in this book. Secondly, we will review some definitions of the field, which, while being less than fully satisfactory, will at least serve to indicate the rough scope of linguistic pragmatics. Thirdly, some reasons for the current interest in the field will be explained, while a final section illustrates some basic kinds of pragmatic phenomena. In passing, some analytical notions that are useful background will be introduced.

The origin and historical vagaries of the term pragmatics

The modern usage of the term pragmatics is attributable to the philosopher Charles Morris (1938), who was concerned to outline (after Locke and Peirce) the general shape of a science of signs, or semiotics (or semiotic as Morris preferred). Within semiotics, Morris distinguished three distinct branches of inquiry: syntactics (or syntax), being the study of “the formal relation of signs to one another”, semantics, the study of “the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable” (their designata), and pragmatics, the study of “the relation of signs to interpreters” (1938: 6).

To squeeze all that goes under the rubric of pragmatics within the confines of a linguistics textbook would be neither possible nor desirable. Consequently this book is quite conservative in scope and approach, and considers the main topics in a particular tradition of work. This is the largely Anglo-American linguistic and philosophical tradition that builds directly, for the most part, on philosophical approaches to language of both the logical and ‘ordinary language’ variety (an exception is the set of topics treated in Chapter 6, which has a sociological origin). In contrast, the continental tradition is altogether broader, and would include much that also goes under the rubric of sociolinguistics. But even within this much narrower field, this book is in some ways restricted, since its main aim is to provide an introduction and background to those topics that, perhaps largely for historical reasons, are central to the Anglo-American tradition of work in pragmatics. The would-be pragmaticist must understand these issues in depth, if he or she is to understand the background to a great deal of current research in both linguistics and philosophy.

One major way in which this book is perhaps innovative is the inclusion in Chapter 6 of a brief review of work in conversation analysis. Apart from its demonstrable importance for theories of language usage, work in conversation analysis contributes directly to many of the same issues that have preoccupied philosophers of language, and thence linguists, while employing a startlingly different methodology.

Despite the battle of Mantineia in 418 (see 205), the Spartans and the Athenians remained formally at peace with each other and the Spartans made no attempt to come to the help of Melos (see 206). But the Sicilian expedition clearly induced a majority at Sparta to believe that Athens must and could be attacked and defeated; and this time, there was none of the feeling which had dogged Sparta in the Archidamian War, that she had been guilty of starting the war and therefore enjoyed no success. The exile Alkibiades found a ready hearing and the Spartans moved to fortify Dekeleia in the heart of Attika.

But even after the defeat of the Sicilian expedition, Athens was far from being down; and the Spartans were even now only able to make headway by persuading Persia to provide them with the money for a fleet. The long-term effect of the Spartan offensive was to make Persia once more a major factor in Greek affairs.

See in general Lewis, Sparta and Persia.

228. Alkibiades in Sparta

Choosing exile rather than trial (see 214), Alkibiades arrived in Sparta in the winter of 415/14; he there set out to disarm opposition generated by his earlier activities inimical to Spartan interests and his democratic leanings, and then proceeded to make himself indispensable by terrifying the Spartans with an account of Athenian plans to conquer Sicily, Italy and Carthage and deploy the forces so acquired against Sparta.

I Greek society

The study of the history of ancient Greece is both exciting and infuriating – exciting because of the inherent interest of the way in which Greek society organised itself, and because the members of that society still seem able through their writings to communicate as individuals with us who are the inheritors of much which they created; infuriating because in the course of transmission over two and half millennia much information has disappeared, and because the information which remains often shatters on inspection the first impression of similarity between the Greeks and ourselves.

We hope that the texts and other sources presented here will provide a coherent and comprehensible picture of ancient Greece; certain things, however, need some comment.

The characteristic institution of the Greek world was the polis, a small, independent community consisting of an urban nucleus, or astu, and territory, or chōra. Although a few Greeks chose to spend much or all of their lives away from the place of their birth, for most Greeks existence outside their polis was unthinkable. An exile was prepared to go to almost any lengths to secure his return and if a polis was destroyed by one great power and restored by another, as sometimes happened, the survivors of the destruction returned to re-people their home. If a colony (apoikia) was destroyed, its men were likely to return to the polis which had sent them out.

The economic foundations of Athens, as of all poleis, lay in land, the land of Attika. The Athenians claimed to be ‘sprung from the soil’ (autochthonous), and whatever alternative sources of community supply and of personal affluence might arise, cultivating the chōra of Attika preserved the polis as an agricultural state, and owning a part of it was and always remained the traditional, basic and best source and index of wealth. Yet the foundations of Athens' robust economic position in the fifth century had been set down, by Solon and then the Peisistratidai, principally by fostering the non-landed sectors of the Athenian economy. By about the time of the Persian Wars three interconnected areas were clearly emerging as important: a large and energetic immigrant community (160); a thriving commercial traffic through the Peiraieus (159) – these two linked by a policy of welcoming foreigners, whether as residents or visitors (158); and the optimisation of Attika's supreme natural asset, the silver mines (161). These three areas were still seen as crucial in the mid-fourth century, when Xenophon came to write his treatise Ways and Means (Poroi); in addition he proposed acquisition by the state of a slave labour force (see 277, and Ch.29 in general). The bulk of chattel-slaves were in fact in private ownership, however; and their contribution to the economy was vital (162).