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1.3 Current interest in pragmatics
There are a number of convergent reasons for the growth
of interest in pragmatics in recent years. Sorne of these are essentially
historical: the interest developed in part as a reaction or antidote to
Chomsky's treatment of language as an abstract device, or mental
ability, dissociable from the uses, users and functions of language (an
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The scope of pragmatics
abstraction that Chorhsky in part drew from the post-Bloomfieldian
structuralism that predominated immediately before transformational
generative grammar). In looking for the means to undermine
Chomsky's position, generative semanticists were then attracted to a
considerable body of philosophical thought devoted to showing the
importance of the uses of language to an understanding of its nature
(work by Austin, Strawson, Grice and Searle in particular). To this
day, most of the important concepts in pragmatics are drawn directly
from philosophy oflanguage. Once this broader scope for mainstream
American linguistics was established,20 pragmatics soon took on a life
of its own, for the issues raised are interesting and important in their
own right.
But there have also been powerful motivations of a different kind.
In the first place, as knowledge of the syntax, phonology and
semantics of various languages has increased, it has become dear that
there are specific phenomena that can only naturally be described by
recourse to contextual concepts. On the one hand, various syntactic
rules seem to be properly constrained only if one refers to pragmatic
conditions; and similarly for matters of stress and intonation.21 1t is
possible, in response to these apparent counter-examples to a contextindependent notion of linguistic competence, simply to retreat: the
. rules can be left unconstrained and allowed to generate unacceptable
sentences, and a performance theory of pragmatics assigned the job
of filtering out the acceptable sentences. Such a move is less than
entirely satisfactory because the relationship between the theory of
competence and the data on which it isbased (ultimately intuitions
about acceptability) becomes abstract to a point where counterexamples to the theory may be explained away on an ad hoc basis,
unless a systematic pragmatics has already been developed.
Alternatively, pragmatics and other linguistic components or levels
can be allowed to interact. Arguments between these two positions
have never been fully articulated, and because of their highly
theory-dependent nature are dealt with, in this