1.3 Current interest in pragmatics
There are a number of convergent reasons for the growth
of interest in pragmatics in recent years.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
. 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
34 35 
The scope of pragmatics
abstraction that Chorhsky in part drew from the post-Bloomfieldian
structuralism that predominated immediately before transformational
generative grammar).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.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.