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.

摘要 本文借鉴了以民族志为基础（如斯蒂芬·莱文森（Stephen Levinson）与埃莉诺·奥克斯（Elinor Ochs）的研究）以及以社会为导向（如雅各布·梅伊（Jacob Mey）与乔安娜·平托（Joana Pinto）的研究）的学术成果，针对语言语用学（linguistic pragmatics）提出了特定的研究立场。语用学（pragmatics）最初由皮尔斯（Peirce）命名，其被确立为一种研究视角而非独立学科，汇集了全球范围内不同学术传统下的相关研究。从院系设置的角度而言，以语用学视角开展语言研究的学者可能隶属于社会语言学、语言人类学、应用语言学、神经语言学等领域，但存在一种家族相似性将他们联结起来：即作为社会科学的语用学，它既指以民族志方法研究语言使用者的角色、意识形态与主体性的研究领域，也指扎根于社会、具有政治定位的“社会中的科学”。本文除梳理以语义学为导向的学术成果外，还重新考察了大洋洲与非洲地区的语言民族志研究。最后，本文与拉贾戈帕兰（Rajagopalan）的观点一致，认为语用学所探讨的各类问题，均是对研究对象情境化行动的精细化提炼。