'Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in discursive pragmatics?'

GRAINGER, Karen (2012). 'Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in discursive pragmatics?'. Journal of Pragmatics. (Submitted)

Preview

PDF - Submitted Version Download (166kB) | Preview

Abstract

What do we mean by a 'discursive' approach to language study? Some scholars may characterise it as placing emphasis on participant evaluations (e.g. Eelen 2001), others may foreground the analysis of contextualised and sequential texts (Mills, in press), while still others consider it to include both of these (Mills, in press; Grainger, in press). In general, though, discursive pragmatics often seems to involve a reaction to, and a contrast with, so-called Gricean intention-based approaches. In this paper I argue that, far from discarding the insights of Grice, Austin and others, a discursive approach to pragmatics should embrace those aspects of non-discursive pragmatics that provide us with a 'tool-kit' and a vocabulary for examining talk-in-interaction. At the same time, I will argue that the shortcomings of the speaker-based, intention- focused pragmatics can be compensated for, not by privileging hearer evaluations of meaning, but by taking an ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of naturally-occurring discourse data. By providing sample analyses of interactional data, I aim to demonstrate how a combination of insights from Gricean pragmatics and from post-modern constructivist theory allows the analyst to comment on the construction and negotiation of meaning in discourse, without having recourse to notions of either intention or evaluation.

Actions (login required)

Downloads