Pragmatistic Pragmatics

Abstract

Charles Morris(l938) divided a linguist's meaning-related task into three branches-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntax in Morris' characterization deals exclusively with relations between linguistic expressions, and semantics with relations between expressions and whatever are considered to be their meanings. Pragmatics has to do _ with relations among expressions, their meanings, and users and/ or contexts of use of those expressions. In one of his early papers, Bar-Hillel(l954) proposed , that pragmatics coverj the study of indexical expressions, expressions whose reference cannot be determined without knowledge of the context of use. However, Richard Montague and his colleagues laid the foundations for what is now known as indexical semantics in the -general framework of model-theory. An example representative of Montague's view of pragmatics is found in the paper entitled 'Universal Grammar', where he distinguished senses from meanings. The former are defined to be functions of a possible world while the latter as functions of two arguments-a possible world and a context of use. Due to this precise technical structure given to the indexical semantics, Richmond Thomason suggested that the study of the meanings of indexical expressions be treated in the semantic component rather than in the pragmatic one in a general program of natural language analysis. While this leaves for a genuinely pragmatic theory the study of presupposition, speech acts conditions, and implicatures, we need to have a better understanding of what these apparently disparate subjects represent from some underlying holistic structure of pragmatics.