Text 16

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 363.

penelope brown and Stephen levinson: Politeness. Cambridge University Press 1987, page 281

In language the constraints are more on form than on content (or at least form provides a more feasible area of study). The ways in which messages are hedged, hinted, made deferential, and embed­ded in discourse structures then become crucial areas of study. But such areas are also the concern of pragmatics, the study of the systematic relation of a language to context. The special interest of sociolinguistics in our view is in the differential use of such pragmatic resources by different categories of speakers in differ­ent situations. It is in this way that we derive our slogan 'Sociolinguistics should be applied pragmatics.'

t> Do you agree with the assumption that pragmatics comes first and then is 'applied' to the social use of language, or should it be the other way round?

t> Notice that the concepts of 'hedge' and 'hint' are used here. Recall the use of 'hedges' on implicatures in Chapter j, pages 38-9 (which themselves may be termed 'hints'); would such phenomena in the use of language be better analyzed as aspects of politeness? Is pragmatics really just the study of lin­guistic politeness?

Does the 'slogan' at the end of this text provide a better (or worse) perspective on pragmatics than those offered in Texts 1 and 2 earlier?

Chapter 8

Conversation and preference structure