Recent developments in pragmatics: As evidenced by Horn and Ward's Ha

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Recent developments in pragmatics: As evidenced by Horn and Ward's Handbook of Pragmatics
北京大学 姜望琪 (Jiang Wangqi)
(第十届语用学研讨会论文摘要)
from: http://www.cpra.com.cn/Html/Article/61320070915212256.html


The Handbook of Pragmatics edited by Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward, published in 2004, contains 32 chapters grouped under four headings: the domain of pragmatics, pragmatics and discourse structure, pragmatics and its interfaces, pragmatics and cognition.
As is shown by these headings, the chapters in this book are of two types in terms of their topics: the first part covers the core topics of pragmatics while the latter three deal with the periphery of pragmatics, the inter-relations between pragmatics and other related areas of language study.
The distinction between the core and the periphery doesn’t in any way imply that the latter three parts are not as important as the first part. In one sense, the periphery, which represents the new frontiers, is more important. Pragmatics itself, to some extent, is a peripheral discipline to the core topics of linguistics, and the peripheral topics in pragmatics now are in a similar situation.
Take the second part as an example. Among the four parts, this part is perhaps the newest in the sense that the other three parts have been discussed for more years by pragmaticians. And according to the editors this part focuses on context-dependent aspects of meaning that arise within discourse, the structuring of information within and across sentences in particular. There are 11 papers in this part, which are on topics of information structure, topic and focus, context, discourse markers, discourse coherence, non-sentences, anaphora, empathy, deferred interpretation, language performance, and ellipsis and event reference respectively.
All these papers contribute greatly to the field of discourse analysis. The paper on information structure by Ward and Birner, for example, argue cogently that discourse-status and hearer-status are key elements by which speakers structure their utterances, and in particular that non-canonical constructions are used in predictable ways in order to preserve a general old-before-new ordering of information in English.
The paper on topic and focus by Gundel and Fretheim likewise suggest a new approach to these key notions in discourse analysis. They argue that it is evident that not all of the phenomena associated with topic and focus can be directly attributed to the grammar. Topic and focus are pragmatically relevant categories with clear pragmatic effects, including the appropriateness/ inappropriateness of sentences with different possibilities for topic-focus interpretation in different discourse contexts.
As the study of language in use, or in the words of the editors, as the study of those context-dependent aspects of meaning, pragmatics is inherently related to discourse analysis from the very beginning. The speech act theorists regard the speech act as the unit of pragmatic study, and Grice uses the term “conversation” in a broad sense, even though they mostly use single sentences or short dialogues as examples. With the discursive turn, or the turn to discourse, that is going on in linguistics, and in pragmatics in particular, at the present, it is predictable that pragmatics will develop on a healthier basis than ever before.