Summary
Nenad Miščević: The Birth of Pragmatics
The larger part is devoted to the historical origin of pragmatics in the middle of the 20th century. This development nicely illustrates the cooperation between linguistics and philosophy, with authors such as Austin, Searle and Grice.
The focus of consideration in these theories is neither language as a linguistic system, nor individual formal languages with their semantics, but speech activity, what is sometimes simply called "language use". This speech activity was considered as an action, guided by a set of rules and motivated by a communicative intention. Problems of meaning, propositions, truth, and other questions of philosophical logic and theory of meaning enter the domain of consideration, but not as a central issue, but as problems subordinate to the topic of speech activity.
A smaller part is dedicated to one contemporary topic - the demarcation of semantics and pragmatics. In the case of assertions and judgments, the proposal that will be defended is the following: the semantic content is a solid basis, and the pragmatic additions are a covering that completes the basis and makes it usable.
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.