34.1084, Featured Linguist: Anne Bezuidenhout

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1084. Fri Mar 31 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1084, Featured Linguist: Anne Bezuidenhout

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Date: 
From: Lauren Perkins [lauren at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Anne Bezuidenhout


Every year as part of our fund drive, the LINGUIST List features a
number of linguists on our blog whose research is of particular
interest to our readers, whose lives as linguists or path to
linguistics has been remarkable, or who’ve impacted and contributed to
the worldwide linguistics community. Our first Featured Linguist this
year is Anne Bezuidenhout, Professor of Linguistics & Philosophy at
the University of South Carolina. Anne writes:

In keeping with this year’s Linguist List theme “Future tense”, I will
say a bit about how I hope my field, pragmatics, will evolve over the
next decade or so. I never imagined being a spokesperson for
pragmatics. However, as I am currently the President of the American
Pragmatics Association, AMPRA, (having recently taken over from Istvan
Kecskes) and the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pragmatics (with
Andreas Jucker), I suppose now is my time to step up!

In the 1960s, pragmatics was treated as a “waste basket” to which
issues not amenable to the methods of syntax and other core areas of
linguistics were consigned (see Bar-Hillel, 1971). Fodor (1983)
treated pragmatic inferencing as outside the language module and
claimed that such reasoning is unencapsulated, and thus not amenable
to scientific study. However, this view slowly began to give way to
the idea that pragmatic phenomena and processes are systematic and can
be subsumed under theories. Sperber & Wilson’s (1986) Relevance Theory
and the neo-Gricean theories advocated by Horn (1984) and Levinson
(2000) are examples of such attempts to theorize about the way in
which people use language in context, considering factors such as
speaker intentions, the social and cultural context of communication,
and the effects of wider discourse on meaning.

Pragmatics has emerged as a field of study, with its own theories and
methods and a set of phenomena to be studied that are recognizably
pragmatic in nature or at least have pragmatic aspects, such as
illocutionary acts, conversational implicatures, presuppositions,
discourse particles, evidential and stance markers, discourse
structures, information structuring devices, politeness phenomena,
non-literal uses of language such as metaphor and irony, and many
more.

Pragmatics has always been a rather sprawling field, ranging from
formal pragmatic approaches, which intersect with syntax and
semantics, to very applied approaches that intersect with areas such
as sociolinguistics and linguistics anthropology, second language
acquisition, and (critical) discourse analysis. Some pragmaticians
embrace this messiness, as for them pragmatics is a perspective on
language rather than a sub-discipline on a par with syntax and
semantics (see Mey, 2012).

Out of this messiness certain centers of interest have emerged, such
as intercultural pragmatics, second language pragmatics, and internet
pragmatics. There is also a growing interest in multimodal analyses,
which examine the ways in which linguistic and non-linguistic cues
(such as gestures, facial expressions, and body language) interact to
convey meaning. All these areas now have specialist journals that
cater to scholars working in these areas. The field of politeness
studies has also evolved considerably and gone through several waves
and this area has also become more autonomous.

In addition to these coalescing centers of interest, the methods used
to study pragmatic phenomena have evolved, with a growing interest is
corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, and computational
approaches to modelling pragmatic reasoning. These trends are likely
to continue. Studies of talk-in-interaction and social media
communication are currently areas that attract a great deal of
scholarly attention. With the recent public release of ChatGTP and
other large language models, computational pragmatics is likely to get
a big boost in attention.

Whatever the eventual evolution of pragmatics turns out to be, there
are two things that I really hope will happen. The first thing is that
Pragmatics will one day win the sub-field challenge when people donate
to Linguist List because so many of the donors pick Pragmatics as
their field. The second is that AMPRA becomes a thriving professional
association that truly lives up to its founding aim to unite scholars
of pragmatics across all the Americas, Including Canada, USA, Mexico,
the Caribbean, and all of Central and South America.

To donate to this year's fund drive, please visit:
https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate

References:
Bar-Hillel, Y. (1971). Out of the pragmatic wastebasket. Linguistic
Inquiry 2: 401-407.
Fodor, J. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horn, L. (1984). Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference:
Q-Based and R-Based Implicature. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, Form,
and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications (pp. 11-42). Washington:
Georgetown U. Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of
Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mey, J. (2012). Anticipatory pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 44 (5):
705-708
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and
Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.



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