Call for Papers
Context and appropriateness: micro meets macro
A panel organized at the 9th International Pragmatics Conference
of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
July 10-15, 2005, in Italy (Riva del Garda, Trento)
More general information about the conference can be accessed via:
www.ipra.be.
Context and appropriateness: micro meets macro
Context and appropriateness imply interpersonal realities and thus are
key to a pragmatic theory of language and language use. While context is
generally seen as a common frame of reference anchored to a commonly
shared system of symbols, appropriateness refers to the pragmatic
well-formedness of the linguistic realization of a coparticipant’s
communicative intention in linguistic and sociocultural contexts.
Context is omnipresent in pragmatics, discourse analysis and
ethnomethodology. To employ Heritage’s terminology, “the production of
talk is doubly contextual” (Heritage 1984:242). An utterance relies upon
the existing context for its production and interpretation, and it is,
in its own right, an event that shapes a new context for the action that
will follow. In spite of its status as a fundamental premise in
pragmatics and discourse analysis, the concept of context has remained
fuzzy and seems almost impossible to come to terms with. There is,
however, one core meaning which is found in all of its usages, namely
the gestalt-psychological distinction between a figure or a focal event
and its ground or background. In order to be felicitously integrated
into pragmatic theory, however, that extremely general definition of
context requires some delimination.
Appropriateness supplements and refines the notion of pragmatic meaning
by the accommodation of a sociocultural-context perspective. In
discourse, pragmatic meaning is not only inferred with regard to its
illocutionary goal and force, but also with regard to the connectedness
between coparticipants, social status, interpersonal relationship and
communicative setting. Against this background, the frames of reference
of pragmatic meaning and appropriateness go beyond an individual
contribution. Appropriateness is anchored to the dyad of (minimally) a
speaker and a hearer seen from both I-we (Searle 1995) and I-thou
perspectives (Brandom 1994), thus representing a dialogical concept par
excellence ( Linell 1998).
Appropriateness and context are represented by dynamic and relational
concepts. They are manifest in the micro domain of language use, and
they manifest themselves as pillars against which the validity and
well-formedness of linguistic and communicative acts - this entails both
verbal and non-verbal means of communication - are evaluated and
measured against.
Like context and appropriateness, micro and macro have an interactive
potential and are also dynamic and relational, but they represent
different levels of empirical reality. Micro refers to a face-to-face
encounter while macro is seen as a communicative constellation in which
a direct interaction between the coparticipants is not a necessary
condition. Yet macro structures are indispensable prerequisites of
communicative action, and presupposition is seen as one device which is
assigned a bridging function between micro and macro.
The goal of the panel Context and Appropriateness: Micro meets Macro is
to investigate the nature of the connectedness between context and
appropriateness, and between micro and macro in order to further our
understanding of the complex processes involved in producing and
interpreting language in context. Particular attention will be given to
(1) possible universal values which may serve as starting points for the
processes of relational justification, for instance the Gricean CP, the
principle of relevance, communicative projects or communicative genres,
and (2) bridging problems between micro and macro, and (3) bridging
problems between context and appropriateness.
References:
Brandom, Robert B. (1994): Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing,
and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press.
Heritage, John (1984): Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Linell, Per (1998): Approaching Dialogue. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Searle, John R. (1995): The Construction of Social Reality. New York:
The Free Press.
Please send your abstract to
Anita Fetzer
Universitaet Lueneburg
FB III: Kulturwissenschaften
Englische Sprachwissenschaft
D-21335 Lueneburg
fon: +49-4131-78-2662
fax: +49-4131-78-2666
email: fetzer@uni-lueneburg.de
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 04 2004 - 09:19:35 GMT