Delimitation of pragmatics: Paradigms, myths, and fashions. A response to Bara

Abstract

Bloomfield’s (1933) Language, Sapir’s articles on language, anthropology and psychology (1949) belong to an era in which linguists could still deliver a ‘story about everything’, everything about language, about the areas and levels of linguistic analysis, that is worth knowing, researching, and recording for posterity. But with this extraordinary scope also came a refined, new outlook, the paradigm that pushes forward the horizons of language sciences. Following the cognitive revolution, we have had more specialised debates that addressed either one problem, area, level or orientation, or interfaces and interactions, such as that between syntax and semantics, semantics and pragmatics, or syntax and pragmatics. Carving the field large or small is equally sound, provided it is dictated by objectives that match the assumed scope. What is not sound is carving the field large, having no paradigm to match, and instead giving in to a medley of fashions and trends. Despite the impressive experimental and theoretical work in clinical psychology reported in his other works, Bruno Bara’s recent overview of what he calls ‘cognitive pragmatics’ (Bara 2011) falls in the camp of slaves to fashion, for the reasons I explain in what follows. Pragmatics has very respectable roots in philosophical writings of ordinary language philosophers of the Anglo-American tradition, and even further into the past, in the phenomenological writings in continental Europe.