Meaning and function of Spanish formulemes and pragmatemes vs. illocutionary verbs

Abstract

From the perspective of Pragmatics, some scholars claim that the taxonomy of illocutionary acts should be revised. The aim of this paper is to propose such a review by means of a research field in which Lexicography and Pragmatics overlap. As we attempt to prove, formulemes offer the advantage of being a narrower field of study than free utterances. Formulemes ( Have a nice day! ) have been defined within the Meaning Text-Theory as a type of cliché and Pragmatemes ( Happy birthday! ) as a type of formuleme more restricted by the extralinguistic situation (someone’s birthday). E-dictionaries require a formal method to express both the meaning and the function of formulemes, yet this lexicographic development may well elicit problems. Within Meaning-Text Theory pragmatemes have been formalized to date by Lexical Functions. However, we have observed that this tool is unsatisfactory for didactic purposes. Therefore, in the Spanish e-dictionary Diretes , we have attached each formuleme to one illocutionary verb that we call “Pragmatic Function” (such as to wish and to congratulate for the examples above). In order to identify whether a formalization by means of Pragmatic Functions could be both possible and successful, we have formalized more than two hundred formulemes (sixty of them pragmatemes). Although the project is in progress, up to now any kind of formuleme (being or not pragmateme) was successfully analyzed by means of thirty Pragmatic Functions created ad hoc . Pragmatic Functions could be useful not only for the formalization of formulemes and pragmatemes when teaching Spanish, but also to revise the list of illocutionary verbs from the perspective of Phraseology and Lexicography.