Metapragmatic conventions and integrative context: Introducing Sībawayhian pragmatics

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to shed light on theories of discourse meaning from the Arabic, namely Sībawayhian, linguistics tradition, that are novel in the contemporary pragmatics space and prompts us to rethink and reshape the Anglo-American, namely Gricean and post-Gricean, lens through which current theories are predominantly defined. The Arabic linguistics tradition was founded by Sībawayhi more than ten centuries ago, yet it is severely underrepresented and under-researched in modern (Western) linguistics. Sībawayhi posited a discourse-oriented, pragmatics-centric, and intuition-driven model of language and communication, providing unique insights into how intentions and conventions figure in meaning representation. Despite his monumental contribution, Sībawayhian theory has hitherto been missing from the present-day field of pragmatics. Instead, pragmatics as a line of study is usually attributed to Grice and subsequent post-Gricean developments, where theory construction has been limited to intra-theoretical analyses and falls short of cross-cultural epistemological perspectives. Many of these analyses are as such reinventions of what can be found in Sībawayhian and post-Sībawayhian pragmatics. And there are many more components of Arabic pragmatic thought that remain to be (re)discovered, with the potential to further current thinking in pragmatics and open a new orientation of contemporary pragmatic study. In this paper, I attempt to address all of the above by closely examining selected sections of Sībawayhi’s monumental al-Kitāb. I particularly introduce two main conceptions Sībawayhi relies on in his theory of meaning – metapragmatic conventions (conventionsmp) and integrative context (contexti) – and investigate their role in shaping major areas of pragmatic theorization, namely syntax, discourse compositionality, and inference.