Quo vadis pragmatics? From adaptation to participatory sense-making

Abstract

Before looking forward, the past and present of pragmatics is reflected upon. Two developments are signaled as potentially problematic for the identity of the field. On the one hand, there is inner fragmentation in the field of pragmatics. On the other hand there are developments in neighboring fields like cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, which seek to recontextualize to the social-pragmatic dimension, this way coming closer to pragmatics. The two developments lead to the question what the core profile of pragmatics should be in order to play its own distinctive role in future research on human sense-making.