Sociopragmatics

Abstract

As the composite nature of the term itself suggests, “sociopragmatics” focuses on actual language use in real-life settings and across cultures. These aspects of language use had been neglected in early pragmatic work by philosophers such as H. P. Grice, J. L. Austin and J. Searle, which focused primarily on individual speakers’ intentions and language-internal, structural (in the Saussurean sense) explanations for differences in meaning across (putative) circumstances of use. Conversely, empirical and cross-cultural aspects of language use were given center stage in the development of politeness theories, which can be considered early precursors of sociopragmatics from the 1970s onward. Unlike its antecedent fields, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, which grew out of the Anglo-American (analytical) tradition in the late 1950s and 1960s, sociopragmatics reflects a functionalist focus usually found in continental work of the time. Early mentions of the term can be found in the work of Marcel Dascal and Ludger Hoffman, although the term itself was made popular through the work of two British scholars, Jenny Thomas and Geoffrey Leech, who famously distinguished between “pragmalinguistics” as knowledge of the non-truth conditional/interpersonal meanings linguistic forms can express, and “sociopragmatics” as the distribution of these form/meaning pairs in different contexts and the social parameters that regulate that. In terms of its subject matter, sociopragmatics focuses on how language expressions are used, by whom, and to what effect. In this sense, it can be contrasted to formal pragmatics, which focuses on the expressions’ meaning potential more abstractly conceived. Another major difference between sociopragmatics and formal pragmatics concerns where explanations are sought, with formal pragmatics seeking explanations in linguistic structure, while sociopragmatics does so in societal reasons. More specifically, sociopragmatics considers differences in meaning stemming from language users’ social (cultural, ethnic, ideological, interpersonal relationship, and so on) background and how this background shapes and is in turn shaped by their use (production and comprehension) of language. Sociopragmatics, in other words, fully acknowledges and tries to do justice to the performative potential of language, that is, its potential to bring the social world into existence. It thus bears links to more analytical fields, such as the philosophy of language, but also to more applied ones, such as discourse analysis, while at the same time differing from both, in terms of the questions it poses, as well as the tools it uses to address them. Major themes in sociopragmatics include identity, face and relational work, cultural conventions and norms, and (increasingly) emotions. To analyze these themes, sociopragmatics uses theoretical tools from pragmatics, most prominently implicatures and speech acts, and methodological ones from sociolinguistics (ethnographic observation, corpora, interviews, and questionnaires) and sociology (conversation analysis).