Specifying Pragmemes: The Case of Expressing Condolences in Memorial Advertisements

Abstract

For some years now, there has been a growing body of literature under the slogan of ‘societal pragmatics’ which favours a societal perspective on speaker meaning and employs pragmatic theories to explain language use from the outside by focusing on the situations in which speech acts are performed. Among these theories is the ‘pragmatic act theory’ which can be traced back to Mey and has been further refined by Capone. The current paper demonstrates how pragmatic act theory may be used to shed light on the event of death from the perspective of societal pragmatics. In particular, it provides a method leading from an analysis of individual pragmatic acts to a detailed description of the corresponding pragmemes. To demonstrate the efficacy of this method, the paper gives an exemplary analysis of memorial advertisements from Poland. As will become clear in the course of this analysis, the hallmark of such advertisements are pragmatic acts that are instantiations of the pragmeme of expressing condolences.