The Pragmatic Approach in Eastern Europe

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to briefly outline the history and the present state of the pragmatic approach to language in Eastern Europe, namely Slavic regions of theformer Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia) as well as Bulgaria and Serbia. Pragmatic studies in Poland and former Czechoslovakia are not reviewed as better known by scholars who are interested in linguistic pragmatics. It is our point that some results from Eastern Europe are relevant not only for the study of Slavic languagesbut also for the general linguistic pragmatics and therefore may be of interest for those who do not have reading knowledge of Slavic languages. The authors present a general view of the studies belonging to the pragmatic domain: the behavior and interaction of the participants of communicative events, its reflection in linguistic units, the analysis of specific aspects of communication, such as emotions, humor, implicite information etc. In Section 1 and 2 the predecessors of pragmatic approach are mentioned: Stylistics, Rhetoric, studies of funtional sentence perspective and verbal etiquette. In Section 3 the development and the state of the art of Pragmatics proper in USSR is outlined followed by Section 4 devoted to the studies based on the Conceptual Metaphor theory and Section 5 devoted to the studies bordering Pragmatics: studies of the speech influence, language of Internet, affectiveness in language, humor and irony and some other topics. In Section 6 the specifics of the EastEuropean pragmatic studies is discussed. The paper was conceived as an introduction to the collection of articles presented in this volume and those that shall appear in the next volumes of the journal “Fundamental Linguistics”.