Towards a pragmatics of mantra recitation

Abstract

This paper purports to investigate certain ritualistic acts of mantra recitation in the light of their family resemblances to more familiar everyday speech acts (such as promising, pardoning, naming, etc.), without thereby intending to minimize the differences between the ritual and the quotidian varieties of speech act or to suggest the reducibility without residue of the religious rites under consideration to the mere stipulation of a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for performing the speech acts which they contain. Charles Morris' well known but not unproblematic trifurcation of semiotic into syntax, semantics and pragmatics, spawned a stepchild in the last member of the triad, which has only recently begun to receive the attention linguistic theory has long since accorded its siblings. That this attention was overdue was the consensus reached by the participants in the 1970 Jerusalem Symposium on Pragmatics of Natural Languages.1 On the other hand, though there was agreement that the study of speech acts falls within its domain, questions as to the general lineaments, and proper sphere of application (much less the specific structural details) of the desiderated pragmatic theory remained (and continue to remain) very much open. Thus with full awareness that no description of the nature and content of pragmatics hazarded at present is likely to escape controversy, we provisionally adopt the following characterization of the field given by Stalnaker, on grounds of its clarity and breadth: