Socio-pragmatics: General Introduction

By: Assist. Lect. Dalya Qays

Language is used as a way of communication about things, events, and states of affairs in the world. Socio-pragmatics was created after Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983) have divided pragmatics into two components: pragma-linguistics and socio-pragmatics. Pragma-linguistics points out to the resources for delivering communicative acts and interpersonal or relational meanings (Allan and Jaszczolt, 2012: 600).  Basically, these resources involve pragmatic strategies such as directness and indirectness, routines, and an enormous diversity of linguistic forms which can intensify or soften communicative acts (ibid.). Socio-pragmatics, on the other hand, relates pragmatic meaning to an assessment of participants’ social distance, the language they use, discourse practice, and accepted behaviours (Bublitz and Norrick, 2011: 77). Besides, Pragmatics handles a sociocultural perspective on language usage, that is, investigating the way that the principles of social behaviour is identified by the social distance between speakers (Cutting, 2002: 3)

The roots of pragmatics generally lie in the work of ordinary language philosophers (Austen, Grice, and Searle) and their attempts to theorize the abstract, context-general principles by which people use language to communicate and do things in the world. This places Socio-pragmatics at the intersection of linguistics and social concerns (Haugh et al., 2021: 3). They add that socio-pragmatics focuses on the role of social conditions and variables in setting the use of language to mean and do things in the world (ibid.4). 

Holmes, cited in (Haugh et al., 2021: 3), regards socio-pragmatics as emerging from integration between classical pragmatics and classical socio-pragmatics. She describes pragmatics as involving the study of the use of language in context, specifically, “how individuals use linguistic resources to produce and interpret meaning in interaction and sometimes to change relationships”. Therefore, Socio-pragmatics encompasses the study of language in society and this involves descriptions of variation in speech communities, and “systematic accounts of how social variables influence linguistic choices from among those resources”. She further adds that socio-pragmatics involves “identifying and analysing evidence for societal norms and how they are subscribed to and contested” (ibid. 4) .

Sources 

Allan, K. and Jaszczolt, M. (2012). The Cambridge Hndbook of Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bublitz, W. and Norrick, N. (2011). Foundations of Pragmatics. Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston.

Cutting, J. (2002). Pragmatics and Discourse: A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge. 

Haugh, M., Kádár, D. and Terkourafi, M. (2021).The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.