What is it about?
An escalation of Silvana Borutti's assault on the idealization of pragmatics out of the realm of actual language use, followed by an attempt to expand Gricean implicature into a series of increasingly complex levels (illocutionary, perlocutionary, and metalocutionary) as an example of how pragmatics might move past idealism, or what in Performative Linguistics (the monograph in which I work out the implications of this article more fully) I call "constative linguistics."
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Why is it important?
The idealizing impulse in linguistics is relentless. Every time any influential thinker (Saussure, Austin, Grice) moves too close to actual language use, the idealizing impulse steps in to render that move powerless. This article, and Performative Linguistics (2003) as its monograph expansion, are attempts not only to track that impulse but to counteract its harmful effects on thinking about language.
Perspectives
When Jacob Mey, the editor of the Journal of Pragmatics then as now, came to Hong Kong for a semester in 2014--invited by a friend of his, who was Head of English--I (as Dean) invited him to lunch. Before responding to my invitation email, he asked around about me: was I the Doug Robinson who used to live in Finland? I was astonished: I remembered his name because he had published that early article of mine; but how could he possibly remember mine, one of hundreds of people he had published? At lunch he explained that he remembered me because of the Finnish connection: he too had lived in Finland, and spoke Finnish.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Metapragmatics and its discontents, Journal of Pragmatics, December 1986, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/0378-2166(86)90145-1.
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