Interview with Anne Wichmann

Abstract

Pragmatic meaning is a very important aspect of human communication, but what makes it interesting is its mysterious and slippery nature. Most nonlinguists tend to think of meaning only in terms of what words mean, but in pragmatics one must account for what people mean. It’s interesting because it is invisible: we know it’s there, but we can’t often identify why it’s there. I also think that pragmatics is interesting from a methodological point of view. There are different approaches to pragmatics. There is Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory, derived from philosophy, which has become more of a sociological-ethnographical approach to pragmatics. This approach highlights what speakers intend rather than what listeners interpret, but it also requires a profound understanding of the context in which things are spoken. There is also the cognitive approach of Relevance Theory, although it worries me that this approach is often based on introspection and invented data. Then there is the strict conversation analysis approach which focuses on close detail and only accepts evidence from participants’ responses. In my experience, the analysis can be so close that it is very difficult to stand back from individual examples to make generalizations. In my own work, I have mostly used speech corpora, in other words transcribed recordings of spoken language, allowing me to look at the frequencies and distribution of data, along with the immediate context and co-text. There are many areas that are interesting for pragmatics, ranging from basic speech acts to turn-taking and the whole area of politeness and especially impoliteness. Also, it’s worth looking at pragmatics from a developmental perspective, i.e., how children learn. For example, children often take things literally, so if you say on the telephone “Is your mummy there?”, they think it’s a question, rather than a request to speak to the mother. How and when do they learn this? So pragmatic meaning is interesting from the perspective of child language acquisition. There is also a lot of interest in historical investigations