Impoverished Pragmatics? The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface from an Intercultural Perspective

Abstract

The semantic-pragmatic interface debate is about how much actual situational context the linguistic signs need in order for them to be meaningful in the communicative process. There is evidence (e.g. House. Misunderstanding in social Life: Discourse approaches to problematic talk. Longman, 2003; Kecskes. Explorations in pragmatics: Linguistic, cognitive and intercultural aspects. Mouton de Gruyter, 2007; Trbojevic. Journal of Pragmatics. 151:118–127, 2019; Gabbatore et al., Intercultural Pragmatics, 16(1):27–57, 2019) that interlocutors in intercultural interactions rely more on the compositional meaning of linguistic signs (semantics) than contextually supported meaning (pragmatics) because actual situational context cannot help pragmatic implication and interpretation the way it does in L1 communication. At the same time in pragmatic theory there seems to be an agreement between the neo-Gricean account (Chierchia, 2013; Horn. The Handbook of Pragmatics) and the post-Gricean account on the fact that the process of implicature retrieval is context-dependent. But will this L1-based contextualism work in intercultural interactions? Is pragmatics impoverished if interlocutors can only partly rely on pragmatic enrichment coming from context and the target language? The paper argues that in fact pragmatics is invigorated rather than impoverished in intercultural communication. A new type of synchronic events-based pragmatics is co-constructed by interlocutors. Instead of relying on the existing conventions, norms and frames of the target language interlocutors create their own temporary frames, formulas and norms. There is pragmaticization of semantics which is a synchronic, (usually) one-off phenomenon in which coded meaning, sometimes without any specific pragmatic enrichment coming from the target language, obtains temporary pragmatic status. This pragmatic enrichment happens as a result of interlocutors’ blending their dictionary knowledge of the linguistic code (semantics) with their basic interpersonal communicative skills and sometimes unusual, not necessarily target language-based pragmatic strategies that suit them very well in their attempt to achieve their communicative goals.