The pragma-semantics envisaged in section 423.2.4. may be a well-founded dream based on a certain reading of current trends. But the discipline of pragmatics is already a reality. And it is interesting that it has mainly developed in the context of linguistics as a scientific enterprise, taking a rational and activist line that presents an interesting complement to the development of the relatively poetic and passionate discipline of semiotics, also in a setting provided by linguistics. It seems clear that the applied studies in general, and the applied linguistic disciplines plus language arts in particular, have more to gain from the activism of pragmatics than from the pathos of semiotics. Scholars within linguistics proper have tended to be favourably disposed towards, and relatively willing and able to welcome concepts coming from, pragmatics rather than semiotics. The suggestions here is that workers in applied linguistics and the language arts should think about and make sense of this preference. This is linked to proposal in section 4 that workers in the translation field should work on their own foundations, highlighting issues of substance rather than form. Pragmatics works with accessible nations and deals with matters of substance, whereas semiotics is committed to a study of form.
Semiotics is concerned with typically unconscious symbolic processes which often vary across cultures. Its agenda inherits the issues of nineteenth-century symbolism in poetry and the twentieth - century anthropology of symbols, invoking the thematic space of a late-Romantic quest for authentic roots in which the human desire to find meaning can be poetically understood if not systematically justified or explained. The basic element of semiotic work is the sign, a complex of signifier and signified with some displacement and projection; the scientific nexus is with the psychology not of cognition but of extremely primitive and poorly understood processes, shared by humans with all animals, processes which endow percepts with significance without yet building a conceptual level of meanings or a pragmatically real level of references. This unavailability of meaning and the affective intensity of the formal phenomena to be studied lead semiotics to concentrate on form.
In contrast, pragmatics thematizes people's actions vis-à-vis the mutually adjusted rationalities of actors in a social situation, real or imagined, and thus deals with notions of meaning. Being an open discipline, it is capable of reflexive work on the boundaries and foundations of pragmatics and its links with the sciences and arts it serves as an aid or adjunct. (Cf. Dasgupta 1988 for discussion of the pragmatic road from the formal microlinguistics of grammar to the social macrolinguistics of language as a whole. Without much exaggeration, one might describe pragmatics as the study of the substantive or real-life use of forms, the study of how form is situated in substance.
Applied studies in general, not only applied linguistics, must deal with the problem of using scientific resources in social life. This is a pragmatic issue to the extent that scientific results are forms and the issues of life are substantive issues. But the relation between science and pragmatics goes deeper than that. Not only does the non-scientific social user have to decide pragmatically what various pieces of science will mean in real life; even the scientist working in some new period has to make pragmatic decisions in relation to what is becoming the old science of period - has to decide how pieces of the science of the older period will or will not count as meaningful in the context of new science (perhaps as derivatively meaning-ful, via some oversimplifying reduction that transforms hypotheses of one period into hypotheses of another). Even within science, the relation between different periods, across a boundary created by scientific progress, is a social relation in the sense that its management can benefit from pragmatics. All social and rational dialogue relations that involve the meshing of two cognitive beings can be conducted more carefully if the nations of pragmatics are brought to bear on them. This is why pragmatics can help even translators in working out the substantive foundations of their enterprise. |
