The notion of construction has gained increasing attention under the past two decades. Constructions are commonly defined as conventional signs with a symbolic correspondence between form and meaning (Croft and Cruse 2004, Goldberg 2013). Contrasting this view with recent theorizing in pragmatics (e.g., Depraetere/Salkie 2017), the question arises how pragmatic meaning can be represented in constructionist approaches. Pragmatic meaning is commonly understood as those aspects of meaning that are inferentially derived in context, guided by general pragmatic principles, e.g., Gricean maxims.

Crucially, however, contextualist approaches to the semantics/pragmatics interface have shown that inferential processes not only come into play at the level of ‘what is implicated’ (Grice 1989), but intrude already at the propositional level, determining the truth-conditional content of an utterance (e.g., Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Recanati 2010). Obviously, this should be true not only for utterances of sentences, but also for utterances of all kinds of constructions. Yet, construction grammar lacks a theoretical explication of the role of pragmatic principles in the theory.

On the other hand, on the meaning side of constructions, many constructionist approaches include aspects such as pragmatic presuppositions, speech act restrictions, or genre specifications, as far as they can be said to be conventionally tied to the construction (e.g., Fillmore 1996, Kay 2004, Nikiforidou/Fischer 2015). However, the question is whether this kind of information is still pragmatic in character. After all, one of the most widely accepted criteria for a pragmatic meaning aspect is its cancellability (cf. Ariel 2010).

In this talk, I will argue that the two strands of research – construction grammar and contextualist pragmatics – might be fruitfully integrated. Such an integrated analysis entails both a clarification of the notions of “pragmatics”, “conventionality” and of “constructional meaning”. Drawing on a sample of German sub-sentential constructions, I will show that pragmatic aspects play an important role in the meaning constitution of utterances of constructions. Based on this analysis, I will discuss the following more general questions: (i) How can pragmatic meaning be represented in a descriptive model of constructions? (ii) What are the relevant criteria to differentiate between conventional semantic and conventional(ized) pragmatic aspects of constructions? (iii) What role do inferential processes play in constructions? (iv) How are different degrees of form/function associations in constructions related to pragmatic notions such as conversational implicature, conventional implicature, or explicature?

 

References

Ariel, Mira. 2010. Defining Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances. The Pragmatics of Explicit Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell.

Croft, William & D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Depraetere, Ilse & Raphael Salkie (Eds.). 2017. Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Cham: Springer (Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning 11).

Fillmore, Charles. 1996. The Pragmatics of Constructions. In: Slobin, Dan et al. (Eds.): Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language. Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 53-69.

Goldberg, Adele E. 2013. Constructionist approaches. In Thomas Hoffmann & Graeme Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar, 15-31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Logic and conversation. In Paul Grice (ed.), Studies in the way of words, 22-40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kay, Paul. 2004. Pragmatic Aspects of Constructions. In Laurence Horn & Gregory Ward (Eds.): The Handbook of Pragmatics, 675-700. Oxford: Blackwell.

Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. The theory of generalized conversational implicatures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nikiforidou, Kiki & Kerstin Fischer. 2015. On the interaction of constructions with register and genre. Constructions and Frames 7 (2), 137-147.

Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-conditional Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.