Pragmemes and modes of presentation (on professors, teachers, cardinals and popes)

Pragmemes

The view of linguistics I would like to advance is one in which societal factors preponderantly shape the use (and understanding) of language (Mey 2001). We are usually integrated in (or are part of) a society that has certain social norms that determine beliefs and conduct (including linguistic behaviour too). The rules we follow in our linguistic activities are both production and interpretation rules.
I follow Mey’s (2001) conviction that the main task of pragmatics is not only to ask how users ‘mean what they say’, that is, how they communicate, but also to ask how ‘they say what they mean’, employing the linguistic devises that society provides them with. Thus, I propose that production rules are not just rules serving to express a certain propositional content (or a certain speech act), but are mainly linguistic processes that relate utterances to contexts, marking them by procedures of the following sort:

If you want to say that x is the case, then choose an appropriate form F that relates to the situation of utterance and, in particular, to the situational context in which the utterance is placed, and cast your message in form F, thus signalling a close relationship between the message and the situation in which it was uttered. In short, if you can express thought U by alternative choices, choose the expression that signals that you are in the context in which you are (if there is one such expression available).

I would like to use a non-linguistic example to illustrate the societal dimension of linguistic rules that shape the expressions chosen for certain speech acts. Suppose we want to build a house. Then it is obvious that we must choose the right materials, and, in particular, those materials (say bricks, concrete, planks, tiles, etc.) that are functional to building something that is a house. Yet, in building a house, we also employ certain architectural principles that distinguish a house as one owned by a person belonging to a certain group (or to a certain nationality). In other words, the way we build houses does not just project what we need to have and do in order to obtain a place where the family can gather and is protected from the outside dangers, but it also projects our national identities.