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

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

by Alessandro Capone

Biography
Dr Alessandro Capone studied at the University of Oxford under the Committee of Comparative Philology and General linguistics chaired by Anna Morpurgo Davies. He was taught logic and semantics by Professor James Higginbotham, obtaining a doctorate, with a thesis entitled ‘Modality and discourse’. He has published various papers, long reviews, and volumes, among which ‘Pragmemes’ (Journal of Pragmatics), and ‘Tra semantica e pragmatica’ (Bologna, Clueb, 2003) (prefaced by Sorin Stati), ‘Dilemmas and excogitations: an essay on modality, clitics and discourse’ (Messina, Armando Siciliano, 2000), and ‘Modal adverbs and discourse’ (Pisa, ETS, 2002). He taught at the University of Messina.

Language, in symbolizing human life, standardises and codifies it. Thus we are able to speak of language as defining, indeed constructing, social institutions (…) (Mey 2001, 115).

Introduction
In this paper I shall try to connect my views on pragmemes (already expressed at length in Capone 2005) to considerations on the way we customarily and ordinarily talk about individuals under the constraints of (tight) social rules that have a bearing on the choice of particular modes of presentation as a function of the context we are in. In particular, I shall write and expatiate on linguistic modes of presentation actually used in conversation (in institutional or non-institutional settings) from a societal linguistic perspective (rather than from a philosophical perspective) and I shall show that the choice of certain modes of presentation is often determined by the specifics of the language games in which we happen to talk about certain referents and, also, by the actions on which such talk bears. The paper is cast in a framework which is dubbed ‘societal pragmatics’ and is mainly due to important work by Jacob Mey.

1.