语用学研究的新发展:变异语用学学科现状与研究趋势探析

Variational Pragmatics:Status Quo and Future Developments

变异语用学主要从地域、社会阶层、年龄、性别等宏观社会因素和社交权势、社会距离、语域等微观社会因素维度探析语用变异问题,其议题涉及形式、行为、互动、话题和组织等层面,研究主要遵循实证、对比、可比性、还原主义等原则,采用自然会话、语料库等自然数据和问卷、角色扮演、访谈等实验数据的方法对语用变异展开探究。变异语用学在学科界定、英语和西班牙语语内变异以及语言形式层面的语用变异等方面已取得一系列有价值的发现,但其不足是尚未完全厘定变异语用学与跨文化语用学、社会语言学等其他学科的关系,行为、互动、话题和组织等层面的研究尚不多见,研究方法也亟待体系化,对其他语种变异的研究也尚待进一步展开。

Variational pragmatics analyzes pragmatic variations from macro-social(e.g.,regions,social classes,ages,sexes,etc.)and micro-social(e.g.,power,distance,register,etc.)dimensions,and discusses topics at formal,actional,interactional,topic and organizational levels.Related research is conducted under the principles of empiricity,contrastivity,comparability and reductionism,the data of which are mainly from two sets,i.e.natural data(e.g.,natural conversations,corpora)and empirical data(e.g.,questionnaires,role plays,interviews).Variational pragmatics has made great advances in defining its research scope,intra-lingual variations in English and Spanish,and topics at the formal level.Future research is supposed to further illustrate how it differs from other related disciplines like cross-cultural pragmatics and sociolinguistics,how pragmatic variations are manifested at actional,interactional,topic and organizational levels,what are its key methodologies,and how other languages vary pragmatically.