国外语用学20年:回顾与前瞻

A Review of Pragmatics in Europe and America in the Past 20 Years

在过去20多年中,西方的语用学研究已形成微观语用学和宏观语用学两个方面。对传统课题如言语行为、会话含义、预设、指示以及会话结构等的探索有所进展,引人注目的研究包括对格赖斯语用推理机制的修正,以及对语法和语用接口问题的探讨,最有影响的是斯珀伯和威尔逊的关联理论。与微观语用学相比,宏观语用学认为语用学不必是语言学的分支,而可以是考察语言的功能性视角,是结合语言运作的认知、社会和文化因素的研究思路。宏观语用学对格赖斯的合作原则及其准则提出了批评,认为必须结合社会因素才能正确理解和分析人类交际。国外语用学研究目前的动向有几点值得注意:(一)语用学的一些理论和概念正在成为教条;(二)从认知角度研究语言使用已成为必然,但不必是在关联理论为代表的认知语用学框架内;(三)新的研究角度正在形成;(四)实证研究开始受到重视。

In the past 20odd years, pragmatic researches in the West can be subsumed under micropragmatics and macropragmatics. Progress has been made in traditional areas like speech acts, conversational implicature, presupposition, deixis and conversational structure. Important studies have been done to revise the Gricean inferencing mechanism. Sperber and Wilsons relevance theory has become a vogue. In contrast to micropragmatics, macropragmatics regards pragmatic research not as a branch of linguistics but a functional perspective on the study of the use of language, involving cognitive, social and cultural factors. Trends in the current research that merit attention include: (1) Some pragmatic concepts are getting dogmatic; (2) Cognitive approach is considered as inevitable; (3) New perspectives are taking shape; and (4) Databased methods are gaining acceptance.