Romero-Trillo J, (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context. Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 95-115., 2023
Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in or... more Language is paradigmatically a human activity, largely consisting of speakers saying things in order to inform, warn, misinform, threat, sell, and so on. Usually, the plans that motivate such utterances include being understood by others and having an effect on their behavior as a result. The use of language belongs squarely in what Frege called the causal realms, the physical and the mental. Language is important because it is a system for doing things. This suggests that the philosophy of action should be a parta very important partof the philosophy of language. To a certain extent it is. Charles Morris, in Signs, Language, and Behavior (1946), divided "semiotics," the study of signs, into three parts: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 1 Taking language as a system of signs, pragmatics is the study of how language is used, "how to do things with words," as Austin says. Austin developed his theory of speech acts in the 1950s, and Searle and others have further criticized and developed it (Searle 1985). Speech act theory categorizes and describes actions in terms of what we do to perform them, and what we do in and by performing them. Perhaps by uttering a sentence I say something about a politician (a locutionary act); in saying that, I insult the politician (an illocutionary act); by insulting the politician I annoy his powerful friends (a perlocutionary act), and so on. All of this depends on syntax and semantics to get started, but it is basically pragmatics. A bit later, H. P. Grice (1975) introduced the concept of implicature, which is something conveyed by an utterance beyond the proposition it expresses, We are grateful to the members of the Zoom group of philosophical discussion for their constant inspiration. The first two authors acknowledge two grants, one by the Spanish Government
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