4Th International Conference Intercultural Pragmatics – Madrid 2010

Gibbs: Can There Be A Pragmatic Theory For The Entire World?

These different foci on areas of stability and variability in pragmatic behaviors are often accompanied by very different theoretical accounts of how and why people act, speak, and understand in the ways they do. As pragmatics research has long noted, there are always instances of some people behaving in regular patterns and other people failing to adhere to putative pragmatic principles. My talk describes some aspects of this tension in the study of pragmatics, using some of my own work in experimental psycholinguistics as examples. I will argue that there is a way of thinking about both stability and instability in linguistic pragmatics as emerging from people?s self-organizing tendencies. This dynamical view claims that both broad regularities and specific variations in pragmatic behaviors, like all natural systems, can be accounted for by self-organizational processes that operate without explicit internal rules along multiple time-scales of experience (i.e., from neurons to culture). I suggest some reasons for adopting this perspective on human performance as a way of keeping pragmatics both scientifically sound and sensitive to the cross-cultural, and socially-specific, variations in pragmatic behavior.

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
University of California, Santa Cruz
Dept. of Psychology
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
U.S.A
gibbe@ucsc.edu