Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

Pragmatic analysis refers to a set of linguistic and logical tools with which analysts develop systematic accounts of discursive political inter- actions. They endeavor to identify the full range of inferences that a reader or a hearer would make when encountering the locutions of an author or a speaker, considered in context. Consequently, pragmatic analysis is suited to the practice of inquiry that Hall (1999: 210–16) terms ‘specific history,’ in which analysts reconstruct, through emplotment, historical episodes that were meaningful to historical actors before they became meaningful as objects of analysis. Analysts endeavor to recover this meaning in order to understand agents’ actions and thereby to understand why events turned out the way they did rather than some other way. The method is systematic, in the sense that any researcher may replicate the analysis of another. The method forces analysts to specify each inference explicitly. Critics who wish to dispute the substantive conclusions can point to the specific inferential steps that ostensibly misled them. This feature of pragmatic analysis focuses scholarly dispute on the source of intellectual disagreement, thereby promoting know- ledge cumulation. Because it systematically examines meaningsinthe context of interaction, pragmatic analysis can be useful in empirically testing constructivist formulations, particularly those that theorize the role of agents in the creation of meanings, practices, structures, and institutions through their speech acts and communicative interactions