Pragmatics of Understanding: Centrality of the Local

Abstract

Cross-cultural contrastive approaches motivate research that questions the universality premise of pragmatic theories by illustrating facts of local linguistic practices from diverse geographical areas. In the spirit of my earlier studies of Japanese (e.g. Matsumoto 1988, 1989), I suggest that contrastive pragmatics can lead the field of pragmatics to addressing variations in linguistic practice that go beyond the geographical diversity of cultures and encompass other types of “atypical” discourse, such as discourse of speakers with varied cognitive conditions including persons with Alzheimer’s. This paper argues for the pragmatics of understanding , i.e. the language users’ and the analysts’ efforts (i) to understand what speakers are trying to convey in verbal interaction and (ii) to understand local pragmatic principles of verbal exchange, and thereby to encourage more inclusive studies of pragmatics.