Towards an empirical Pragmatics

Abstract

Besides the usual philosophical and linguistic approach to speech acts, pragmatics should also have a more empirical basis, in which the actual production, comprehension and acceptance of speech acts in their cognitive and social contexts should be made explicit. on the basis of earlier work on the cognitive processing of discourse, it is spelled out briefly how speech acts are actually understood, and it is argued that a number of social-psychological factors play a role in the acceptance of speech acts. linguistic properties of speech acts, e.g., style, are often a function of these social-psychological conditions of pragmatic successfulness.