Pragmemes in discourse

Abstract

This paper argues for a pragmatic perspective on discourse, delimiting discourse from context, and from arbitrarily concatenated discourse units. It argues for a relational conception of discourse unit whose form and function depends on the frame of investigation, and proposes to adapt the concepts of pragmeme and pract. A micro pragmeme may be realized by an utterance or by the minimal form of discourse connective counting as a communicative act. A meso pragmeme spans over various micro pragmemes, which count as a sequence, and a macro pragmeme spans over some more or less delimited number of meso pragmemes counting as discourse genre or activity type. Analogously to the differentiation between type and token, a pragmeme with a contrastive function may be realized with the practs well or but, with a meso pract with a challenging function, or with the macro pragmeme of review. A continuative pragmeme may be realized by practs focussing on temporal or argumentative continuation.