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Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Edited by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 294] 2018
► pp. 59–84

The interface between pragmatics and conversation analysis

| University of York

In his authoritative account of Pragmatics, Levinson (1983) included conversation analysis (CA) as firmly part of pragmatics. Others have perhaps been more cautious about whether CA is really relevant to the pragmatics programme. Despite the differences and divergences between CA and pragmatics, they share a number of key interests, especially in three of the foundational areas of pragmatics – namely implicature (e.g., from Grice 1975), speech acts (social action) (e.g., from Austin 1962 and Searle 1969) and presupposition and well-formedness (e.g., from Lakoff 1971). I will show examples that demonstrate the distinctiveness of CA’s approach to these core pragmatic aspects of language use – in the spirit of demonstrating how CA’s approach complements and does not detract from approaches in pragmatics.

Keywords: conversation analysis, implicature, speech acts, performatives, social action, well-formedness, sequential analysis, grammatical design
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Implicature
  • 3.Speech acts
  • 4.Presuppositions and well-formedness
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 7 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.294.04dre
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