What if…? Imagining non-Western perspectives on pragmatic theory and practice
Introduction
The Ewe proverb which is the epigraph of this paper likens knowledge to the huge baobab tree which cannot be embraced by one person or by a pair of hands. The moral lesson it contains is that no single person or perspective has monopoly over knowledge. This moral lesson resonates with calls for “cognitive justice” – that is, “the right of many forms of knowledge to exist, seeing that all knowledges are partial and complementary” (Visvanathan, 2002: 7) – in scientific enquiry. In this context, our goal in this short article is to explore the possibilities for embracing theories and models of social interaction and language-in-use from diverse lingua-cultures, especially from the so-called non-Western world. How has this project been understood in the context of pragmatic inquiry until now, to what extent has it been carried out, and how (else) can it be understood? We hope to show that there are linguistic practices that are radically different from established views currently on offer in pragmatics and that, in the interest of cognitive justice and the plurality of sciences and knowledge systems, these should be developed to complement the current stock.
Before continuing with our task of reflecting on these non-Western perspectives, it is worth acknowledging that the task itself is framed from a Western perspective. It is often pointed out that non-Western is a vague and vast term. Does it include the Middle East? What about Eastern Europe? ‘Fringe’ areas like Mexico and Greece have been struggling with these questions since their modern inception.1 Fully aware of the issues here, our primary focus will be Africa (even here, there is enormous communicative diversity), although we will also draw parallels to other areas.
A useful way to begin thinking about our task is to reflect on a hypothetical question: What would linguistics (or any subdiscipline thereof, including pragmatics) look like, had it been based on African language practices and data? For one thing, multilingualism as a natural state of the human mind and in society would probably not have come as a late realization in the field as it has now. This being the norm rather than the exception in Africa (and in South Asia), models of multilingual and multilectal linguistic practices may have preceded (rendering them obsolete) the dominant monocultural and monolingual models, largely acknowledged to be reflections of standard language ideologies promoted within the nation-states of Europe. Perhaps we would also have a better model of multimodality where we pay attention to both the visual and auditory modes of language use, reduced use of non-verbal and gestural channels also known to be characteristic of some Western European modes of communication. Perhaps we would have a better handle on language use in various culturally recognized activities. We might, for instance, no longer claim that greetings are meaningless or used only for phatic communion.2 We might develop an understanding of greetings as not just greetings but rather as a type of activity in which ideologies relating to honor and status are enacted, as is the case in West Africa (see e.g. Finnegan, 1969, Irvine, 1974, Foley, 1997, Ameka, 2009).
There is no doubt that over the past half century much information has been gathered from the non-Western world about linguistic practices and the cultural logics that motivate them. Still, these other perspectives have yet to make their way into the mainstream of pragmatic theorizing. That is not to deny the existence of pragmatic frameworks rooted in the non-Western world, such as Emancipatory Pragmatics (Hanks et al., 2009, see also Hanks et al., 2019) and Postcolonial Pragmatics (Anchimbe and Janney, 2011), both of which have been showcased through special issues of the Journal of Pragmatics. Despite their availability, however, few studies have been conducted within these frameworks.3 Admittedly, paradigm change in scientific practice is slow to materialize and these frameworks are recent but it is telling that, despite a recent boom in textbook and handbook publications in pragmatics, only one textbook (Senft, 2014) mentions emancipatory pragmatics and only one handbook (Barron et al. 2017) includes a chapter on postcolonial pragmatics (Anchimbe and Janney, 2017). Our point is that, while the potential of these theories to positively impact the field as a whole has been acknowledged,4 uptake by the scientific community has been slow. If these theories are not used to train students and if scholars outside a select few are not exposed to them, there is a real danger that they will be, as it were, “museumized” and catalogued as alternative forms of knowledge (Visvanathan, 2002: 184, 185), admired but not engaged with in the pragmatic analysis of linguistic behavior beyond their contexts of origin, despite their proponents’ aspirations.5
Rather, the main way in which non-Western pragmatics continues to be understood is that of taking a concept, a paradigm, or a model developed based on Western modes of thinking and interaction and testing whether it is applicable to non-Western societies.6 This applies not only to the ‘usual suspects’ (the theories of conversational implicature, speech acts, and politeness) but also to recent theoretical advances made within the field of Conversation Analysis. Indeed, non-Western societies have provided fertile grounds for testing these theories. However, overall it would seem that researchers are mostly content when the theories are confirmed and the tendency is to countenance “correction” or “expansion” of tested theories rather than their replacement in the face of disconfirming evidence. The same ‘lifting’ of practices from a Western context and applying them to non-Western ones can be observed in research practices as well. Ethical principles of data collection and preservation, in particular, have been developed to accommodate ethics as understood in a Western context. We have yet to imagine a research ethics guided by ethical principles as these are understood in other places around the globe.
To illustrate these points, we discuss four themes which have been tested in non-Western languages. The themes are speech acts (Section 2), conversational implicatures (Section 3), (im)politeness (Section 4), and Conversation Analysis (Section 5). Typically, the tests are inconclusive in the sense that we find studies that confirm and others that diverge from the Western concepts being tested. What this illustrates is that there is diversity of communicative practices, which calls for a plurality of approaches to better theoretically account for the variation that we find. This in turn emphasizes the need for more data and research to be carried out in non-Western contexts, raising the issue of a truly inclusive research ethics. Section 6 highlights how our current practices in this respect can fall short of serving the needs both of the communities where the data is collected, and of the researchers themselves. We conclude with recommending three steps that we can all take to make pragmatics a more inclusive discipline, respecting and reflecting patterns of language-in-use irrespective of where they are located geographically.
Section snippets
Western-centrism in performatives and speech acts?
Finnegan (1969) investigated performatives in Limba (lia), an Atlantic language of Sierra Leone shortly after speech act theory was proposed by Austin (1962). Finnegan noted that Austin was not the only one to have talked about performatives: social anthropologists had also done so. But she found that Austin had “presented it as a general interpretation of speech rather than as one arising specifically from the study of non-industrial societies or intended to explain distinctive forms such as
Western-centrism in conversational implicature?
The Cooperative Principle (CP) and its maxims, proposed by Grice (1989) to account for the logic of conversation, have also been tested in non-Western contexts and found to be non-applicable. Recall that the earliest critique of the CP, long before it was challenged on theoretical grounds by Sperber and Wilson (1986), was provided by Keenan (1976) based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Malagasy. Keenan argued that the Malagasy follow very different principles from the maxims of the CP in
Western-centrism in politeness?
The development of Brown & Levinson's approach to politeness in the 1970s could be seen as a response to the Anglo/Western-centrism of earlier developments in Speech Act Theory. Their Politeness theory was supposed to be universal and a way of accounting for indirect speech acts, among other things. The firm grounding of their theory in Grice's CP (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 5), however, has been limiting in this respect. For it has led them to seek politeness in increasing rates of
Western-centrism in Conversation Analysis?
The field of Conversation Analysis would appear to be the least vulnerable to the critique of Western-centrism frequently leveled against the theories dealt with above, and to some extent that is true. Clearly, the field's origins in sociology and ethnomethodology have something to do with this. It is worth remembering, however, that Sacks' seminal insights that are at the foundations of the field (Sacks, 1992) also originated in a Western (specifically, US) context and the same goes for the
Western-centrism in methods and ethics
We started out by suggesting that in the interest of cognitive justice, pragmatics as a discipline cannot continue to ignore theoretical insights and patterns of language use emanating from non-Western societies. A corollary of this is that it is not ethical for the discipline to continue to use non-Western societies (however defined) simply as a testing-ground for theories and tools developed based on Western patterns of language use. As several disciplines are experiencing (and experimenting
Imagining a more inclusive pragmatics
There is a slow realization in the language sciences that language universals including universals of pragmatics built on a narrow empirical base grounded in Western ways with words and practices are a myth (Evans and Levinson, 2009, Levinson and Evans., 2010, Henrich et al., 2010, Eisenbeiss and Hellwig, 2018). Rather, variation and diversity are the hallmark of the human language system. As Levinson (2012: 397) puts it: “there is no other animal on the planet, as far as we know, which has
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to three anonymous referees, whose comments significantly helped us improve this paper. All remaining errors are our own.
Felix K. Ameka is Professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. He was also a Research Associate in the Language and Cognition Group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, until December 2017. His research interests are the quest for the meaning of linguistic signs and exploring their use in social interaction. He is interested also in the reflexive relation between language, culture and cognition. He works with primary data collected using ethnographic and experimental
References (108)
Slurs and appropriation: an echoic account
J. Pragmat.
(2014)When evaluation changes: an echoic account of appropriation and variability
J. Pragmat.
(2017)The concept of face and its applicability to the Zulu language
J. Pragmat.
(1998)- et al.
Question–response sequences in conversation across ten languages: an introduction
J. Pragmat.
(2010) - et al.
Towards an emancipatory pragmatics
J. Pragmat.
(2009) - et al.
Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to language practice
J. Pragmat.
(2019) - et al.
Time for a sea-change in linguistics: response to comments on ‘The myth of language universals’
Lingua
(2010) Reexamination of the universality of face: politeness phenomena in Japanese
J. Pragmat.
(1988)Anticipatory pragmatics
J. Pragmat.
(2012)Linguistic politeness and socio-cultural variations of the notion of face
J. Pragmat.
(1992)
Verbal indirection in Akan informal discourse
J. Pragmat.
The use of diminutives in expressing politeness: modern Greek versus English
J. Pragmat.
“Direct” and “indirect” communicative acts in semiotic perspective
J. Pragmat.
Conventionalization: a new agenda for im/politeness research
J. Pragmat.
The future of science studies
Futures
Grammar and cultural practices: the grammaticalisation of triadic communication in West African languages
J. West Afr. Lang.
‘When I die, don't cry’: the ethnopragmatics of gratitude expressions in West African languages
Access rituals in West Africa: an ethnopragmatic perspective
Meaning between algebra and culture: auto antonyms in the Ewe lexicon
Areal cultural scripts for social interaction in West African communities
Intercult. Pragmat.
Offers and Offer Refusals: A Postcolonial Pragmatics Perspective on World Englishes
Postcolonial Pragmatics Special Issue, Journal of Pragmatics
Postcolonial pragmatics
An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory
Pragmatics
How to Do Things with Words
Omoluwabi: towards a theory of cooperation in Yoruba interactional discourse practices
Politeness and interactional imbalance
Int. J. Sociol. Lang.
Speaking potlids from the lower Congo (Cabinda/Angola)
Texts on textiles: proverbiality as characteristic of equivocal communication at the East African coast (Swahili)
J. Afr. Cult. Stud.
Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different?
J. Pragmat.
Imagen ‘positiva’ vs. imagen ‘negativa’? Pragmática sociocultural y componentes de face
Oralia
Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage
Pragmatics between East and West: similar or different?
Universals in human language: a historical perspective
Rev. Belge Philol. Hist.
Nineteenth-century English politeness: negative politeness, conventional indirect requests and the rise of the individual self
J. Hist. Pragmat.
Towards a model for the study of politeness in Zulu
S. Afr. J. Afr. Lang.
Other-initiated repair in Siwu
Open Ling.
Recruiting assistance in interaction: a West-African corpus study
Other-initiated repair across languages: towards a typology of conversational structures
Open Ling.
Formats for other-initiation of repair across languages: an exercise in pragmatic typology
Stud. Lang.
Is ergativity always a marker of agency? Toraja and Samoan grammar of action and the contribution of emancipatory pragmatics to social theory
Appl. Ling. Rev.
Inferences and indirectness in interaction
Open Ling.
Extending Psycholinguistics to Under-represented Languages and Populations-The Principle of Justice and Ethical Challenges for New Types of Linguistic Fieldwork
The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science
Behav. Brain Sci.
How to do things with words: performative utterances among the Limba of Sierra Leone
Man
Women's language of respect isihlonipha sabafazi
Cited by (27)
Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science
2022, Trends in Cognitive SciencesCitation Excerpt :The Gricean rules of conversation have served as the basis of a number of successful models of pragmatic reasoning [107]. However, speakers of languages other than English have been observed to adhere to different conversational norms: speech communities in both Africa [108] and East Asia [109] seemingly flip (at least some of) the Gricean expectations, as regular conversations typically involve ambiguous, indirect, and opaque utterances (Figure 2). Whether ambiguity or communicative efficiency (a la Grice) should be at center stage in our models of human interaction and pragmatic reasoning, therefore, seems to be at least partially mediated by language and its roots in culture (Box 5), which is reinforced by the observation of variation even within European languages [202] (see Outstanding questions).
Engaging readers across participants: A cross-interactant analysis of metadiscourse in letters of advice during the COVID-19 pandemic
2021, Journal of PragmaticsCitation Excerpt :Names and sensitive content (e.g., the discourse content of the policies, regulations and anything that could be related to ideology) in the examples throughout the paper are not shown. As argued by Ameka and Terkourafi (2019), the researcher can choose to do this in an ethical way according to local ethical standards. Coding was conducted by two experienced researchers (one being the author and the other being an experienced research assistant in the author's research group).
Kinship, seniority, and rights to know in Datooga children's everyday interaction
2021, Journal of PragmaticsCitation Excerpt :An alternative, “bottom-up” approach to take in the future would begin from the data, rather than specific linguistic forms, and attempt to determine which semiotic resources are drawn on in children's negotiation of knowledge. In studying children's language-in-use in a little-studied language, this research contributes to efforts to bring greater diversity and plurality to the field of pragmatics (Ameka and Terkourafi, 2019). Though the theoretical tools relied on here—concepts relating to epistemic stance, status, primacy, etc—come from a Western tradition of studying knowledge negotiation, the social dimensions of epistemic management of interest in this paper, namely age-based seniority and kinship, derive from my ethnographic research in Datooga communities.
Grounding the energy justice lifecycle framework: An exploration of utility-scale wind power in Oaxaca, Mexico
2021, Energy Research and Social ScienceCitation Excerpt :This, in turn, informed the ethnographic methods described in the following section. Due to both the context in question and the desire to bring rich, new empirical narratives to bear on theoretical frameworks developed largely within the ‘western’ academy [69] (namely that of the lifecycle approach to energy justice), ethnographic methods were selected. These enabled the immersive day-to-day interactions and experiences required for acquiring a better sensitivity regarding different local understandings of USWP development in the region [70].
A discursive approach to disagreements expressed by Chinese spokespersons during press conferences
2020, Discourse, Context and MediaCitation Excerpt :It is during the late 20th century that the first political press conference (March 1st, 1983) was held by the Chinese government following the Western press conference system. Nowadays, a paradigm is shifting away from the observations of communicative practices in the West towards the calls for more inclusive research, respecting and reflecting patterns of language-in-use irrespective of where the interlocuters are located geographically (Ameka & Terkourafi, 2019). In this vein, Ren (2018) stated that since Chinese writing is character-based rather than alphabetic and Chinese culture is largely different from many Western cultures, investigating the pragmatic, social issues of Chinese can provide insights into the testing grounds for Western usage rules and their assumed motivations applied into non-Western language use and also help us better understand the complex relationship between universality versus particularity in various settings, including political scenarios.
Felix K. Ameka is Professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. He was also a Research Associate in the Language and Cognition Group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, until December 2017. His research interests are the quest for the meaning of linguistic signs and exploring their use in social interaction. He is interested also in the reflexive relation between language, culture and cognition. He works with primary data collected using ethnographic and experimental methods especially on West African languages. Some of his recent publications have been reflections on research practice and ethics especially in language documentation.
Marina Terkourafi is professor of sociolinguistics at Leiden University. She has worked extensively on the pragmatics of non-standard varieties, starting with her PhD dissertation (Politeness in Cypriot Greek: A frame-based approach; Cambridge, 2001) and, more recently, on indirect speech through an Associateship held at the Center for Advanced Study of the University of Illinois (results published in the Journal of Belgian Linguistics, 2014). She is broadly interested in the ways people's backgrounds and other contextual factors may lead them to divergent interpretations of the same utterances, a topic she has investigated from macro (historical) and micro (including experimental) perspectives.