Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 145, May 2019, Pages 72-82
Journal of Pragmatics

What if…? Imagining non-Western perspectives on pragmatic theory and practice

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.04.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Pragmatic theory and practice to date overwhelmingly rely on observations of communicative practices in the West.

  • Patterns of language use in non-Western communities serve primarily as testing grounds for these theories.

  • Western-inspired theoretical frameworks are not culturally neutral but situated in Western modes of thinking.

  • Ethics practices in pragmatics also reflect Western perspectives and values.

Abstract

To date, pragmatic theory and practice have largely drawn on theories and models based on observations of communicative practices in the West and tacitly treated as culturally neutral, while patterns of language use in non-Western communities have been used as testing grounds for Western usage rules and their assumed motivations. We see this practice as contrary to calls for cognitive justice and as hampering progress toward the development of inclusive and truly universally valid theories of pragmatics. We illustrate these points by discussing four themes which have been tested in non-Western languages: speech acts, conversational implicatures, (im)politeness, and Conversation Analysis. We then move on to the domain of research ethics and find that, here too, practices tend to reflect Western values, prioritizing Western notions of ethics and what is important to people and ultimately falling short of serving the needs both of the communities where the data are collected, and of the researchers themselves. We conclude with recommending three steps 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.

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

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    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.

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