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9 - Sociopragmatics and Context

from Part III - Pragmatic Approaches to Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2023

By
Sophia Marmaridou
Edited by
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Jesús Romero-Trillo
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Summary

Sociopragmatics typically refers to sociocultural parameters of the communicative use of language (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). This concept has long been taken up in the area of applied linguistics (Kaspar & Rose 2002) and historical pragmatics (Jucker 2006; Culpeper 2009). Context per se is difficult to pin down and, therefore, its association with language in a principled manner is a challenging task. In view of the above, and within a Construction Grammar framework (Fried and Östman 2004), this chapter aims to show that the object of sociopragmatic analysis can in fact be viewed as the domain of socioculturally defined genres that are often associated with particular (genre) constructions reflecting a speaker’s knowledge of the language (Nikiforidou 2016). The question to be addressed in this view is to what extent speakers’ understanding of context is systematic, conventional, and, hence, an inherent part of grammar and the description of language. The data to be discussed include recipes, labels, couple talk, stage directions, and TV talk. It will be argued that sociopragmatic context, typically encoded at the meso-level of genre, can be accounted for as a set of specifications that are routinely incorporated in the description of a language’s grammatical constructions.

Keywords

Applied LinguisticsHistorical PragmaticsConstruction Grammargenregenre constructionsrecipeslabelesecouple talkstage directionsTV talk
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context , pp. 205 - 224
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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