Informational pragmatics

Why might a courtroom utterance such as About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? sound as if the idea that the cars smashed into each other is being taken for granted? And why might an utterance such as this topic on pragmatics, let’s hope it’s good sound different from let’s hope this topic on pragmatics is good? Answers to such questions fl ow from the study of informational pragmatics, an area that is concerned with “(a) how to segment the message into units; (b) how to assign degrees of prominence or subordination to different parts of the message; and (c) how to order the parts of the message” (Leech 1983:64). It is all about information packaging. Our term informational pragmatics is inspired by Leech’s discussions of “textual rhetoric” (some scholars refer to this area of pragmatics as discourse pragmatics). Although the label “textual” is, as Leech acknowledges, inspired by Halliday’s (e.g. 1973) work on language functions (just as is the use of “interpersonal” in “interpersonal rhetoric”), the notion of textual rhetoric is pitched as analogous to Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle, which we will discuss. According to Leech (1983: 60), textual rhetoric helps

to determine the stylistic form of the text in terms of segmentation, ordering, etc. ... [it] is based on speaker-hearer cooperation, a textually “well-behaved” utterance being one which anticipates and facilitates H’s task in decoding, or making sense of, the text.

What we like about this definition is that it explicitly flags up the fact that constructing a text involves both the speaker and hearer, something that ties in with our interactional focus. Leech did not himself follow up the notion of textual rhetoric with further publications, but the substance of what he was talking about has been pursued under the heading of “information structure” in particular (Lambrecht’s substantial 1994 study is of note). We have adopted the label informational pragmatics. We do not use the label information structure because that label suggests a different focus. Our focus is not on structure per se, something that would suggest a study in grammar, but structure insofar as it mediates communicative meanings in context, something that would suggest a study in pragmatics. One aspect has in common with textual rhetoric and information structure is that, linguistically, it focuses in particular on what is happening within the span of a sentence. This is, of course, a key point of departure, where the linguistic focus was on short expressions.

This topic is structured according to a distinction between information that is in the background and information that is in the foreground. As we explain next, this is a tricky distinction, as it can be characterized in a number of different ways. The following examine backgrounded information, specifically background assumptions (in relation to schema theory) and then presuppositions. next, we examine foregrounded information, specifically the notion of salience (in relation to foregrounding theory) and then elements that constitute the focus. In our concluding, we discuss informational grounding in an interactional perspective. Here we also reprise the notion of common ground, which we first introduced.