Metapragmatics Conclusion

We have suggested that reflexive awareness underpins all language use. We have alluded to our preceding discussions of referring expressions, informational pragmatics, pragmatic meaning, pragmatic acts and interpersonal pragmatics, in describing how metarepresentational, metacognitive and metacommunicative awareness lie at the core of such pragmatic phenomena. We have also suggested that some pragmatic phenomena, such as irony, reported talk, pragmatic markers, metapragmatic descriptors and commentary, and social discourses cannot be explained without making recourse to these different forms of reflexive awareness. It is for this reason that we have intentionally concluded this volume with an explicitly metapragmatic perspective on pragmatic phenomena.

A metapragmatic perspective takes pragmatic phenomena to be consequential for people in the real world. What people are taken to be referring to or meaning, for instance, has real-world implications for those people involved. People talk about language use and such discussions matter. In analyzing metapragmatics in use it is clear that an analysis of the metalanguage that is both explicitly and implicitly invoked by participants (and observers) is necessary. It is important to remember, however, that this metalanguage is unlikely to be completely synonymous across languages, or even across groups of users of that language. Metapragmatics is thus ultimately a language- and culture-specific enterprise, a point we have tried to emphasize through using examples that not only highlight the ways in which English speakers display reflexive awareness of their use of English, but also touch upon the variation in such awareness across speakers of English.