ABSTRACT
Any discussion of pragmatics raises all of the critical, highly political field-defining and methodological issues in the recent history of linguistic theory. Or if it doesn't, it should. That history is alternately characterized by unrecognized theoretical assumptions determining the outcomes of empirical research, and theorizing innocent of empirical data. We do not try to correct these meta-theoretical problems here—Levinson (1983), and Leech (1983) summarize them nicely—though we do hope to operate from a consistent theoretical position, suggesting the direction such a correction might take. Some of our guiding questions:
What apparatus (we are reluctant to commit to its nature) do speakers bring to text-forming and text-interpreting situations? The question of pragmatic competence(s).
What is the nature of each of the components of this competence? The question of ontology—rules, conventions, strategies, heuristic procedures, and mutual knowledge: what's what?
What analytical methods and formal representations serve us best?
