ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades a growing number of linguists have come to acknowledge the need to look at various linguistic phenomena, particularly morphological and syntactic phenomena, from the viewpoint of their functional motivation in actual human communication, in real discourses and texts-in preference, that is, to concentrating exclusively on the formal algorithmic properties of syntax, and considering in isolation often implausible sentences that can be contextualized only with great difficulty. In particular, there is increasing recognition that whatever intrinsic meaning grammatical categories may have, pragmatic factors and discourse context play a crucial role in the interpretation of their meaning. We understand pragmatics here, as most linguists and philosophers of language do, to refer to the use of language in actual contexts of communication, that is to the ways in which speakers - or writers - manipulate the resources of their language to accomplish particular communicative objectives. This view of discourse-pragmatics subsumes a variety of different notions having to do with structuring information (e.g. the encoding of topicfocus relations, foreground-background, assertion, and presupposition), creating textual cohesion and connectivity, establishing discoursal point of view, expressing speaker attitudes in discourse, and conveying information pertinent to the relations between speech-act participants and the text. Such a view implies, then, that grammatical categories, properties of the text, and characteristics of the context (in particular the speech-act context) are inextricably interwoven, and thus collectively provide the appropriate foundation for a general and explanatory functional analysis of the categories in question.
