Sociopragmatics

Abstract

This chapter examines both the roots of sociopragmatics and current understandings of the field. It starts by positioning sociopragmaticswithin pragmatics, pointing out some particular difficulties with its conception. After consideration of whether J. L. Austin’s work could be said to be an early precursor, the foundations of sociopragmatics in the work of Geoffrey N. Leech and Jenny Thomas are reviewed, including the distinction they propose between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics, a distinction, it is noted, that has gained traction in certain sub-fields of pragmatics (e.g. cross-cultural pragmatics). The penultimate section examines the role of context in definitions of sociopragmatics, arguing that meso-level contextual notions are key. Finally, a definition of sociopragmatics is proposed

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.