Variational Pragmatics

Abstract

Variational pragmatics is the study of pragmatic variation, specifically the systematic study of language use conventions across national, regional and social varieties of the same language, spoken (and written) natively and increasingly also spoken (and written) non-natively. Variational pragmatics is focused on the influence on communicative behaviour of such factors as region, social class, ethnicity, gender and age and also investigates the interplay of these factors and their interaction with situational parameters, such as power and distance relations and context and discourse genre. This chapter outlines the original framework of this field of inquiry and its development, introducing recent modifications and extensions of this framework. It also provides a discussion of theoretical issues – most notably pragmatic universals and pragmatic variables and their variants – and of methodological principles, data types and data collection procedures. Finally, an overview is given of work carried out in variational pragmatics, in particular on the formal, actional, interactional, topic, organizational, prosodic, stylistic, non-verbal and metapragmatic levels of examination analytically distinguished in its framework. Detailed reference is made to the languages and language varieties considered, the social factors focused on, the phenomena examined (e.g. the types discourse markers or speech acts) and the methods employed.

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