Source: Schneider, K. and Barron A., 2008. Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational pragmatics. In Variational Pragmatics. Schneider K. and Barron A. (eds.) pages: 1-31. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
The domain of Variational Pragmatics is a combination of pragmatics and variational linguistics. It studies pragmatic variation in geographical and social space, but also functions on the interface of pragmatics and variational linguistics as it focuses on both regional and social variation. Variational pragmatics hope to combine and to complete dialectology and pragmatics.
On the one hand, dialectology is claimed to miss out on certain pragmatic elements. A long time, dialectology focused on accentology (variation in pronunciation). Lexical and some grammatical aspects entered the domain as well, but research questions about i.e. variation on the level of polite language do not occur. However, “the choice of how to say something may depend upon who is talking to whom under what social circumstances” (Wolfram & Schilling, 2006).
On the other hand, pragmatics have been looking for universal features, assuming that language communities are homogeneous wholes. Wierzbicka wrote a seminal paper on this, titled “different cultures, different languages, different speech acts”. The title gives it away; this paper goes against the common assumption that what is valid for English, counts for other languages as well. In a rather intuitive way, she shows that pragmatics should look into the naturally occuring variation in language use (as dialectology does). In that sense, the approaches of intralingual pragmatic variation are the forerunners of variational pragmatics.
Before stepping up to a detailed survey of the research possibilities, a note on terminology. The term “dialect”, common in dialectology, refers to regional variation. However, because of the shift to other types of variation, the term “dialect” is generalized to denote all types of language use, be it different due to region, sociological issues, etc. The ambiguity between “dialect” as ‘regional variation’ and “dialect” as the hypernym ‘all types of varying language use’ is problematic. Therefore, the term “variety” is introduced to denote the hypernym; the term “dialect” is replace by “regiolect”, as “dialect” has grown a negative connotation. In short, the term “variety” is an umbrella-term for whatever variation one may encounter in language use.
Combining the knowledge of both pragmatics and dialectology, the dimensions along which language can vary are now more or less defineable. On the one hand, there is more or less stable variation that “defines” a language user in a constant way.
- regional variation (national, subnational, pluricentric)
- socio-economical variation
- ethnic variation (native, non-native, integration)
- gender (male, female, homosexual)
- age (young, old)
- education
- religion
- etc.
On the other hand, situational variation may occur along the following (micro-social) dimensions:
- social distance (symmetric, asymmetric conversations)
- power
- assimilation
- etc.
From pragmatics, it is possible to find out which tangible features can be looked at to measure these dimensions. There are five levels of features:
- formal level: T/V pronouns, response tokens, discourse markers, hedges
- action level: requests, thanking, apologies, invitations
- interactional level: small talk, adjacency pairs
- topic level: taboo, discourse structuring device cf. conversational topics
- organisational level: turn taking, pauses, overlaps
These (levels of) features can be used to distinguish the dimensions mentioned above. As an example, the combination of a certain scientific topic, long pauses and many requests may “define” the dimensions of an asymmetrical conversation between an older professor and a younger student (age, social distance, power). This observation is one of the main points in my PhD research.
