engleski

Context-Dependent Pragmatic Norm: A Culture as an Excuse

The pragmatic norm embraces sociocultural patterns and strategies in speech acts, belongs to the specific features of a civilization and culture, and is very much a contextual norm since the choice of communication strategy directly depends on every element of the communicational context. In each individual's speech behavior, both his individual and his collective experience are always present (since he belongs to a collective), and the latter, inter alia, includes experience both of content (which cannot or should not be uttered) and of linguistic expressions (which must not or ought not to be used). In those circumstances a culture is used as an excuse (Dervin 2013) for such behavior. According to Grice and Strawson, it is the intentions that are the topos of language activity, and not conventions and norms. Intentionalists stress the interaction among speakers and participants in the communicative act, abstracting from the sociocommunicational dimension. Ethical regulation, dealing with the rights and norms of public communication, particularly with its pragmatic aspects, differs from society to society and from one synchrony to another. Further, formulations of ethical rules and norms always depend on the context they belong to. Nevertheless, in every period and in every paradigmatic social context, spaces of public communication seem to be governed by a very broad ethical principle from which all other norms are derived. Since antiquity, ethics has demanded that participation in public communication must always be subordinated to the idea of the good of the entire community ; in modern times, the ethical imperative is not to injure individual and collective identities. Yet practical language use betrays a different reality, with frequent deviations from the ethical imperative. Manipulating the language of public communication (seeking to show one's own interests as common and shared) is done through a large set of subtle or crude procedures of communication and language (from untruths to semantic shifts that remain hidden from the addressees). The possibility of manipulation is not only based on contextual circumstances but also on an inherent characteristic of language behavior in public communication, namely the ideologization of public-communication language.

pragmatics; norm; context; culture; interculturality

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