Pragmatics and Discourse Organization -- Discourse and FLT 2007.2

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Date Posted: 09:20:24 09/02/07 Sun
Author: K�tia
Subject: Pragmatics and Discourse Organization
In reply to: Michelle Menezes 's message, "Re: TEXT 4 - DA and Grammar (McCarthy)" on 11:12:57 08/28/07 Tue

Let me try to help you a little bit here. You seem to have got the point, but some extra explanation won�t hurt, right? When we talk about communicating, we cannot separate things. I mean, grammatical choice, discourse organization and pragmatics are all interconnected. But in science we tend isolate our objects of study � that�s why we have separate names for such interrelated entities.
We know we can study Grammar isolated from the context � that�s what we�re all used to. When we talk about grammatical choice, we signal we are not adherence to a traditional view of Grammar any more, as we are admitting language users do make a choice when they speak.
Speakers�/writers� choices can be studied by means of the analysis of the discourse organization. If we do that, we�ll be examining what in the discourse, the text itself (written or oral), that made users take that choice. It could be the mention of their subject matter by the previous speaker, or what they have written in the previous paragraph or letter, for example. Cohesion is one of the concepts we might take into account when looking into discourse organization.
Now, if we decide to study the choices speakers or writers make based on who they are, their relationship to their interlocutors (readers/listeners), their communicative purpose, the setting of the communicative event etc., we are taking a pragmatic approach to study of discourse.
Of course, if we are studying something like the use of IT/THIS/THAT we will have to explain grammatical choice based on discourse organization for some cases and on pragmatics on other cases. Saying that the referent was mentioned in a previous sentence would be an example of the former, whereas saying that the speaker used a specific element to show their disapproval is an example of the latter.
We can also say that Grammatical Choice depends on Discourse Organization, which, in turn, depends on Pragmatics. In other words, the context determines our decisions concerning Discourse Organization, which, in turn, determine the choices we make related to linguistic (or grammatical) items. If we study a communicative event taking the grammar as our starting point we are taking a bottom-up perspective (from smaller units to larger ones) � that�s also called a micro-analytic approach. If we do the opposite, and start form the context (pragmatic aspects) to get to discourse organization, or, ultimately, to linguistic (grammatical) choice, we are taking a macro-pragmatic approach, which is, of course, also a top-down perspective to the study of discourse.

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