Striving For An Integrated Model Of Pragmatic Studies

Since Morris' invention of the term of pragmatics in 1937, many scholars have been devoted to the studies of pragmatics as a discipline. Given the relatively short history and its dynamic nature, however, pragmatics is still in its embryo stage, especially so in China. Based on some of the findings by scholars both at home and abroad, the present paper traces its traditional formation and its historical origin with semiotics. It is found that it is its philosophical basis that has contributed to the formation of the current two major trends of pragmatic studies, socio-cultural pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics. These two trends, in our tentative explorations, turn out to be closely related and could well be regarded as the two sub-components of pragmatics. Thus an integrated model of pragmatic studies has its practical significance. The writer finds out that the hearer attempts to adhere to some pragmatic principles such as the politeness principle and the cooperative principle and consider some other contextual factors to infer the speaker's meaning or utterance meaning while the speaker needs to take the hearer's inferential abilities into full account to realize his or her communicative intention. Consequently, we may arrive at the conclusion: in the process of linguistic communication, the interaction of all the elements including the speaker, the hearer, intention, effect, context and the like is for the pursuit of tact maxim, that is, for the consideration of the hearer's inferential ability.