The Yunshan Chair Professor of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Istvan Kecskes fromNew YorkStateUniversity(Albany) was invited to hold an interactive seminar on “Is pragma-discourse possible?”, at theNationalResearchCenterfor Linguistics and Applied Linguistics on June 14th, 2013. The participants included teachers, researchers, M.A. and Ph.D. students from the university, and the pragmatics reading group of the Center.
This seminar mainly introduced a newly trend pragma-discourse as a subfield of pragmatics in terms of its origin, linguistic evidence, and theoretic framework. Professor Kecskes proposed that although pragmatics is an utterance-based discipline, some current approaches in pragmatics have sought out meaning “ingredients” both inside and outside the utterance, which can be evidenced in intercultural communication, where communication participants are creative on discourse rather than on utterance level due to limited language proficiency that may result in, among others, not-very-well formulated utterances.
Then, Professor Kecskes clarified the confines of three sub-branches of pragmatics, namely pragma-semantics, pragma-dialogue and pragma-discourse. What’s important is that the difference between pragmatics and discourse is that while pragmatics analyzes individual utterances (organized set of words) in context, discourse focuses on an organized set of utterances. And he elaborated the distinction between utterance and discourse. Finally, Professor Kecskes explained the two levels of information in terms of pragma-discourse, a higher level of information besides the structural and propositional ones that are attached to single utterances in context.
After the presentation, Professor Kecskes gave intercultural conversational data to demonstrate how discourse can be anayzed for appropriate interpretation.
During Question & Answer section, the pragmatics reading groups held a heated discussion with Professor Kecskes about utterance span, the differences between pragma-discourse and discourse analysis.
