On the morning of October 27th, 2015, Jef Verschueren, the founder and Secretary General of the International Pragmatics Association, was invited to deliver a speech entitled “Humanities and the Public Sphere” in the north campus of GDUFS.
Prof. Verschueren first contextualized the speech by pointing out the necessity of reconceptualization or reinvention of the notion of public sphere, in which the scope of the public sphere is no longer treated only as political domains, but expanded to a wide internationalized and global level. The public sphere is viewed as a space of publicly accessible meaning, with communicatively, interactively, intersubjectively generated meanings as its very substance. It can also be seen as an arena for struggles over meaning.
After the contextualization, Prof. Verschueren proposed the new concept of the “ecology of the public sphere”, a close scrutiny of meaning generating processes provided by a specific discipline of humanities. According to him, meaning generating in the public sphere is the product of interplay between the explicit and the implicit; hence a careful analysis of such processes is of crucial importance.
How can we analyze the meaning generating process in the public sphere? Linguistic pragmatics provides a solid basis for analysis of implicit meaning. Prof. Verschueren highlighted two fundamental design features of language: 1) use a combination of implicit and explicitly formulated meaning; 2) have structural resources for marking, coding, carrying or triggering implicit meaning. However, the complexity concerning public sphere as global phenomenon reflects in the fact that the explicit-implicit scale is differently anchored into the different languages and communicative styles. In other words, quite different meaning landscapes may emerge even one same event or state of affairs is talked about. He substantiated this argument by citing examples from the draft treaty proposed by the European Convention in 2004 for establishment of European constitution, through the lens of three dimensional matrix (salience, context and structure). Prof. Verschueren finally concluded that future work should address the understanding of these variations and find ways of educating people into learners of the processes involved.
The speech lasted about two hours. His studies and findings aroused a lot of interests and discussion in the audience relating to the public discourse and meaning making.
