In this paper, I develop a pragmatic view of the poetic function of language by resorting to the ideas of contextualism, inferential pragmatics, and pragmemes (Mey, 2001, Capone, 2005), developing considerations on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson (1960) and Waugh (1980). I argue that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language and that even in everyday language (not only in anthologies) we find cases of texts where the poetic (...) function coexists with (or aids) other functions. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved via sedimentation of citations in a current text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept, or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression. Polyphony is what allows the text to live on in a dimension that transcends the limits of the subjective experience of the poet but allows the text to be inserted in a tradition in which each verse reverberates with memories of other verses. The poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market-place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions. In this paper, I also try to tackle the issue of the universal appeal of some poems, even if I am aware that this topic is as mysterious as fascinating. Paradoxically, a contextual approach to poetry seems to be at odds with the claim that the most acclaimed examples of poems have a universal appeal and touch a universal chord in the readers’ hearts. What is genuinely puzzling is the contrast between the need to fully contextualize a text and the fact that such a text can have a universal appeal across cultures. (shrink)

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman’s scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by (...) Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either “societal pragmatics” or “emancipatory pragmatics,” to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the “status quo” may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures. -/- . (shrink)