Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Metapragmatics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Metapragmatics is a term from linguistics describing language that characterizes or describes the pragmatic function of some speech. Discussions of linguistic pragmatics are meta-pragmatic, because they describe the meaning of speech as action. Meta-semantic characterizations of speech are a type of metapragmatic speech."Metapragmatics"is a term from linguistics.
In anthropology, describing the rules of use for metapragmatic speech (in the same way that a grammar would describe the rules of use for 'ordinary' or semantic speech) is important because it can aid the understanding and analysis of a culture's linguistic ideology.
Self-referential metapragmatic statements are indexical. That is, their meaning comes from their temporal contiguity with their referent: themselves. Example: "This is an example sentence."
- Lucy, John A. Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University 2004.
- Silverstein, Michael. "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description." Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith Basso and Henry A. Selby. Albequerque: UNM Press, 1976.