Colloquium Talk: Kate Ritchie (UCI)

Social Structural Pragmatics

Abstract: Significant work in pragmatics makes use of social structural explanation. Yet, there is a disconnect between these pragmatic theories and the formal frameworks that are commonly used to build models that represent pragmatic phenomena. Such frameworks typically represent just at the level of individual psychological facts (such as propositional attitudes, preference orderings, attentional states, or intentions). We argue that to reveal patterns among similarly situated linguistic agents and to capture how agents’ linguistic behavior may depend upon and update their social positions, pragmatic frameworks cannot rely solely on individual-level representations; they must be supplemented by representations at the social structural level. A multilevel pragmatic framework enhances understanding, bridges an existing gap across branches of pragmatic theory, and provides resources to integrate formal pragmatics with social ontology and social epistemology.