Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions

1. Introduction. Constructions and Pragmatics What do constructional approaches to grammar have to contribute to linguistic pragmatics? A careful answer to this question would require prior specification of which approaches should properly be called 'constructional' and also what exactly is intended by 'linguistic pragmatics'. Conscientiously discharging these preparatory obligations could require a text longer than this chapter, as well as competence exceeding its author's. But a rough and ready answer might go something like this: Constructional approaches to grammar have shown that the interpretation of linguistic utterances can involve an interaction of grammar and context which vastly exceeds in complexity, formal structure and wealth of interpretive content the data discussed in the standard linguistic and philosophical literature on indexicals (pronouns, tenses, and other diectic elements). There are admirable exceptions. For example, Nunberg (1993) cites sentence (1) (from a biology text) to illustrate the point that a referential use of a first person plural pronoun in English normally picks out some set of people, containing the speaker, whose further identity is left to the addressee to figure out on the basis of the common conversational background and the rest of the utterance.