Cover not available

Article published In: The pragmatics of professional discourse
Edited by Winnie Cheng
[Pragmatics and Society 7:1] 2016
► pp. 141–161

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Humanities and the public sphere

A pragmatic perspective

 | University of Antwerp
Published online: 7 April 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.7.1.06ver
This article starts from the observation of current changes in the nature of a globalizing public sphere for which older structural boundaries have lost much of their relevance. Though the public sphere has traditionally been a topic for social scientists (and philosophers), a redefinition in terms of the realm of publicly accessible meaning, and of struggles over socially and politically important meaning, necessitates a contribution from the humanities. In particular, linguistic pragmatics, providing tools for an analysis of the way in which explicit and implicit forms of meaning interact in the process of generating meanings, is argued to be a useful instrument. The argument is supported with an analysis of the differences in meaning landscapes that emerge even in different-­language versions of the ‘same’ text, illustrating how dependent publicly available meaning is on basic pragmatic processes. The article concludes that a maturing science of language use is therefore needed to understand variations in the accounts of social and political reality that people in a globalizing public sphere live by.
References (53)
Auer, Peter, and Jürgen Erich Schmidt (eds). 2010. Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barker, Hannah, and Simon Burrows. 2002. Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bastardas-Boada, Albert. 2012. Sociolinguistics: Towards a Complex Ecological View. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. New York: Ballantine Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E.P. Dutton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin K. 2012. Louder than Words: The New Science of how the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bookchin, Murray. 1980. Toward and Ecological Society. Montreal: Black Rose Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Calvet, Louis-Jean. 2006. Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dahlgren, Peter. 1995. Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Doran, Ryan, Gregory Ward, Meredith Larson, Yaron McNabb, and Rachel Baker. 2012. “A Novel Experimental Paradigm for Distinguishing between What is Said and What is Implicated.” Language 88 (1): 124–154. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 2002. Multiple Modernities. Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Enfield, Nick. 2010. Human Sociality at the Heart of Language. Nijmegen: Radboud University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Enninger, Werner, and Lilith M. Haynes (eds). 1984. Studies in Language Ecology. (Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, Beihefte, Heft 45). Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
European Convention. 2003. [Texts of the Draft Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe]. [URL] (October2013).
Finke, Peter. 2005. Die Ökologie des Wissens. Freiburg: Alber.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ghervas, Stella. 2004. “A propos des traductions du projet de Constitution européenne.” Geneva, unpublished ms.
. 2012. “Les valeurs de l’Europe: entre l’idéal, le discours et la réalité.” In Rethinking Democracy, Kiev. [URL]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giorgi, Liana, Ingmar von Homeyer, and Wayne Parsons (eds). 2006. Democracy in the European Union: Towards the Emergence of a Public Sphere. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gripsrud, Jostein, and Hallvard Moe (eds). 2010. The Digital Public Sphere: Challenges for Media Policy. Göteborg: Nordicom.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gripsrud, Jostein, Hallvard Moe, Anders Molander, and Graham Murdock (eds). 2011. The Public Sphere (vols. 1–41). London: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1983. “Modernity – An Incomplete Project”. In Postmodern Culture, ed. by Hal Foster, 3–15. Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. [Original German version, 1962, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit.]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haugen, Einar. 1972. The Ecology of Language. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hawley, Amos H. 1950. Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York: The Ronald Press Co.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koopmans, Ruud, and Paul Statham (eds). 2010. The Making of a European Public Sphere: Media Discourse and Political Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McNair, Brian. 2000. Journalism and Democracy: An Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001. The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Rim. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Östman, Jan-Ola. 1986. Pragmatics as Implicitness: An Analysis of Question Particles in Solf Swedish, with Implications for the study of Passive Clauses and the Language of Persuasion. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Price, Monroe E. 1995. Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scollon, Ron. 2008. Analyzing Public Discourse: Discourse Analysis in the Making of Public Policy. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Steward, Julian H. 1972. Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thompson, John B. 1990. Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Triandafyllidou, Anna, Ruth Wodak, and Michał Krzyżanowski (eds). 2009. The European Public Sphere and the Media: Europe in Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Verschueren, Jef. 1999. Understanding Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold/New York: Oxford University Press. (Now freely downloadable at [URL])Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. “Predicaments of Criticism.” Critique of Anthropology 21 (1): 59–81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “Context and Structure in a Theory of Pragmatics.” Studies in Pragmatics 101: 14–24.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. Ideology in Language Use: Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “Markers of Implicit Meaning: A Pragmatic Paradox?” Foreign Language Education and Research 1 (1): 1–9.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Verschueren, Jef, and Frank Brisard. 2002. “Adaptability.” In Handbook of Pragmatics (8th annual installment), ed. by Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vygotsky, Lev S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wagner, Peter. 2012. Modernity: Understanding the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Veronika Koller (eds). 2008. Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer (eds). 2009. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Jin, Yingzhe & Xinren Chen
2025. “Wo zhege ren. . .” (“I’m a person who . . .”): Chinese celebrities’ metapragmatic evaluative self-disclosure in televised interviews. Discourse Studies DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue