Page 50 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

27 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

and utterances. The production of sentences according to the
rules of grammar is something other than the use of sentences
in accordance with pragmatic rules that shape the infrastructure
of speech situations in general. But this raises the following
questions. (1) Could not the universal structures of speech—
what is common to all utterances independently of their particular
contexts—be adequately determined through universal sentential
structures? In this case, with his linguistically reconstructible lin-
guistic competence, the speaker would also be equipped for mas-
tering situations of possible understanding, for the general task
of uttering sentences; and the postulate of a general communica-
tive competence different from the linguistic could not be justified.
Beyond this there is the question, (2) whether the semantic
properties of sentences (or words), in the sense of the use theory
of meaning, can in any case be explicated only with reference to
situations of possible typical employment. Then the distinction
between sentences and utterances would be irrelevant, at least to
semantic theory (as long, at any rate, as sufficiently typical con-
texts of utterance were taken into consideration). As soon as the
distinction between the linguistic analysis of sentences and the
pragmatic analysis of utterances becomes hazy, the object domain
of universal pragmatics is in danger of fading away.
{In reference to question 1,} I would agree, with certain qual-
ifications,® with the statement that a speaker, in transposing a
well-formed sentence into an act oriented to reaching understand-
ing, merely actualizes what is inherent in the sentence structures.
But this is not to deny the difference between the production of
a grammatical sentence and the use of that sentence in a situation
of possible understanding, or the difference between the universal
presuppositions that a competent speaker has to fulfill in each
case. In order to utter a sentence, the speaker must fulfill general
presuppositions of communication. Even if he fulfills these pre-
suppositions in conformity to the structures that are already given
with the sentence employed, he may very well form the sentence
itself without also fulfilling the presuppositions specific to the
telos of communication. This can be made clear with regard to
the relations to reality in which every sentence is first embedded
through the act of utterance. In being uttered, a sentence is placed