Page 66 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

43 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

language one always refers to an object language in the objectiv-
ating attitude of someone asserting facts or observing events; one
forms metalinguistic statements. By contrast, on the level of inter-
subjectivity one chooses the illocutionary role in which the prop-
ositional content is to be used; and this communication about the
sense in which the sentence with propositional content is to be
employed requires a performative attitude on the part of those
communicating. Thus the peculiar reflexivity of natural language
rests in the first instance on the combination of a communication
of content—effected in an objectivating attitude—with a com-
munication concerning the relational aspect in which the content
is to be understood—effected in a performative attitude.
Of course, participants in dialogue normally have the option of
objectifying every illocutionary act performed as the content of
another, a subsequent speech act. They can adopt an objectivat-
ing attitude toward the illocutionary component of a former
speech act and shift this component to the level of propositional
contents. Naturally they can do so only in performing a new
speech act that has, in turn, a nonobjectified illocutionary com-
ponent. The direct and indirect mention of speech standardizes
this possibility of rendering explicit the reflexivity of natural
language. The communication that takes place on the level of
intersubjectivity in a speech act at t, can be depicted on the level
of propositional content in a further (constative) speech act at
tn41. On the other hand, it is not possible simultaneously to per-
form and to objectify an illocutionary act.”
This option is sometimes the occasion for a descriptivist fallacy
to which even pragmatic theories fall prey. We can analyze the
structures of speech, as every other object, only in an objectivating
attitude. In doing so, the actually accompanying illocutionary
component cannot, as we saw above, become wno acto the object.
This circumstance misleads many language theorists into the view
that communication processes take place at a single level, namely
that of transmitting content (i.e., information). In this perspec-
tive, the relational aspect loses its independence vis-a-vis the
content aspect; the communicative role of an utterance loses its
constitutive significance and is added to the information content.
The pragmatic operator of the statement, which in formalized