Research Articles

The importance and challenges of documenting pragmatics

---

Abstract

Pragmatic knowledge and linguistic use are fundamental parts of the ethnography of communication and are key to understanding basic communicative practices. In this paper I examine the potential for documentation to reconstruct pragmatic and situational uses of language through the prism of existing language description, with the documentation of one of the Tungusic languages, Evenki, serving as a case study. The purpose of the discussion is twofold. One is to explore the best practices for documenting and describing discourse-pragmatics. The other is to consider the linguistic consequences of language shift in contact situations and how pragmatics are affected (or not) by this shift. The documentation and description of pragmatics and discourse in endangered languages, in particular in those languages already undergoing shift, present certain difficulties. First of all, in shift situations, speakers are not always fully fluent and may have limited access to certain registers, genres and/or styles. In addition, because of the shift, their intuitions are not always reliable (or useful) and they may show interference from the contact language(s). These are obstacles which linguists face in any aspect of documenting and describing a language undergoing shift but pose particular challenges in the elicitation and analysis of pragmatics.

Keywords: language documentation and description, pragmatics, language shift, best practices, endangered languages

How to Cite:

Grenoble, L., (2007) “The importance and challenges of documenting pragmatics”, Language Documentation and Description 4, 145-162. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd265