Sunt verba rerum: the pragmatic life of words

Abstract

Pragmatics is not about language as such, viewed in isolation, but about words as they are being used. And words are never things, pure objects; words have their history and lives: their story is the story of their users. Pragmatic thinking focuses not just on what ‘is’ there (the ‘essentialist’ method of linguistics), but on how what ‘is’ there, ‘got’ there, and what it ‘does’ there, in a ‘functionalist’ approach, characteristic of pragmatics. Such a functional approach relies heavily on the processes that are material in creating the conditions for words to be used in a particular way: both those processes we normally call ‘historical’ (the history of what has been) and those that are characteristic for what happens in our own times: the pragmatic life of words. I will illustrate these reflections by focusing on a series of well-known linguistic phenomena, first of all the historical ‘emptying’ of content known as ‘semantic bleaching’, and second the transformation of the ways words function, commonly known under the name of ‘grammaticalization’ or ‘grammaticization’. To better understand these processes, I will first focus on what I call the ‘historical bias’ of structuralist linguistics, including a brief discussion of issues having to do with language development and how linguists and historians traditionally have tried to deal with this.