Introducing the notion of the pragmeme
by Alessandro Capone
As a linguist, I was greatly impressed by the fact that Goffman, in his book ‘Forms
of talk’ (Chapter on replies and responses) wrote about sentences (the abstract units
of analysis belonging to the grammarian) as ‘orphans’, in that they were deprived of
the contextual cues and clues which animated their meanings. But I was much more
scandalized when I realized that Il Mulino, an important Italian publisher, withdrew
this book from commerce at the time when I was supposed to start lecturing at the
University of Messina but then re-injected it into the market (promising to reprint it)
at my promise that I would ‘adopt’ the book not only for my courses for the current
academic year, but for all subsequent future courses. So Goffman was not altogether
wrong in saying that the units of grammatical analysis were sort of ‘orphans’ and in
the same spirit in which he volunteered to give shelter to these little orphans (the
utterances which sentences could potentially make up if united with the powerful
influence of the context), I volunteered to adopt Goffman’s book, which in the
meanwhile had itself become an orphan in Italy – much to my disappointment. In my
career I was greatly offended by two things: a) the fact that conversation analysis was
expunged from linguistics proper, although temporarily adopted by sociology (and in
some linguistic departments like Edda Weigand’s and Sorin Stati’s); b) the fact that
formal linguists treated us (the students interested in conversation analysis and
communication) Cinderella-like, with some pity and much hatred. During my years
as a linguist I witnessed this abomination of seeing linguists respected if they
belonged to the formal stripe or ill-treated if they belonged to the informal stripe.
You should not be surprised that I wanted to lend some strength to Mey’s
notion of the pragmeme by gathering (in his name) some of the world leading
pragmaticians and by hosting this book in my series with Springer – having now to
note that the publisher Springer (mainly with my series Perspectives in Pragmatics,
Philosophy, Psychology (PPPP)) offered a home for all these creatures without
shelter and without fathers – the pragmaticians expunged from the serious and formal
business of linguistics. Of course, we could take the fact that Springer is offering us a
home as clear indication that formal linguistics is losing momentum – now that
Chomsky, their most prominent and energetic supporter, has retired and nobody
really promises to replace him. Perhaps this is the time in which the pragmatics of
language and theories of language use, if properly guided, might thrive.
Readers should reflect properly on the following example. Consider the
possibility of a sentence being written on a blackboard in a classroom. There might
be different cases. Consider what happens if you see ‘flying planes is dangerous’.
This will be taken as surely an example (a grammatical unit, to be treated as such),
rather than an utterance belonging to someone’s voice and addressed to someone in
particular. You will not bother to ask: who said that? Who was addressed when that
was said? You will most likely take for granted that this is the remnant (on a
blackboard) of a grammatical explanation (part of a lecture on syntax, presumably)
and, thus, if taken to be used as a grammatical example, a grammatical unit to be
elucidated, the example did not catch life. However, suppose you see on a blackboard
in the same room the sentence:
Mr Capone is a nigger (let us for a minute accept the supposition that I am colored).
Then suddenly, although we do not know who proffered the sentence/utterance, who
was addressed in saying that, why what was said was said, etc., the sentence gets
animated by an intention (and mainly an intention to offend), an intention which
surely must be missing in a sentence used as a grammatical unit, a unit of
grammatical analysis, an abstract type. We know that at least two things militate in
favor of considering the sentence an utterance having real force:
The reference must be to myself, the teacher who populates and happens to teach
these rooms (and their related students). Furthermore, the sentence/utterance contains
an abominable, detestable reference to a racist intention. The sentence was written by
someone whose aim was to offend me (albeit he did not have the courage to show his
face to me but took advantage of anonymity, a topic on which we will not dwell but
which is itself very promising as a novel chapter of linguistics). Racism and racial
hatred, as expressed through language is one of the most painful, but at the same
time, promising chapters of linguistics (see Kennedy 2002). We see how language
can be applied to a cause which is wrong and anti-social. At the same time, this must
be part of a societal linguistics, our theoretical reflection on how language can be
used to construct the world of social obligations, how language can be useful in the
transmissibility of culture and how language can be so central in the construction of
social identity or sexual identity (through the macro speech act ‘Education’).
Individuals are rarely the way they are because it is their nature that contributes
everything to their character and behavioral inclinations. Language and society have
a strong impact on our inclinations and on our social identity. We are human beings
who can be taught, who can be persuaded through complex arguments, who can be
exposed to culture and who themselves are able to transmit culture. Although nobody
so far, to my knowledge, has been busy with a complex experiment which could be
called the macro speech act of education, this is not to say that this macro speech act
could not or could never be studied. Surely, this macro speech act would have to be
studied by focusing on societal linguistics.
And now we are back to the main topic of this book. In this book we will
mainly look at societal linguistics and pragmemes, although we give space in a final
section to theoretical contributions which are somehow more tenuously linked to
these societal concepts, albeit they need to be embedded in the same kind of subject,
as I have always presumed that the Gricean maxims (which are the starting point for
more theoretical works) are embedded in culture and society. Thus, it is not
impossible that more theoretical contributions to pragmatics are made of the same
societal stuff as societal pragmatics and studies on pragmemes.
In explaining the word (or term) ‘pragmeme’ (introduced and defended by
Jacob L. Mey) I always face a certain amount of embarrassment. Is the pragmeme
after all a speech act in context? Or is the pragmeme the equivalent of a
Wittgensteinian language game? Or is the pragmeme merely an ‘utterance’, some
kind of Goffmanian creature that relies on context for its living? All these questions,
after all, presuppose that the pragmeme does little extra work with respect to more
consolidated notions like the speech act, the language game or the utterance. So, why
bother to launch a new expression in the theory of pragmatics? Certainly, the
pragmeme is close to the spirit of speech act theory or to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s
language game or to the spirit of Goffman’s analysis (we might say with some pride
that we have finally found a place for the kind of linguistics which Goffman, the
sociologist, had in mind and that we aim to go beyond the sentence as a unit of
analysis and to offer a shelter to all these little Goffmanian orphans). However, none
of these units of analysis does the job which the pragmeme is supposed to do. The
speech act (of Searlian origin) is too philosophical as a unit, and not much beyond the
little orphans Goffman talks about. A speech act is a sentence with a bit of context,
often artificially studied. The context is itself an artificial creature, often constructed
by the armchair linguist. The Goffmanian utterance, with its related notion of
footing, is probably what comes closest to the pragmeme. And the notion of language
game makes us reflect on the fact that the unit of analysis need not be a
sentence/utterance but may be an interactional piece consisting of more than one
utterance, each of them gravitating around a certain conversational purpose. But a
pragmeme need not be an utterance and sometimes may be equivalent to long,
structured, and completed units, like for example the lecture, studied by Goffman.
Even so, the picture is not complete, unless we have access to the enlightening paper
by Jock Wong on the pragmeme and culture (what he calls ‘the triple articulation of
language’) (the original paper was published in an issue of the journal of Pragmatics
which I edited under the title of ‘Pragmemes’).
When you have access to a pragmeme, you are not only exposed to language, but also
to a bit of culture. When in my 2005 paper on pragmemes (Capone 2005) I discussed
the example of the teacher who calls a student to his own desk to examine him, the
expression ‘Vieni’ (Come) or expressions for ways of accepting to comply (Ok,
vengo (Ok, I am coming)), or expressions for ways of declining the invitation (No,
non vengo professore (NO, I am not coming, teacher)) all come as part and parcel of
a certain culture, in which language is embedded, and which itself transmits
language, its uses, and the learning of such uses. Using a pragmeme, thefore, amounts
to attesting the pragmeme, but also to recording the pragmeme, to
transmitting/propagating the pragmeme, and also keeping a memory of the pragmeme
(especially written utterances). I was never aware that the theory of speech acts, or of
language games of Goffman’s utterances had the same potential for evoking a unit
that is intrinsically made up of language, culture and society. One need not go far, to
see that the connection between language and culture, in the case of utterances like
‘Vengo’ in the school room setting has been lost and that nowadays, given that Italian
students no longer go to the blackboard or to the teachers’ desk to be examined, the
function of the expressions ‘Vieni?’ ‘Vengo’, ‘Non vengo’ has been lost and some
replacement is needed.
To see further value in the notion of the pragmeme, one can examine a little
known article by myself on pragmemes and classroom interaction (Capone 2010).
Classroom interaction is very much busy around the negotiation of norms. Handling
norms for going to the toilet (trivial though this topic might be) for example is very
complicated, as students invent all sorts of lies to snatch away a permission to go out
(and thus the teacher must always be in guard as ‘May I go the toilet’ may become a
synonym of ‘May I go out?’). Anyway, in Capone (2010), I expressed the notion that
some utterances effect a renegotiation of norms and create precedents, out of which
new norms emerge.1 The pragmeme is particularly useful, for these cases, as it is a
case of language use that creates a precendent. To my knowledge, the notion of
utterance, language game, or speech act are not flexible enough to account for this
part of critical discourse analysis – how new norms are negotiated and emerge out of
interaction. The meaning of an utterance, therefore, is never in itself, but in the fact
that it creates a precedent for new norms. The pragmeme is a suitable unit of analysis
because it does not only capture the existence of norms for interpretation but the
negotiation of new norms. The pragmeme, so to say, establishes its own context.
There is nowhere, in the formal paradigms, the implication that language and
culture should come together, be propagated together, be learned together, be
practiced together. And thus I take that the traditional picture of linguistics, with its
traditional heavy emphasis on phonetics/phonology and syntax/morphology has been
completely misguided and has misguided generations of students. This is not to say
that we should not study syntax or morphology, but to assume that they can be
studied independently of a picture of language as communication (or language as
dialogue) is a craziness we have to learn to reject. Chomskyan linguistics has
notoriously been part of a theoretical picture which can be called ‘Theory of mind’.
But why should we call this theory of mind ‘linguistics’? Is it not natural that
1
The example I have in mind is the case of the student who reacts to a mark by given
teacher by questioning the mark. This is not only a case of rejecting the specific
mark, but a case in which a norm (teachers not students judge students) is questioned.
The utterance, if reiterated, can gradually give rise to a new norm or, anyway,
amounts to the rejection of a norm.
linguistics should inquire into theories of communication and also interaction
(dialogic interaction). One of the great books of our age is called to mind: ‘Language
as dialogue’ by Weigand, which tries to correct, in part, the errors made by the people
who taught us linguistics.
Weigand (personal communication) criticized our efforts to build up a theory
of pragmemes by saying that we should after all specify whether the notion of the
pragmeme is a dialogic notion or not. Of course it is a dialogic notion. You cannot
understand a response utterance (Goffman distinguished between replies and
responses) unless you fall back on what was uttered before, that is to say unless you
situate the pragmeme in a dialogic space. But of course, both a theory of pragmemes
and of dialogue need to be situated in a picture of linguistics that makes reference to
culture. How is dialogue acquired? How is it transmitted from one generation to
another? (How can the mechanics of the turn-taking system be transmitted from one
generation to the next?). If pragmemes need to be situated in a dialogic space,
nevertheless dialogue itself needs a cultural dimension and pragmemes and dialogue
intersect at a number of places. It is a myth – in conclusion – that there are uses of
language that are not dialogic. Even if there is no dialogue, as when we wake up and
think some thoughts by looking at the mirror when shaving (those of us who have
beards) or when we sing, the possibility of dialogue is inherent in the thought as the
thought has been expressed, given that after all we could always express the same
thought to someone else and in vocalizing the thought we use (we normally use) the
same linguistic expression we would use when transmitting the thought to a Hearer.
The potentiality for dialogue is there in the language as it transforms a piece of
thought from an entity which is inaccessible to an entity which is in principle
accessible. If something is accessible in principle, then this means that the thought
has been expressed through constraints which made the dialogic dimension possible.
The dialogic dimension is inherent in the thought in so far as it was expressed by
making use of a public language.
Before closing this introduction to the notion of the pragmeme, I would like to draw
the readers’ attention to a piece of interaction recorded at the market place in Sicily.
It is the pragmeme ‘vandiari o mercatu’ (shouting at the market). It is not a single
utterance we focus on, but an interactional event situated in a social context (the
market place and the relationship between vendors and customers). The dialogic
dimension (as noted by Edda Weigand) is immediately visible. The vendor shouts at
the crowd, usually a crowd of women, and uses poetic language with the aim to
persuade them to buy. The vendor is effective because he addresses women (it is not
clear that men would be as sensitive to poetic language). Poetic language for the
purpose of this paper can be defined as a language where great attention is devoted to
the form, a text in which a certain rhythm is present as well as rhymes (possibly).
Here we have a mixture of shouting and singing – singing too is an effective way of
persuading women who notoriously are sensitive to music. Although prima facie, the
things said, reported below in synthesis may sound extravagant, they are not, but they
maximally use rationality as every sentence is to be seen as an attempt to persuade
women to buy – thus many sentences can be seen as suppressed arguments:
There are no more of them  hurry up to buy as there is little left
The singing: ‘beautiful clothes clothes beautiful’ is also a supressed argument 
they are so beautiful you cannot fail to buy them.
The vendor displays attention at the customers: Signora signorina signorina signora
(the inversion typical of poetry) --- You should buy because I really care of you
The description: we give them for free is also a suppressed argument - since we
give them for free, you had better buy them.
The singing becomes like a publicity ad ( a slogan which enters your head and does
not leave it any more):
SINGS Tutte cose che trovate sempre poco le pagate (All things you find, always
little you pay them).
This too is a suppressed argument - given that everything you find here you pay
them little, you had better hurry up and buy them.
Now I report the interactional event (in sysnthesis):
Pragmeme ‘selling goods(shouting/doing poetry at the market place’
file:///C:/Users/Sandro/Desktop/dropbox/Dropbox/venditore%20al%20mercato.3gp
(bold characters = increased energy)
Dai dai dai dai dai dai (Come on Come on Come on Come on….)
Ve ve ve ve ve ve (See….)
SINGS Roba bella roba bella bela roba bela roba (beautiful clothes…… clothese
beautiful)
Dai dai dai (Come on….)
Non c’è ne chiu(uuu) Non ce ne chiuuuu (There are no more……
Cerki trovi cerki trovi (look for find (if look fori t you’ll find it)
Dai dai dai dai dai dai daiiiii (Come on…)
Forza forza forza forza forza (Hurry up/Come on)
Signora signorina signora signorina signora (Mrs Miss Miss Mirs)
Guardate guarda un po’ (look at them…..)
SINGS Bela roba bela roba roba bella roba bellaaa (beautiful cloches clothese
beautiful
SINGS Tutte cose che trovate sempre poco le pagate (All things you find, always
little you pay them).
Regalamu regalamu (We give them for free….)
Regalemu regalemu (Let us give them for free….)
When we reflect on the pragmeme above, it is clear that it must be contextualized in
culture – without reference to culture and to our social praxis, you would tend to
think that the vendor is crazy. It is a dialogic unit (as Weigand likes to stress), as the
relationship between speaker and addressee is part of the message, as special
attention is devoted to the dialogic dimension (terms of address). It is something that
can be propagated and it is of a generative nature – someone who is exposed to his
piece of interaction knows how to make a similar one and how to generate a message
which was never heard before (thus uniqueness as part of the dialogic genre emerges
as an integral and characterizing property of this pragmeme). There are clearly
elements which make this unit distinct from the utterance, the language game, or the
speech act, as the pragmeme has a cultural dimension which brings with it the need to
divulge/transmit culture while the interactional event is in place (the purpose of the
event is not only to further a contingent purpose but also to populate the world and
culture with similar events). The pragmeme, furthermore, can be intended as a
generative device as it establishes its own rules for the generation of similar but
different pieces of interaction. While language games à la Wittgesntein can probably
too be considered generative devices as they transmit the rules that characterize the
language game (intended as something that be reproduced), the pragmeme like the
one we have analysed at the market (in addition) has the potential for establishing
rules that make every future reproduction of the same event type always different,
given that poetic language will allow infinite possibilities. Unlike language games,
the pragmeme does not aim at mere reproduction (and survival) but aims at
establishing interactions which are always different. The success of the pragmeme is
due to the personality which emerges during interaction. This does not only happen
during the interactional episode at the market, but during a lecture, a radio talk, a
television program, and most importantly in the course of reciting a poem. The
merging of social, cultural, and individual elements is what makes the pragmeme
different as a unit from the speech act, the language game and the utterance.
References
Capone, A. 2000. Dilemmas and excogitations: an essay on modality, clitics and
discourse. Messina, Armando Siciliano.
Capone, A. 2001. Modal adverbs and discourse. Pisa, ETS.
Capone, A. 2005. Pragmemes. Journal of Pragmatics 37 (9), 1355-1371.
Capone, A. 2010. Pragmemes revisited (conflicts and power within the class). In
Capone, A. ed. Perspectives on language use and pragmatics. A volume in memory of
Sorin Stati. Muenchen, Lincom.
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kecskes, Istvan. 2014. Intercultural pragmatics. Oxford, OUP.
Kennedy, Randall. 2002. Nigger: the strange career of a troublesome word. New
York: Vintage books.
Mey, Jacob. 2001. Pragmatics. An introduction. Oxford, Blackwell.
Searle, John. 1969. Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge,
CUP.
Weigand, Edda. 2009. Language as dialogue. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.
Wong, Jock. 2010. The triple articulation of language. In Capone, A. ed. Pragmemes,
Journal of Pragmatics 42(11). 2932–2944.