Publication | Special issue

Quo Vadis, Pragmatics?

The special issue on “Quo Vadis, Pragmatics?” is the result of a lively discussion among members of the editorial board of the Journal of Pragmatics triggered by the most recent revision of the journal's scope statement. The 11 contributions that make up this special issue cover a rich suite of themes, from the identity of the field to issues of multimodality, interdisciplinarity and ethics, taking in non-propositional, Gricean, historical, and discursive perspectives along the way. We are grateful to the contributors to this special issue. who responded to our call and hope the result will stimulate further discussion about the present state of the field and its future development

Author

Edited by Michael Haugh and Marina Terkourafi

Date

01 May 2019

Links

Elsevier

In 2017, the Journal of Pragmatics celebrated its 40th anniversary, making it the oldest journal in pragmatics and one of the oldest in linguistics as a field. Our current Editorial Board is more than 50-strong and our Honorary Board includes 17 members in addition to the journal's two founding editors, Hartmut Haberland and Jacob Mey. Anytime that a journal as old as this and with an editorial board as large as this decides to revise its scope statement, some discussion is likely to be generated; and that is precisely what happened when we decided to revise our scope statement in late 2017.

While in the end the changes brought about were modest - the revised scope statement emphasises two key points: that prospective articles must be based on attested data, and that they must make a theoretically interesting contribution e the amount of discussion generated convinced us that it was time to take stock. Subsequently, we invited several members of our Editorial Board representing as many different voices in contemporary pragmatics as possible, to contribute to a special issue to be titled “Quo Vadis, Pragmatics?”. In the invitation email, the rationale for this special issue was explained as follows: “As pragmatics has been growing in new directions, both theoretically and methodologically, we believe the time is ripe for a public discussion that will help us trace both converging as well as diverging lines in the ways we conceive of what pragmatics is and how it should be practiced. Our hope is that the outcome will do justice to the polyphony of views within our field and will help identify both challenges to a unified view of the field as well as promising directions for future research.”