Zsuzsanna Iványi, András Kertész, Kornélia Marinecz & Nóra Máté:
Social Categorization and the Grammar-Pragmatics Relation. An Analysis of Hungarian Data
Abstract:
The aim of the present paper is to contribute to the comprehension of the theoretical problem of the grammar-pragmatics relationship by reducing it to a relatively well-defined empirical question based on a specific set of data and on a specific method which appears to be ideally suited for revealing relevant aspects of these data. Conversation analysis is applied to discuss how grammar and pragmatics are related in the course of the communicative construction of social categories in the corpus at our disposal. Our results are as follows: The surface grammatical structures are pragmatically determined in that the social categories whose construction they serve rest on a complex system of social and communicative background knowledge; they are pragmatically interpreted in so far as they refer to persons representing the social categories constructed in the conversation; and they are also pragmatically motivated, because they work as the means of the solution of categorization problems which participants are confronted with in the course of conversation.
