CURRENT APPROACHES TO PRAGMATICS. TOWARDS A NEW LINGUISTIC THEORY

Out of all issues in the theory of language usage, the speech act theory has probably aroused the widest interest. Psychologists have suggested that the acquirement of the concepts underlying speech acts may be a prerequisite for the acquisition of language in general, literary critics have looked to speech act theory for an illumination of textual subtleties or for an understanding of the nature of literary genres, philosophers have seen potential applications to the status of ethical statements, while linguists have seen the notions of speech act theory as variously applicable to problems in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, second language learning, and elsewhere