Pragmatic Issues in Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Starting from the problems raised by the notion of ‘discourse’ and its definition, this paper takes issue with the views that consider discourse as an object of study observable and describable as a ‘whole’ static structure, and which meaning is richer than the sum of the meanings stemming from the individual utterances composing it. The assumptions previously put forward by authors such as Chafe, who claimed that discourse is better studied as a process unfolding through time, is taken seriously into account. Within the ongoing discussion about the very notion of discourse, some arguments are proposed to sustain the view that all the meaning produced by a given discourse is in fact reducible to the meaning produced by the single utterances composing it; in particular, implicit rhetorical relations are conceived as the result of pragmatic inferences of the same nature as contextual hypotheses in general, and therefore rhetorical relations are to be interpreted at the level of pragmatic meaning.