Pragmemes (a study with reference to English and Italian)

In this paper I shall argue that we have to focus on units of pragmatic analysis such as the pragmeme. A pragmeme is a situated speech act in which the rules of language and of society combine in determining meaning, intended as a socially recognized object sensitive to social expectations about the situation in which the utterance to be interpreted is embedded. Given a sequence of utterances, literally interpretable as having certain meanings and goals, features of the situation are utilized to produce pragmatic inferences, thus completing or expanding a minimal proposition vocalized by an utterance; other features of the context of utterance, in the form of defeasible or otherwise non-cancellable aspects of meaning, will transform the literal signification of an utterance, imposing the stamp of the situation on it, making certain rules of interpretation relevant to it, and constituting a set of constraints that strictly enforce certain readings by discarding or eliminating others. In this paper, after expatiating on studies that advocate the importance of studying the context of use of a speech act, I offer analytic considerations on what seem to me interesting cases of pragmemes.