The Interface Between Pragmatics and Conversation Analysis

In his authoritative and brilliant account of Pragmatics,Levinson(1983)included Conversation Analysis(CA)firmly as part of Pragmatics.Others have perhaps been more cautious,even sceptical,about whether CA is really relevant to the Pragmatics programme;and it has to be said that some conversation analysts have been rather stand-offish about being associated with Pragmatics,regarding CA’s programme as very different from that of Pragmatics.Whilst there are many differences and divergences between CA and Pragmatics,my own view is that CA shares with Pragmatics a number of focal interests that lie at or close to the heart of each.So I will explore some connections between them,focusing on the contributions CA makes to our understanding of the pragmatics of language use,especially in three of the foundational areas of Pragmatics—namely Implicature(e.g.from Grice 1975),Speech Acts(social action)(e.g.from Austin 1962 and Searle 1969)and Presupposition and Well-Formedness(e.g.from Lakoff1971).I will show examples that demonstrate the distinctiveness of CA’s approach to these core pragmatic aspects of language use—in the spirit of demonstrating how CA’s approach complements and does not detract from approaches in Pragmatics.