Morris' Lost Pragmatics A plea for multimodal semiotic pragmatics

The pragmatics envisaged by its founding father Charles Morris addresses issues of behavioral semiotics, of which multimodality and sign behavior are two building blocks. Decades of development in linguistic pragmatics has witnessed a continuous narrowing in scope. The narrowing reaps the benefit of sharp focus and in-depth research into some narrow topics. At the same time, it has resulted in some crucial areas, such as Umwelt, left barren. The paper first briefly reviews Morris' envisaged pragmatics, which is argued to be essentially multimodal semiotic pragmatics in nature. Then it argues for embarking on Morris' original program through reviewing researches, explicitly Morrisian or otherwise, that have already been converging toward this direction.