Pragmatics and Society 1/2010 [antikvár]

Jacob L. Mey, Hartmut Haberland and Kerstin Fischer Whenever somebody starts a new journal these days, the inevitable question arises: Why do you think yet another journal is necessary? Dont we have enough of them already? In particular, in the generál area of pragmatics, we have at least half a dozen journals, most of them internationally recognized and Thompsonindexed, so why add yet another rock to the pile?1 Or, in other words, what does this new journal have to offer that none of the existing journals already do? To answer that question, let us first go back in history a little before we address somé more recent issues. After the 'pragmatic turrí in linguistics (thought to have occurred in the late sixties with the advent of Searles ground-breaking Speech Acts, but already foreshadowed by the until then lesser known, classical early sixties work by John Austin How to do things with words), much attention was devoted to the definition and delimitation of this new trend. At that time, too, voices were raised advocating a non-linguistically' determined turn: it was questioned why pragmatics seemed to have an irresistible need to define itself vis-á-vis linguistics (in particular semantics), whereas the need for a societally oriented pragmatics quite often was overlooked. These voices argued for a more social orientation of pragmatic questions, addressing in particular the ever-pressing query: What makes it possible for the speaker to use this particular language here and now? Or (as two of the authors of the present Editorial formulated it somé thirty years ago): "The pragmatic question par excellence is therefore not: What does an utterance mean? but: How did this utterance come to be produced?" (Haberland & Mey, 1977:8).2 This question was raised and many partial answers were given, but there was no fórum for an explicit discussion of the Janus-headed social question: how to deal with language both as an instrument of social action, as a tool for reorganizing and reshaping society, and at the same time, how to deal with language itself being reshaped by society at large. The present new journal, appropriately called Pragmatics and Society, will try to remedy somé of these near- or all-misses and exploit the insights that were