DESEMANTICIZING PRAGMATICS

This paper starts with a 'metatheoretic' discussion on the sociohistor ic conditions of 'pragmatics' as a discourse genre, and identifies a c omplex set of antinomies in modem studies of language, in relation to which pragmatics is situated. Then, the paper investigates how such an tinomies are manifested in the speech act theories of logico-linguisti c and ethnographic approaches in terms of referential representation a nd social action, and suggests the possibility of reconstructing a the ory of speech acts which may integratively reformulate both referentia l and social interactional facets of the problem.