Integrative pragmatics

While we readily acknowledge the existence of a variety of different approaches to pragmatics, the approach we have developed has attempted to bridge these through close attention to the role of interaction in shaping how participants both come to mean things through their use of language, and form understandings of what particular instances of language in use mean for them. This emphasis on the critical role that interaction plays in shaping pragmatic phenomena and the perspectives of both users and observers on these can be broadly described as an integrative pragmatics. The primary focus of integrative pragmatics is the study, by observer-analysts, of what particular form-function relationships are taken to mean by user-participants in particular situated, sequential contexts, and how this can vary across those participants. The above definition is, out of necessity, somewhat compressed, so we first unpack the various elements of an integrative pragmatics before going on to briefly consider the implications of taking such an approach for the methodologies we, as analysts, employ.