All pragmatic analyses aim at utmost explicitness of explanation as for the meaning of an utterance / a discourse under observation. It is necessary to keep in mind, though, that explicit interpretation in pragmatic linguistics is prevalently based on individual, context-bound data which are hard to formalize or resist to it. The difference between semantics and pragmatics traditionally seen as a difference between competence and performance can be fleshed out with the notion of discourse competence (cf. Carston 1998) – a set of principles ruling for each speaker his/her selection of syntactic and referential choices in certain context. From the viewpoint of addressees, identical set of principles rules their understanding / interpretation of chosen constructions.
Pragmatic phenomena are not a part of grammar. Nevertheless, in a language like Czech, with highly developed inflectional morphology, the interface of grammar and pragmatics is in many ways indiscernible: Personal and temporal deixis is fully grammaticalized as an integral part of complex meaning in verbal endings; also, the inflectional morphology is responsible for the extensive congruence mostly reflecting pragmatic factors. Another language-specific issue is the Czech repertory of personal pronouns/determiners/quantifiers offering a refined tool for both identification and evaluative aspects of personal deixis. Last but not least, conceptual and terminological analysis of the speech act theory has shown that specifics of Czech (as well as other Slavic languages) in this area is anchored within the tense and aspectual properties of Czech verbs.
The chosen approach to pragmatic analyses deliberately adopts the methods and ideas of the so-called moderate pragmatics (cf. Cappelen – Lepore 2002) as delimited in opposition towards “radical pragmatics“ represented esp. by J.R. Searle (1983, e.g.). The point is that radical pragmatics denies a direct dependence of the meaning of an indicative sentence and its truth conditions even though (1) the meaning or semantic value of every word in sentence S has been specified; (2) all the relevant compositional /syntactic rules for S have been specified; (3) every ambiguous expression in S has been disambiguated and every vague expression in S has been precisified; (4) the referents of every referring expression in S (including indexical ones and those ´hidden´ in logical form) have been determined. According to radical pragmatics, sentences neither have truth conditions nor say or express anything, even with (1) – (4) being settled. In the view of radical pragmatics, meaning of a sentence always leaves space for variance of truth conditions at every use, therefore, it is always just “applied“, a sentence itself being just a „vehicle“. Moderate pragmatics does not deny the existence of indicative sentences truth conditions of which go beyond the semantic values of their components (cf. well known examples Vzali se a měli dítě vs Měli dítě a vzali se). Nevertheless, if conditions (1) – (4) have been fulfilled it is possible to settle (or derive, or otherwise specify) a/the conditions under which S is true; b/the proposition expressed by S; c/ what intuitively is (literally) said by S. Even though the importance of contextual factors (in the interpretation of speech acts, e.g.) cannot be denied, the present book avoids the radical approach.
As for the existing definitions of linguistic pragmatics the book tries to cover both the “extensional“ conception studying the pragmatic aspects of human linguistic behaviour (reference, illocution, im/politeness) and “intensional“ conception, usually represented by the words of G. Gazdar: “Pragmatics has as its topic those aspects of the meaning of utterances which cannot be accounted for by straightforeward reference to the truth conditions of the sentences uttered. Put crudely: PRAGMATICS = MEANING – TRUTH CONDITIONS.“ (Gazdar 1979, p. 2.). Also, the notion of pragmatic dimension of language phenomena (Kořenský 1994, Verschueren 1999) has been adopted, saying that every linguistic unit larger than a phoneme can be viewed in a pragmatic perspective. Pragmatic perspective consists in seeing the language phenomena not from the viewpoint of their form and position in the grammar of a given language but from the viewpoint of their role and use in verbal communication - it is communication where the pragmatic dimesion of linguistic entities emerges.
The most important preliminary condition of a successful (efficient) communication is the knowledge of the means of a language and the knowledge of the rules enabling to create non-defective (both as for the grammar and for the semantics) sentences of a given language. This area is traditionally described as a grammar / language competence. A complementary notion, language performance covers the production and interpretation of sentences/utterances in certain situations. To be able to communicate succesfully means to know also the conditions and rules of usage of (grammar) sentences (and being able to discern and interpret defective sentences, respectively). A native speaker masters the rules of language competence approximately by the age of six, the rules (and skills) of successful communication, on the other hand, must be learned and adopted in the course of the whole life. They change, develop and they can be regulated and coded (what is considered “appropriate“ is fluid). Speaker´s ability to use competently formed sentences appropriately/competently in relation to the communicative situation is described as a pragmatic competence.
While the use of a language, as a pragmatics very field, can be grasped in more or less identical way as in its non-terninological meaning, language function can mean a mutual relation of language phenomena, a relation of a language/linguistic entity and its referent, it can mean a task/job in communication for which the particular entity is predisposed, and, an aim for which such an entity can be, within its functional potential, intentionally used. Linguistic pragmatics deals both with relational/referential meaning of language units and with their purposeful use. Moreover, the mentioned areas often overlap (when understanding reference/referring as a speech act).