ACTA LINGUISTICA VOL. 38 (AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC, 1988)

1988 / 1-4. sz. - KIEFER, F.-VERSCHUEREN, J.: Preface

PREFACE This issue of Acta Linguistica contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference on Metapragmatic Terms held in Budapest, July 3 through 5,1990, and jointly organized by the Research Institute for Linguistic of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), Antwerp. Metapragmatics is an empirical-conceptual approach to lin­guistic action. It is an attempt to come to grips with the varying ways in which linguistic behavior is conceptualized by those engaged in it, by way of scruti­nizing empirically observable linguistic reflections of those conceptualizations (such as linguistic action verbials, i.e. the verbs and verb-like expressions used, in natural language, to talk about the conceptualized behavior in question). This metapragmatic approach to verbal communication is motivated by the assumption that the meaning of social practices can only be fully understood by gaining insight into the worlds of ideas with which the participants associate them, and in terms of which they interpret them. It ultimate goal, which can only be achieved after further scrutinizing the complex interactions between concepts and actual practices, is to shed light on cross-linguistic and cross­cultural communication problems which may result, in part, from differences in the mental communicative frames in terms of which interacting members of different linguistic, cultural or subcultural background, operate. A useful starting point for the study of differences in the lexicalization and conceptualization of linguistic interaction, and of their behavioral correlates, may be the description of metapragmatic terms, i.e. linguistic entities which reflect directly the conceptualization of linguistic interaction. The present vol­ume is devoted to this problem. Fall 1992 Ferenc Kiefer Jef Verschueren

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