Jef Verschueren (°1952) received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. After a long career as a researcher for the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research, he is now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is the founder and Secretary General of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), and he directs the IPrA Research Center. Main interests are theory formation in linguistic pragmatics (conceived broadly as a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on language and language use), intercultural and international communication, and language and ideology. In all these areas he has published extensively. Some recent publications include the annually updated Handbook of Pragmatics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins; first published in 1995, now also available online), Debating Diversity: Analysing the Discourse of Tolerance (London: Routledge, 1998; co-authored with Jan Blommaert), Understanding Pragmatics (London: Edward Arnold / New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). A new book, Engaging with Language Use and Ideology: Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Ideology Research is forthcoming.

Paper to be presented at the conference Rhetoric in Society III, Antwerp, Lessius College, 26-28 January 2011:

THE DISCURSIVE GENERATION OF CONTEXT(S)

The social world, and especially at the level of the public sphere (the space that is potentially shared by all or most members of a community), is mostly a world of discourse, a world shaped by language use. From the point of view of linguistic pragmatics (defined as the interdisciplinary, cognitive, social, and cultural science of language use), language use is fundamentally a process of (interactively) generating meanings. This talk will explore what that means exactly in relation to the construction of a public sphere, how publicly accessible discourse (like any other form of discourse) carves out its own lines of vision and thus creates its own context, and what the consequences of this process are for a world that is defined and regularly redefined  under the influence of cognitive-cultural and socio-political forces.

An extensive illustration will be taken from the international flow of meaning, as embodied in 19th century colonial and present-day neo-colonial rhetoric. The 19th century materials are taken from academic history writing and historical fiction (in particular Jules Verne’s La maison à vapeur). The present-day materials consist of media discourse and mediatized political discourse.

Demonstrating a practical way of analyzing ideological patterns in public discourse at the level of international relations, perceptions, and representations,  this paper will show how linguistic pragmatics can be used to reveal (and hence potentially counteract) patterns of dominance as manifested in publicly accessible forms of discourse or rhetoric.

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