Obecná pragmatika a pragmatika češtiny
General pragmatics and the pragmatics of Czech

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with different approaches towards linguistic pragmatics, in particular with the difference between the general concept of pragmatics and the pragmatics of a particular language. In recent decades, the scope and content of linguistic pragmatics has been accounted for in various ways, from very broad to rather restricted. In this article, the notion of pragmatic perspective in language analysis and description is adopted as a suitable concept, i.e. pragmatics is not understood as a separate component (level) of a language system even though the links between semantics and pragmatics are indisputable. The notion of pragmatic perspective in linguistic analysis stresses the fact that each element of a natural language has its pragmatic dimension. Most importantly, this concept entails that the field of pragmatics should deal not only with signs in the classical sense, i.e. from this viewpoint, Morris’s canonical definition of pragmatics is abandoned. Furthermore, some examples of pragmatic description of language-specific phenomena are discussed, in particular the pragmatic interpretation of the Czech conjunction a (and) and of the means of personal and social deixis in Czech.

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