THE ROLE OF PRAGMATICS IN UNDERSTANDING HUMAN COMMUNICATION IN AN INSTITUTIONAL SETTING
THE ROLE OF PRAGMATICS IN UNDERSTANDING HUMAN COMMUNICATION IN AN INSTITUTIONAL SETTING

Summary/Abstract: This study tries to show the importance of pragmatics in understanding human communication in an institutional setting. Speakers and listeners are actively involved in a negotiating process that leads to creating a cycle of actively changing contexts in which speech acts win their legitimacy of being real doers of action in real-time situations. Particular cultural repertoires in human societies facilitate language with a wealth of contextual resources that can help anchor meaning by favouring particular speech acts to other ones. In investigating some dialogical tactics practiced by some Kuwaiti customer service employees in Kuwait, I found that Mey’s pragmeme is the ideal outcome of these dialogic encounters. In Mey’s viewpoint, no speech act means anything without the cultural context in which it originates, a stance which casts a serious doubt on the semantico-syntactic analysis of speech acts in a Searlean sense. The communicative value of ethos in institutional encounters relies primarily on looking at meaning from a pragmatic perspective, to be more precise here from a pragmemic perspective. In order to assess the level of their socio-pragmatic awareness and their ability to depend on their socio-pragmatic resources to persuade their customers, I interviewed a group of customer service employees at some Kuwaiti banks. The results of the study showed cogently that bank employees in Kuwait have high socio-pragmatic awareness, which helped them significantly in attracting more customers to their banks. Those employees showed clear awareness of strategic positive politeness and effective usage of appropriate pragmemes, contextualized speech acts (Mey 2001, Capone 2005). Making promises, guaranteeing exceptional services, and pampering clients with versatile banking products are some of the socio-pragmatic strategies used by the aforementioned employees.

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