Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

Pragmatic analysis refers to a set of linguistic and logical tools with which analysts develop systematic accounts of discursive political interactions. They endeavor to identify the full range of inferences that a reader or a hearer would make when encountering the locutions of an author or a speaker, considered in context. Consequently, pragmatic analysis is suited to the practice of inquiry that Hall (1999: 210–16) terms ‘specific history,’ in which analysts reconstruct, through emplotment, historical episodes that were meaningful to historical actors before they became meaningful as objects of analysis. Analysts endeavor to recover this meaning in order to understand agents’ actions and thereby to understand why events turned out the way they did rather than some other way.