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What can Pragmaticists Learn from Studying Artificial Languages?

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Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 2))

Abstract

Among the hundreds of artificial languages put forth as possible international auxiliary languages, relatively few (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua) have seen a substantial amount of actual use. Given this, one might think that the study of such languages might have little to offer pragmaticists, and indeed there has been very little pragmatic work on them. However, I would argue that the pragmatic investigation of artificial languages can provide useful insights and information. Most designers of artificial languages are not professional linguists. Although they usually say little or nothing about the pragmatics of their languages, what they do say can reveal popular ideas about pragmatics, which may otherwise be difficult to discover. I shall present and discuss relevant remarks by some artificial language designers. I shall also look at several pragmatic features of artificial languages. Although the amount of textual material available in most artificial languages is limited, what exists can be subjected to pragmatic analysis. Perhaps most intriguing are the a priori artificial languages (e.g. aUI), attempts to build a language without borrowing anything from natural languages, as, on the surface, these languages can appear quite odd. I shall present some texts from several artificial languages with a view to seeing whether even apparently exotic artificial languages have the same pragmatic properties as natural languages. Such work can be seen as contributing to the study of cross-linguistic pragmatics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I use the following abbreviations: lit.—literally, sec.—section, tr.—translation. Translations of quotations from languages other than English are mine, while translations of texts and examples are those of the source, unless otherwise indicated. In some quotations and texts I have modified punctuation and/or formatting in minor ways.

  2. 2.

    In general I am only interested in ALs that seem reasonably serious in purpose, and thus I do not deal with ALs created in connection with a work of fiction or “artistic” or “personal” ALs. Most of the more serious ALs are meant to be auxiliary languages for international use. I also do not treat computer languages such as BASIC.

  3. 3.

    Gledhill’s grammar of Esperanto is “corpus based”, as it says in the title.

  4. 4.

    The word zan means ‘dear’ and so I take li zan to mean something like ‘with endearment’.

  5. 5.

    The meanings of the words in this sentence are zan ‘dear’, qu ‘you’, nu ‘I’, aya ‘love’, and sio ‘very’; me marks nouns referring to females but it generally occurs after its noun rather than before, and so it is not clear to me whether there is an error in this sentence.

  6. 6.

    The n in Roma(n) is the accusative marker, which does not always occur and may sometimes be optional, as it appears to be in this example.

  7. 7.

    By “pseudo-dialogue” I mean a dialogue which (presumably) has not actually occurred, but which has been created by a language designer/presenter to illustrate some point of grammar or for reading practice.

  8. 8.

    There are two ALs known as Interlingua, the one connected with the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA) and the one also called Latino sine Flexione.

  9. 9.

    Unlike Esperanto’s ĉu, it can introduce wh-questions; it apparently is not required with either yes–no or wh-questions.

  10. 10.

    Although it is not clear in the source, from the context one might think that this sentence is said by the same interlocutor as the previous sentence.

  11. 11.

    I have added “A” and “B” before the conversational turns; this pseudo-conversation seems to have two interlocutors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia

    Alan Reed Libert

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  1. Alan Reed Libert
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Correspondence to Alan Reed Libert .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Messina/Palermo, Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  2. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Franco Lo Piparo

  3. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Marco Carapezza

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Libert, A.R. (2013). What can Pragmaticists Learn from Studying Artificial Languages?. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_16

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