Non-Western concepts in comparative pragmatics : from the Kyoto School to the context of enunciation

This lecture proposes a new approach to the concept of the "context of enunciation" in social pragmatics, based on a critical reading of the philosophy of the Kyoto school, Japan. The key concept is " basho ", which translates as "place, location, field", and which is, in effect, a theory of what we more commonly call "the situation, copresence or indexical field" of speech. The Kyoto philosophers are committed to European thought, making their own approaches more accessible to a Western reader. A radical experiment in translation, she proposes to make a non-Western philosophical concept operative in the analysis of deixis.

Biography

William F. Hanks
Berkeley Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology
Director, Social Science Matrix
University of California, Berkeley

Alumnus and professor at the University of Chicago, William F. Hanks is a linguistic anthropologist specializing in the Mayan language and culture of Yucatan, Mexico, and in the analysis of semantics and enunciation in natural languages. For the past twelve years, he has co-directed a comparative sociolinguistics research team in Tokyo, with Ide Sachiko and Katagiri Yasuhiro.