Abstract

Ever since antiquity, people have been fascinated by the power of words. But only recently have we come to the insight that this power is not a unique property of the individual speaker, the language user, but that the user only can exercise this faculty on the conditions of the society that he or she is a member of. The article will look at this problem from the point of view of ancient history, from the more recent standpoint of the philosophy of language, and finally discuss the relationship between societal conditions and the affordances and limitations of modern language users. In particular, emphasis will be placed on the ’dialectic’ character of language use, that is to say, the reciprocal influence that society and the user exert on one another in and through language. Pragmatics, as the science of language in use, is shown to be a science of the social use of language, rather than merely a science of words and phrases, as they are put together more or less correctly, and studied in grammars. The article concludes with pointing to the ‘emancipatory’ opportunities that a social pragmatics has to offer the user.