Peirce for Linguistic Pragmaticists

When pragmatics was established as a new subdiscipline in linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s, pragmaticists referred to Peirce as one of their ancestors. Since then, Peirce has remained in the collective memory of pragmatics, and is cited now and then—but not more. As a matter of fact, his ideas on natural language and communication have hardly been scrutinized, let alone applied, and wrongly so. This paper shows that the later Peirce sketched a theory of natural language and communication, which offers a new perspective on the heavily debated Semantics-Pragmatics-Interface. Peirce was a contextualist. But he did not refrain from developing a formal method to analyze the meaning of sentences uttered. Standing between radical pragmaticists on one side and formalists on the other, Peirce furnishes us with nothing less than an architect’s plan to bridge the two approaches, and to look for new ways to analyze the phenomenon of meaning in language.