Pragmatics and Its Applications in Interdisciplinary Studies: A Critical Reappraisal of Reception in Arabic Linguistic Research

Povzetek

Pragmatics has long functioned as a shared analytical orientation across multiple fields of language study, and it remains, more than half a century after its consolidation as a “science of usage,” a remarkably resilient framework for studying language in use. Its resilience owes much to its capacity for renewed adaptation to linguistic, social, and cognitive questions rather than to any doctrinal unity among its theories. While the reception, adaptation, and productive extension of pragmatic theory in Western scholarship is well documented, its uptake within Arabic linguistic research – particularly its diffusion into discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, argumentation theory, and corpus linguistics – has not been systematically mapped. This paper addresses that gap by tracing the theoretical foundations of pragmatics, from speech act theory to its interdisciplinary deployment, and by examining, through an illustrative corpus-based case study of Arabic administrative discourse, how pragmatic and corpus-linguistic methods are being combined in contemporary Arabic scholarship. The paper argues that Arabic pragmatic writing has so far excelled in theoretical importation and disciplinary description but remains comparatively underdeveloped in empirical, corpus-driven, and politically engaged discourse research. The paper closes by identifying the most salient markers of innovation in Arabic pragmatic linguistics and by outlining directions for future research.