Metapragmatic Pragmemes

This chapter examines metapragmatic disclaimers (e.g., ‘I know you might probably think that I’m rude, but’) from the perspective of socio-cultural pragmatics. Drawing on insight from Mey’s (Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, 2001; Pragmatic acts. In: K Brown (ed) Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Elsevier, Oxford, 2006) pragmatic act theory, an approach that has its roots in the socio-cultural view of pragmatics, I argue that the notion of pragmeme can fruitfully be used by researchers when describing those utterances that address metapragmatic awareness on the part of the speaker. The examples used in this chapter are taken from a corpus of naturally-occurring Persian conversations, which further reveal how the notion of pragmeme can account for the creativeness one observes in the use of language in general and in the use of metapragmatic disclaimers in particular.