ADR-034: pragmatics and myth-and-folklore join the topics

Context

Registering the bibliography of What Survives Translation? brought in two clusters that no word fitted.

• Pragmatics. Before this batch the record held:

  • Austin (LIT-785);
  • Goffman (LIT-780);
  • Du Bois (LIT-779).

  The batch added:

  • Searle, Stalnaker, Krifka, Heim and Veltman;
  • Brandom;
  • three rational-speech-act papers.

  These were filed under linguistics, whose blurb is “the study of language itself … as linguists pose them”, and philosophy-of-language, which is scoped to philosophy. The RSA reader reported the gap.

• Myth and folklore. Lévi-Strauss (LIT-775) was already held, and the batch added Propp, Descola, and Doja, Capocchi and Santucci. All four were filed under social-science, whose blurb names anthropology but not myth or folktale. The structuralism reader reported the gap.

The owner authorised extending the vocabulary as the record sees fit on 2026-10-09 (ADR-031).

Decision

Add two topics.

• pragmatics. It covers:

  • speech acts and illocutionary force;
  • assertion and common ground;
  • presupposition;
  • dynamic and update semantics;
  • footing and stance in discourse;
  • probabilistic models of speakers and listeners.

  It comes first on works whose subject is language in use: the RSA papers, Krifka, Searle, Stalnaker, Austin, Goffman and Du Bois. It comes second on Heim, Veltman and Brandom, whose primary subject is semantics or philosophy.

• myth-and-folklore. It covers myths and folktales and their variants as objects of study, whether analysed structurally or computationally. It comes first on Propp, Lévi-Strauss, Descola and Doja et al.

The THEORYs filed from these readings take the same words.

Alternatives

• No new words. The closed list exists to stop works being filed under the nearest wrong word. Two readers reported independently that this was happening.
• narrative. Considered for myth. It invites confusion with narrative-unity, which is about selves. The works here study myths and folktales, not narrative as such.
• semantics. Heim and Veltman are as much semantics as pragmatics. But the reason the record holds them is what an utterance does to its context, which is the pragmatics question, and linguistics already covers semantics as linguists pose it.