Reflections on Pragmemes: Towards the Development of Societal Neuropragmatics

Although it is well known that in a linguistic context it is not only the knowledge of the world’s state of things that plays a fundamental role but there are also speaker’s beliefs, intentions and expectations to take into account, the concept of context is not yet well defined. Several branches of pragmatics have tried to define the meaning of “context”, to understand which elements are parts of linguistic context and to identify the boundaries of different contexts. In this essay, I shall focus on work by Jacob L. Mey highlighting the social character of pragmatics, in a way that allows us to come to a better definition of the meaning of “linguistic and social context”. Mey introduces the notion of pragmeme, a speech act that must be situated in a context, to explain the role of social and cultural context. I will try to come to a better definition of this concept, through some examples. My aim is to use the concept of pragmeme considering the improvements of neuropragmatics, which show that the pragmatic phenomena cannot be set aside in the scientific investigation of how our brain elaborates linguistic processes. The neural processing of language use, in a specific context, plays a fundamental role during the comprehension of sentences and, to some extent, these aspects cannot any longer be thought of something that is separated from and consecutive to semantic elaboration.