Wittgenstein’s View of Language and Development of Modern Pragmatics
Abstract

At the turn of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein is a vanguard against the western traditional philosophy as the leader of ordinary language philosophy. In his later work, as well as his masterpiece Philosophical Investigations, he proposes his important notions：“language game”, “form of life” and “meaning as uses”.

Ludwig Wittgenstein views language as activities, actions and practices and for Wittgenstein, a language game is n action which is socially constrained. As for the concept of “form of life”, it refers to the non-linguistic context of linguistic actions. Wittgenstein also utters that to understand the meaning of words, one not only needs to know the conventional usage of words, but also to pay attention to their pragmatic uses in their context.

Based on Wittgenstein’s view of language, this thesis mainly discusses Wittgenstein’s influence on the development of modern pragmatics. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on meaning in use draws the attention of researchers of that time on the study of meaning and context, providing the formation of modern pragmatics with a fairly firm foundation. We could find that Austin and Grice draw ideas from Wittgenstein’s work. Austin borrows the idea of viewing language as actions from Wittgenstein’s work and then regards linguistic actions as speech acts, and among his core linguistic concepts, performative utterance and illocutionary act are based on Wittgenstein’s language games. Grice and Wittgenstein have been put together in ordinary language philosophy camp and apparently Grice’s philosophical theory has some inner connection with Wittgenstein’s work. Enlightened by Wittgenstein’s rules in language game, Grice proposes cooperative principles in the 1950s which explains what the rules are in linguistic actions. In the history of pragmatics, Austin and Grice are among the most prominent figures by making great contribution to the development of modern pragmatics. Thus, we can utter that Wittgenstein’s view of language directly influenced many pragmatic theories.

Wittgenstein’s theory，especially later Wittgenstein’s theory is both extensive and profound. As researchers, we are armed with various theories of language as well as other related theories. Therefore, under the help of Wittgenstein’s view of language, researchers are expected to make great achievements.

Key words: Wittgenstein, Austin, Grice, language game, meaning as uses