V.N. VOLOSHINOV AND THE BEGINNING OF MODERN PRAGMATICS

Abstract

It is a popular opinion that modern pragmatics was born with J.L. Austin’s 1955’s
Harvard lectures on speech act theory. However, the predecessor of modern pragmatics is the Soviet linguist Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov, who had built, four decades earlier, a quite complete system of philosophy of language, which overcomes the limitations of traditional linguistics, especially structural linguistics of Saussure, to study the living language in social communication. These are the points this paper aims to present.