Ireneusz Bobrowski

In the article, the author tries to show the relationships between grammar and pragmatics from the point of view of language use in the media. Many sentences that the grammar of natural language is able to generate, will never be used in the texts. On the other hand, many sentences that are generated by the grammar of the natural language, are used in very different situations. These facts must be taken into account both in linguistic research and media studies.
 

In the present paper I analyse propositions functioning in linguistics from the point of view of the criteria of truth imposed on the propositions within the so-called correspondence theory of truth, coherence theory of truth, and pragmatic theory of truth in its sociological version. There exists in linguistic circulation a certain group of propositions which on some assumptions are in agreement with Tarski’s explication. The truth of each sentence from the second group can be predicated only when they are juxtaposed with sentences belonging to a concrete system of propositions. The analysed sentence will be recognised as false in a different system. Some systems of sentences may recognise the criteria of evaluation as inadequate, they are, however, not sufficiently sharp so as to enable to make the final decision about the supremacy of one concrete system of sentences over the others. In linguistics there also exist many sentences which are true in linguists’ view, although they are not coherent with a certain system of sentences – the propositions belonging to this system may lead to different conclusions. It is the last group of sentences that in the eyes of postmodernists constitutes an argument supporting the thesis that in science (particularly in the humanities) we deal only with accumulating narratives. The major objective of this paper is, however, to prove that the propositions which belong to the third group, although frequent in linguistics, do not belong to its centre – they are only a complement of what may be described by the name of linguistic discourse.