• Metalanguage: meta- indicates that the level of the
study has changed, which means the things people talking about changes from object to “the talk” itself. The notion of metalanguage was proposed by Tarski in the first place in the 30s of 20th century, it was used to describe, estimate and observe the object language. Metalinguistics is the study of metalanguage. It studies the relationship between language system and the relevant cultural behavior system. For example, the dictionary is using metalanguage to describe words, and we can use chines to describe English.
metapragmatics
• Metapragmatics is the study of pragmatics and it is base on pragmatics, as Mey said: metapragmatics is the pragmatic study of pragmatics, which can be comprehended as : the theories and principle of pragmatics are the object language of metapragmatics. • Base on saussure’s theory of language’s arbitrariness, Leech suggested that the arbitrariness of language did not necessarily result in the arbitrariness of grammatical rules, in other words, grammatical rules are conventional. But the cause of the rules came from the nonlinguistic thoughts and reality. Leech also holds that although the grammatical rules are conventional, the pragmatical rules are not conventional, they are determined by the aim of the conversation. The grammatical rules can be comprehended in two level: although grammatical rules are arbitrary, they are generally and commonly explained in the metagrammatic level.