truth conditions my left eye.

Here's a weird thing (taken from Wikipedia, of course!):

...close examination of natural language proved to be a powerful philosophical technique. Practitioners since have included J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Paul Grice, R. M. Hare, R. S. Peters, and Jürgen Habermas.

Hm... it seems like there are other philosophers who may have used close examination of natural language... like EVERY post-structuralist philosopher... EVER! It's a nerdy complaint, at first, but every time I encounter a text about the philosophy of language, I see more or less this same list of names, and little or no mention of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Althusser, etc.

Actually, under the entry about Habermas, I thought I saw a picture that might have been Derrida, but it turned out to be the pope. So that's pretty telling. (As it turns out, Habermas and Derrida were bitterest of enemies. Also, the first time I encountered Austin and Searle was in Derrida's "Limited Inc.", in which he really just rips them to ribbons.)

The Philosophy of Language Guys are looking for the 'meaning' of language, and the rules by which it operates. The post-structuralists tend to talk about broad categories like "discourse," "writing in general," "language in general," and never, under any circumstances, about rules. Truth conditional semantics is an excellent example of this divide. In a largely unsuccessful, but useful, project, many semanticists have tried to reduce language to truth conditions, while post-structuralists argue that there is no truth outside of language; that language itself is the condition of 'truth' and 'falsehood.'

There are those, such as Stanley Fish, and Mikhail Bakhtin, whom we've mentioned on this site before, who come from literary studies using deconstructive techniques, and approach linguistics. But for the most part, the cross-over between postmodern (which i'll use loosely to mean informed by post-structuralism) thinking and linguistics/semantics/pragmatics/philosophy of language is non-existent.

In her 2002 book, The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon includes an epilogue which amounts to a laundry list of theorists and disciplines. She writes,

It would likely be no exaggeration to say that, like all art forms... all disciplines have engaged in some way in the postmodern debates in recent yeras. Even religious studies showed the impact of postmodern theory... New areas flourished, influenced to some extent by postmodern deconstructing impulses: critical legal studies... social theory... politics.

And where is a poststructural linguistics, and perhaps more importantly (and mysteriously!) a linguistic poststructuralism?