What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of the relationship between language, context and meaning. It poses questions such as What do people really think when they use words?
It's a philosophies of practical and reasonable actions. It's in opposition to idealism, the notion that you must always abide by your principles.
What is Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is how language users communicate and interact with each and with each other. It is typically thought of as a component of language however it differs from semantics in that pragmatics looks at what the user wants to convey, not what the actual meaning is.
As a research area it is comparatively new, and its research has grown rapidly over the past few decades. It is primarily an academic area of study within linguistics, however it also influences research in other fields such as speech-language pathology, psychology, sociolinguistics, and the study of anthropology.
There are a variety of ways to approach pragmatics that have contributed to the development and growth of this discipline. One of these is the Gricean pragmatics approach, which focuses on the notions of intention and the interaction with the speaker's understanding of the listener's comprehension. Other perspectives on pragmatics include conceptual and lexical approaches to pragmatics. These perspectives have contributed to the variety of subjects that pragmatics researchers have studied.
The study of pragmatics has covered a vast range topics, such as pragmatic comprehension in L2 and demand production by EFL students, as well as the role of the theory of mind in mental and physical metaphors. It has been applied to social and cultural phenomena such as political discourse, discriminatory speech and interpersonal communication. Researchers studying pragmatics have employed diverse methodologies from experimental to sociocultural.
Figure 9A-C demonstrates that the size of the knowledge base for pragmatics varies depending on which database is utilized. The US and the UK are among the top producers of pragmatics research, but their ranking varies by database. This is due to the fact that pragmatics is multidisciplinary and intersects with other disciplines.
It is therefore difficult to determine the top authors in pragmatics solely based on the number of their publications. It is possible to determine influential authors based on their contributions to pragmatics. For example Bambini's contribution to the field of pragmatics has led to concepts like conversational implicature and politeness theory. Other highly influential authors in pragmatics include Grice, Saul and Kasper.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is more concerned with the contexts and language users rather than with truth, reference, or grammar. It studies the ways in which one phrase can be understood as meaning various things depending on the context and also those caused by indexicality or ambiguity. It also focuses primarily on the strategies employed by listeners to determine which words have a meaning that is communicative. It is closely connected to the theory of conversational implicature, developed by Paul Grice.
While the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is a well-known and established one, there is much debate regarding the exact boundaries of these disciplines. Some philosophers claim that the concept of sentence meaning is a part of semantics, whereas others insist that this particular issue should be viewed as pragmatic.
Another area of controversy is whether the study of pragmatics should be regarded as a branch of linguistics or an aspect of philosophy of language. Some researchers have argued pragmatics is an independent discipline and should be treated as part of linguistics along with phonology. syntax, semantics etc. Others, however, have argued that the study of pragmatics should be considered an aspect of philosophy of language since it examines the ways that our concepts of the meaning and use of language influence our theories of how languages function.
This debate has been fueled by a handful of questions that are essential to the study of pragmatics. For instance, some scholars have argued that pragmatics is not a subject in and of itself since it examines the ways people interpret and use language without necessarily being able to provide any information regarding what is actually being said. This type of approach is known as far-side pragmatics. Others, however, have argued that the study should be considered a field in its own right since it examines the way the meaning and usage of language is affected by cultural and social factors. This is referred to as near-side pragmatics.
The field of pragmatics also discusses the inferential nature of utterances and the significance of the primary pragmatic processes in determining what a speaker is saying in a sentence. Recanati and Bach discuss these issues in greater in depth. Both papers discuss the notions saturation and free enrichment of the pragmatic. These are important pragmatic processes that shape the meaning of utterances.
What is the difference between free and explanatory Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics focuses on how context affects linguistic meaning. It focuses on how human language is used during social interaction and the relationship between the speaker and interpreter. Pragmaticians are linguists who specialize on pragmatics.
Different theories of pragmatics have been developed over the years. Some, like Gricean pragmatics, concentrate on the communication intention of the speaker. Relevance Theory for instance is a study of the processes of understanding that take place when listeners interpret the meaning of utterances. Some practical approaches have been put together with other disciplines like philosophy or cognitive science.
There are also differing opinions regarding the boundaries between pragmatics and semantics. Some philosophers, like Morris, believe that semantics and pragmatics are two separate topics. He states that semantics is concerned with the relation of signs to objects which they may or not denote, whereas pragmatics is concerned with the use of words in a context.
Other philosophers, such as Bach and Harnish have argued that pragmatism is a subfield within semantics. They distinguish between 'nearside and far-side' pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with what is said, whereas far-side is focused on the logical implications of uttering a phrase. They believe that semantics already determines the logical implications of a statement, whereas other pragmatics are determined by pragmatic processes.
One of the most important aspects of pragmatics is that it is a context-dependent phenomenon. This means that a single word can have different meanings based on factors such as ambiguity or indexicality. Other factors that could alter the meaning of an expression are the structure of the speech, the speaker's intentions and beliefs, and listener expectations.
A second aspect of pragmatics is its cultural specificity. This is because different cultures have their own rules about what is appropriate to say in different situations. For example, it is polite in some cultures to make eye contact while it is rude in other cultures.
There are numerous perspectives on pragmatics and lots of research is being conducted in this area. Some of the most important areas of study are: formal and computational pragmatics as well as experimental and theoretical pragmatics; cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics; and clinical and experimental pragmatics.
How does free Pragmatics compare to explanatory Pragmatics?
The pragmatics discipline is concerned with how meaning is conveyed by the language in a context. It evaluates the ways in which the speaker's intention and beliefs contribute to interpretation, with less attention paid to the grammatical aspects of the speech instead of what is being said. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The subject of pragmatics has a link to other areas of the study of linguistics, such as syntax and semantics, or philosophy of language.
In recent years the field of pragmatics expanded in many directions. These include conversational pragmatics and computational linguistics. These areas are characterized by a broad range of research that addresses topics such as lexical features and the interplay between discourse, language, and meaning.
One of the most important issues in the philosophical debate of pragmatics is whether it is possible to provide an exhaustive, systematic view of the pragmatics/semantics interface. Some philosophers have suggested that it's not (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have claimed that the distinction between pragmatics and semantics is not clear and that pragmatics and semantics are actually the identical.
The debate between these positions is usually a tussle scholars argue that certain events are a part of either semantics or pragmatics. For example certain scholars argue that if an utterance has an actual truth-conditional meaning, then it is semantics, while others believe that the fact that a statement could be interpreted in different ways is a sign of pragmatics.
Other pragmatics researchers have taken a different view and argue that the truth-conditional meaning of an utterance is only one of many ways that the utterance may be interpreted and that all interpretations are valid. This method is often known as far-side pragmatics.
Recent research in pragmatics has tried to combine semantic and far-side approaches trying to understand the full scope of the possibilities for interpretation of a utterance by demonstrating how the speaker's beliefs and intentions contribute to the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. (2019) combine the Gricean game theory model of the Rational Speech Act framework with technical innovations from Franke and Bergen website (2020). The model predicts that listeners will be able to consider a variety of possible exhaustified interpretations of a utterance that contains the universal FCI any, and that this is what makes the exclusiveness implicature so reliable when in comparison to other possible implicatures.