What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of the connection between context, language and meaning. It addresses questions such as: What do people really think when they use words?
It's a philosophy that is based on practical and reasonable action. It's in opposition to idealism, the notion that you must abide to your beliefs.
What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of ways that people who speak get meaning from and with each one another. It is typically thought of as a part of language however it differs from semantics in the sense that pragmatics looks at what the user is trying to convey rather than what the actual meaning is.
As a research field, pragmatics is relatively young and its research has grown rapidly in the last few decades. It has been mostly an academic field of study within linguistics, but it also has an impact on research in other fields, such as speech-language pathology, psychology sociolinguistics, and Anthropology.
There are many different methods of pragmatics that have contributed to the growth and development of this discipline. For example, one perspective is the Gricean approach to pragmatics which is focused on the concept of intention and how it relates to the speaker's comprehension of the listener's. Conceptual and lexical approaches to pragmatics are also perspectives on the topic. These perspectives have contributed to the diversity of topics that researchers in pragmatics have studied.
The research in pragmatics has covered a broad range topics, such as L2 pragmatic comprehension and request production by EFL students, and the significance of the theory of mind in physical and mental metaphors. It has been applied to social and cultural phenomena like political speech, discriminatory speech, and interpersonal communication. Researchers in pragmatics have used various methods from experimental to sociocultural.
Figure 9A-C demonstrates that the size of the knowledge base on pragmatics is different depending on which database is utilized. The US and the UK are two of the top producers in pragmatics research. However, their rank differs based on the database. This difference is due to the fact that pragmatics is a multidisciplinary field that intersects with other disciplines.
This makes it difficult to classify the top authors of pragmatics based on the number of publications they have. However, it is possible to identify the most influential authors through analyzing their contributions to pragmatics. For example Bambini's contribution in pragmatics is a pioneering concept such as conversational implicature and politeness theory. Other authors who have been influential in the field of pragmatics are Grice, Saul and Kasper.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is more concerned with the contexts and the users of language rather than with truth or reference, or grammar. It focuses on how one utterance may be understood differently in different contexts. This includes ambiguity as well as indexicality. It also examines the strategies that listeners employ to determine whether phrases are intended to be a communication. It is closely linked to the theory of conversative implicature, which was first developed by Paul Grice.
While the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is a well-known and established one however, there is much debate about the precise boundaries of these disciplines. For instance, some philosophers have argued that the notion of a sentence meaning is an aspect of semantics, while others have argued that this kind of thing should be viewed as a pragmatic problem.
Another area of debate is whether the study of pragmatics should be considered to be a linguistics branch or as a component of philosophy of language. Some researchers have argued pragmatics is an autonomous discipline and should be treated as part of linguistics, along with the study of phonology. syntax, semantics etc. Others, however have argued the study of pragmatics is a component of philosophy since it deals with the way in which our beliefs about meaning and uses of languages influence our theories on how languages function.
There are a few key aspects of the study of pragmatics that have fueled many of the debates. Some scholars have argued for instance that pragmatics isn't a subject by itself because it studies how people perceive and use the language, without necessarily referring to actual facts about what was said. This type of approach is known as far-side pragmatics. Some scholars have argued that the subject should be considered a discipline in its own right, since it examines the ways the meaning and use of language is influenced by social and cultural factors. This is known as near-side pragmatics.
The pragmatics field also discusses the inferential nature and meaning of utterances, as well as the role of primary pragmatic processes in determining the meaning of what a speaker is expressing in the sentence. These are topics that are addressed in greater detail in the papers of Recanati and Bach. Both papers deal with the notions of saturation as well as free pragmatic enrichment. These are significant pragmatic processes in the sense that they aid in shaping the meaning of a statement.
How is Free Pragmatics Different from Explanatory Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to the meaning of language. It examines the way human language is used during social interaction as well as the relationship between speaker and interpreter. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are referred to as pragmaticians.
Over the years, a variety of theories of pragmatism have been proposed. Some, such as Gricean pragmatics, concentrate on the communication intention of the speaker. Relevance Theory for instance, focuses on the processes of understanding that occur when listeners interpret utterances. Certain approaches to pragmatics are merged with other disciplines, such as cognitive science and philosophy.
There are also differing opinions on the boundary between pragmatics and semantics. Morris is one philosopher who believes that semantics and pragmatism are two distinct topics. He claims semantics concerns the relationship of signs to objects that they might or may not represent, while 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 define "near-side" and "far-side" pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics concentrates on the words spoken, while far-side pragmatics focuses on the logical implications of saying something. They argue that semantics determines some of the pragmatics of an utterance, while other pragmatics are determined by the pragmatic processes.
The context is one of the most important aspects in pragmatics. This means that the same phrase can have different meanings in different contexts, based on factors such as indexicality and ambiguity. Other elements that can alter the meaning of an utterance include the structure of the discourse, speaker intentions and beliefs, as well as the expectations of the listener.
A second aspect of pragmatics is its cultural specificity. This is because each culture has its own rules regarding what is acceptable in various situations. For instance, it's acceptable in certain cultures to make eye contact but it is considered rude in other cultures.
There are many different perspectives of pragmatics, and a lot of research is conducted in this field. There are a myriad of areas of research, such as formal and computational pragmatics, theoretical and experimental pragmatics, cross and intercultural pragmatics of language, as well as clinical and experimentative pragmatics.
How is Free Pragmatics Similar to Explanatory Pragmatics?
The pragmatics discipline is concerned with the way meaning is communicated through language in context. It focuses less on the grammatical structure of an utterance and more on what the speaker is saying. Pragmaticians are linguists who specialize in pragmatics. The topic of pragmatics is linked to other areas of study of linguistics like semantics and syntax, or philosophy of language.
In recent years, the field of pragmatics has developed in various directions, including computational linguistics, pragmatics of conversation, and theoretic pragmatics. There is a wide range of research in these areas, with a focus on topics such as the role of lexical features as well as the interaction between discourse and language, and the nature of meaning itself.
In the philosophical discussion of pragmatism one of the main questions is whether it is possible to provide a thorough and systematic explanation of the interface between pragmatics and semantics. Some philosophers have claimed that it isn't (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have argued that the distinction between pragmatics and semantics is not clear and that they're the same.
The debate over these positions is usually a tussle scholars argue that certain phenomena fall under the umbrella of semantics or pragmatics. For instance, some scholars argue that if an utterance has a literal truth-conditional meaning then it is semantics, while other argue that the fact that an expression could be interpreted in different ways is pragmatics.
Other pragmatics researchers have taken a different view and argue that the truth-conditional meaning of an expression is only one of many ways in which the utterance may be interpreted, and that all interpretations are valid. This approach is often known as far-side pragmatics.
Recent work in pragmatics has attempted to combine both approaches, attempting to capture the entire range of possibilities of an utterance's interpretation by modeling how a speaker's beliefs and intentions affect the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. Get More is an Gricean model of the Rational Speech Act framework, with technological innovations created by Franke and Bergen. The model predicts that listeners will be entertained by a variety of exhausted parses of an utterance that contains the universal FCI Any, and that is the reason why the exclusivity implicature is so strong when compared to other plausible implications.