Pragmatics is the part of philosophy of language that focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions, the ways that they convey those intention by their utterances and contexts, and the strategies that hearers employ to discern what those utterances mean. It has traditionally been contrasted with semantics, which is concerned with reference and truth (or, as some philosophers put it, ‘what a thing denotes’). However, contemporary pragmatic theory seems to be moving away from this dichotomy.
Some theorists, like Cappelen and Lepore, are’minimalists’, who hold that pragmatic considerations do not need to intrude into semantics; rather, they need to be dealt with separately. On this view, the conventional meaning of an utterance – the proposition that it genuinely expresses – is a sort of ‘bare minimal claim’: it consists solely of the conventions for meaning, precisification, disambiguation and reference fixing. Other theorists, like Grice and neo-Griceans, go further, treating the core of language as an autonomous domain studied by semantics, with meaning determined as a compositional process of parts. These theorists see Gricean considerations as a kind of shock-absorber, where apparent data that challenge the autonomous semantics picture are treated as merely conventional, and are relegated to the study of implicatures, rather than what is actually said.
One of the most significant differences between semantics and pragmatics concerns function. Syntactic structure mainly expresses semantic relations like modification, predication and quantification, which are essential to a basic account of sentence meaning. On the other hand, rhetorical structure is primarily a way to convey pragmatic relations such as exemplification, concession, justification and summary. It is possible, however, to argue that such a difference does not exist: rhetorical structure may be no more than a convenient and efficient way of organizing the material that can be expressed by words, just as architects may use certain stereotypical patterns when they build buildings or painters might use particular color schemes.
For many people, the pragmatic difference is most pronounced when it comes to questions of intentionality. Speakers are pragmatically motivated by what they want to communicate, and their utterances are pragmatically shaped by the constraints imposed by the environment in which they communicate.
This pragmatic dimension of language is usually viewed as a major source of variation between speakers, and a key factor in cultural variation in language usage. The pragmatist approach to understanding language also has important implications for education, the social sciences and business. For example, it has been argued that a more ‘pragmatic’ teacher is one who considers the effects of his or her actions on students. This could involve putting more emphasis on student participation, feedback and discussion, for example, or giving more guidance in exams. It could also involve focusing on students with learning disabilities or those who are ‘at risk’ of not attaining high standards. Similarly, a more ‘pragmatic’ organisation is one which considers the consequences of its policies for its employees and customers. The pragmatist perspective has also been influential in the field of marketing, where the ‘pragmatic marketing’ concept aims to improve customer service and product design by analysing the impact of advertising on the behaviour and responses of consumers.