Pragmatics is a field that deals with the context-dependent meaning of linguistic expressions and their use. It differs from other areas of linguistic study, such as semantics (the study of the rules that determine the literal linguistic meanings of expressions), syntax (the study of how words are combined to form sentences with specific meaning), and semiotics (the study of signs and symbols and their interpretation).
Pragmatic studies are concerned with how speakers use language in particular social situations in order to achieve particular communicative goals. For example, if a daughter tells her mother that eating cookies makes one gain weight, the mother will interpret that to mean she is calling her friend fat. This difference in interpretation is the pragmatic meaning of the daughter’s utterance.
The different pragmatic interpretations that can result from a single utterance are based on contextual factors such as who the speaker is speaking to and what their relationship is to each other, what the utterance is referring to (the referential content), what implication the utterance conveys, etc. The study of pragmatics is also concerned with the subtle nuances in communication that are conveyed by body language, gestures, tone of voice, and other non-verbal aspects of communication.
Several different pragmatic frameworks have been developed in the literature. These frameworks include far-side pragmatics, near-side pragmatics, and critical pragmatics. The far-side pragmatics perspective is based on speech act theory, which views language as a system of conventionalized utterances that carry specific functions in a particular sociocultural context. The near-side pragmatics perspective, on the other hand, focuses on the nature of certain facts that are relevant to what is said.
Critical pragmatics is a relatively new approach to the field that replaces the notion of truth-conditions with a set of conditions for the’reflexive’ and’referential’ contents of an utterance. The’reflexive’ contents are the truth-conditions that the utterance must meet in order to be true. The’referential’ contents are the propositions that the utterance expresses.
It is important for second and foreign language learners to develop pragmatic competence in order to be able to interact effectively in real-world interactions. However, the research on teaching and testing pragmatic knowledge is limited and many teachers lack the resources to incorporate pragmatics into their classroom instruction. This article aims to provide an overview of the current state of research in pragmatics and to present some possible implications for teaching pragmatics. It is hoped that this article will inspire future research on the topic and encourage teachers to incorporate pragmatics into their instructional programs. Ultimately, the ultimate goal of this study is to create an interactive pragmatics learning tool that will be useful for teachers and students of second and foreign languages. A scoping review methodology was used in this study to identify and define the area of research in pragmatics, and to help inform a subsequent systematic review of the literature. The results of this scoping study were used to develop an online pragmatics learning resource for ELLs.