Pragmatics is a discipline that studies language use, focusing more on the people using it and the context in which they do so, than on linguistic structure or reference. It aims to find out how a speaker communicates an intention or a meaning and what strategies the hearer uses to understand this intention.
The term pragmatic is derived from the Greek word pragma, which means ‘deed’ or ‘act’, and it has traditionally described a philosophy that is concerned with real-world applications of ideas rather than abstract notions. A person or solution that is ‘pragmatic’ is sensible, grounded and practical – the four-year-old who wants a unicorn for her birthday isn’t being very pragmatic!
A key problem in pragmatics is the boundary between it and other areas of study. The distinction between semantics and syntax is often drawn, with semantics being a branch of language that studies objects or ideas, and syntax being the study of the structure of sentences in a given language. However, it has also been argued that the difference between semantics and pragmatics is less clear-cut than this: for example, some scholars have argued that semantics deals with the relationship of signs to the objects or ideas which they may or do denote, while pragmatics deals with how the signs function in context.
Some have also sought to distinguish between near-side and far-side pragmatics, with the former dealing with what is ‘implied’ by an utterance and the latter dealing with what is ‘actually stated’. The former has been influenced by Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, and the latter by theories such as Sperber’s relevance theory and Carston’s illocutionary force.
In recent years, the pragmatist tradition has undergone something of a revival. Richard Rorty’s bold and iconoclastic attacks on mainstream epistemology’s crucial mistake of naively conceiving of language and thought as mirroring the world gave birth to a new movement called neopragmatism. Other recent philosophers have objected to Rorty’s blithe dismissal of truth as an issue best left unexplored, and sought to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals of objective reality.
Other approaches to pragmatics have focused on computational models of natural human information processing, with particular interest in the question of how computers deal with ambiguity in language and context. One of the important challenges for computational pragmatics is reference resolution – how a computer knows which word to choose when there are two possible words that mean the same thing (for example, ‘Eloise’ and ‘Elwood’).
Other topics of interest in contemporary pragmatics include intercultural pragmatics, metasemantics, cross-linguistic pragmatics, historical pragmatics and pragmatics in literature. There is also a substantial amount of research on the ways that children and adults acquire and use pragmatic competence. These pragmatic issues are of relevance to many aspects of education and social interaction, as well as the development of computer systems which attempt to model human language and information processing abilities. Currently, computational pragmatics has become an important part of the field of artificial intelligence.