Pragmatic is the theory that language use and interpretation depends on context and a person’s underlying intentions and actions. The discipline of pragmatics also studies how the meaning of words, sentences, and utterances change from one context to another. It has many branches, including the theory that different meanings or propositions can be assigned to a single word or sentence in a given context because of its ambiguity and indexicality; speech act theory; and the theory of conversational implicature.
Semantics deals with the structure and meaning of sentences, while pragmatics focuses on what people actually say, how they use language to communicate their thoughts, and what effect the linguistic choices they make have on the resulting communication. One of the most important aspects of pragmatics is that people don’t always say what they mean. For example, someone might want to wrap up a conversation but avoid saying so by politely implying that it’s time to go. This is known as “implicit communication.” Pragmatics involves understanding the ways in which people convey meaning to facilitate everyday communication.
There is a debate about whether semantics and pragmatics should be considered two separate areas of study or whether they are closely related and share some of the same concerns. Some scholars argue that semantics and pragmatics should be treated as a single area of inquiry because they both focus on the meaning of sentences. However, others believe that there are significant differences between the two fields, including that semantics focuses on a particular set of rules that determine what a sentence means in a certain context and pragmatics focuses on the way that a sentence is used to communicate a message.
Another major difference between the field of semantics and the field of pragmatics is that semantics addresses a fundamentally different problem than pragmatics. Semantics seeks to provide a complete account of sentence meaning, and it does so by recursively specifying the truth conditions of each sentence in the language. Pragmatics, on the other hand, focuses on how sentences are used in utterances to communicate information in context, and it does so by focusing on how a speaker uses a particular sentence to express their intentions and goals.
The philosopher Paul Grice authored what are now called the Gricean Maxims, which are four general pragmatic principles that appear to govern most situations and most languages. These maxims include the idea that you should be concise, be honest, be clear, and be pertinent. These maxims are responsible for contemporary pragmatic theory focusing on the near side of semantics, which focuses on what is conveyed beyond the literal sense of a statement. This near-side pragmatics approach has been criticized by some as intruding upon the traditional domain of semantics. For this reason, some scholars have proposed a merger of semantics and pragmatics that would incorporate aspects of both disciplines. However, these proposals have not yet been widely accepted.