Pragmatics is a field of study that looks at the meaning of words and phrases that are used in particular social situations. It includes rules such as turn taking, greetings, eye-contact and the way people are referenced in conversations. It also focuses on how these rules change over time. The goal of pragmatics is to pass information from one person to another in a way that is understood by both parties.
Different theorists have focused on different aspects of pragmatics. Some see it as a philosophical project in Grice’s tradition, others concentrate on its interaction with grammar, and still others focus on the empirical psychology of utterance interpretation. These diverse approaches have yielded an enormous literature on pragmatics that has resisted a neat synthesis, even though it is woven through with both linguistic and cognitive mechanisms that form part of the system for processing language and learning to communicate.
The large and varied empirical topics, methods, and perspectives that characterize the current state of the art in pragmatics reflect the complexity of the intention-recognition system. In particular, the large body of research on pragmatic development has shown that young children, even infants, are exquisitely attuned to their interlocutors’ eye gaze and use it to help discover the semantic meanings of novel words. It also shows that they learn a great deal about the meaning of grammatical forms by observing and imitating their parents’ and other speakers’ use of them, even when those utterances are not intended to communicate anything new or novel.
Some of the differences that are reflected in the various pragmatic theories that have been developed can be explained by a fundamental distinction between “near-side” and “far-side” pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics involves perception augmented by some species of ampliative inference, perhaps special application of general principles that apply to communication, as conceived by Grice, or maybe Bayesian reasoning or something like it. Far-side pragmatics, on the other hand, is concerned with facts about a speaker’s intent and the context in which they are uttering them that go beyond what is established by the expressions used and their meanings.
The distinction between these two sorts of pragmatics is important because it allows us to distinguish a linguistic notion of context from the extra-linguistic notion that has traditionally been considered as a factor in the determination of meaning. This article will focus on considerations that motivate a relative emphasis on convention versus context in pragmatic analysis, and on the most important theoretical developments that have permitted bringing the two together in a coherent manner.