Pragmatics is the subfield of linguistics (and of philosophy, ethics and cognitive science) that studies how language is used in real-world contexts. It seeks to answer questions such as: What is the relationship between what speakers mean by the words they use and the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions and actions, and what they manage to communicate?
The ‘pragmatics of meaning’ is often contrasted with the more conventionally and literally’semantic’ or ‘logical’ aspects of language, such as syntax (or morphology), semantics and phonology. While it is impossible to completely separate these different kinds of linguistic structure, the difference between them is often regarded as being that pragmatics seeks to describe how different contexts contribute to an understanding of an utterance and the way in which this contributes to what the speaker intends to convey.
As a field of study, pragmatics has a broad range of topics and methodologies. A common view is that pragmatics investigates all the ways in which a spoken sentence can convey different meanings or propositions in different contexts, such as ambiguity, idioms, indexicals and demonstratives, the theory of speech act, and the theory of conversational implicature. It also explores how the context can influence the way in which a statement is interpreted, and how this might be affected by speakers’ beliefs or attitudes.
Various approaches to pragmatics are based on a range of philosophical and theoretical perspectives. On the one hand, some philosophers, such as Grice, see pragmatics as a branch of the philosophy of language, with its own set of principles. Others, such as Carston and Wilson, take a more empirical psychological approach to pragmatics, viewing it as the study of the processes that go into the comprehension of an utterance by hearers.
A further important dividing line concerns the relationship between near-side and far-side pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics deals with the ways in which a speaker’s intention is conveyed, for example through the resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, and the use of indexicals and demonstratives. It also includes issues involving presupposition: for instance, the fact that “Hesperus is visible” and “Phosphorus is visible” are two ways of saying the same thing in the sense that Venus is visible, but that in some contexts it seems to be said that Hesperus and Phosphorus are different planets.
Far-side pragmatics, on the other hand, deals with the ways in which a speaker’s intended meaning is conveyed to a hearer, for example through the use of inference, inference to the best explanation and implication. It is this type of pragmatics that ‘contextualist’ approaches, such as Relevance Theory, focus on.