The study of pragmatics evaluates the way human language is used in social interaction. It examines the relationship between context and meaning, and focuses not on the phonetic or grammatical structure of an utterance, but on what that utterance means to the speaker. It also focuses on what the speaker intends and believes when they communicate with other people. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians.
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy that examines the role of context in communication. It is a significant departure from lexical and syntactic analysis of individual sentences, which are the traditional focus of psycholinguistics. It grew out of the 1970s when psychologists, both developmental and cognitive, began to explore pragmatic language production and interpretation. It was at this time that scholars started to use the term ‘pragmatics’ to refer to this emerging field.
Pragmatic theory is a broad collection of theories about how we produce and interpret pragmatic meaning in everyday language use. It is a complex and diverse area of research, with many different theories competing to account for people’s pragmatic production and understanding of language. These theories can be broadly categorized as far-side pragmatics and near-side pragmatics.
Far-side pragmatics is based on the idea that we produce and understand meaning in language through a process of perception and rule-following, augmented by some species of ampliative inference. This category of thinking is based on the work of Grice, and has been supported by experimental studies in which participants are asked to follow a set of rules when communicating with other people.
Near-side pragmatics, on the other hand, is based on the idea that we make meaning in communication by interpreting what other people say and do. This includes what they say, but also their physical actions and non-verbal behaviors. It is a more comprehensive and sophisticated view of pragmatics, and has been supported by numerous empirical experiments in which we can test various parts of people’s inference processes.
The debate between far-side and near-side pragmatics is a reflection of the overall complexity of understanding pragmatic meaning in language. As we move into the future, the challenges for experimental pragmatics will continue to grow, but the potential for progress is still there.
One important challenge comes from the fact that it is often impossible to separate the effects of a specific experimental task from its broader implications for pragmatic theories. As a result, there are wide variations in the findings from pragmatic experiments. This reflects a broader issue within the behavioral sciences, which has been dubbed the “replication crisis.” While failure to replicate is a legitimate concern, it should not be seen as casting doubt on any empirical results obtained previously, including those concerning pragmatic language use. Instead, it should be seen as a necessary component of the design of any experiment in which we try to determine what factors influence people’s pragmatic abilities. For example, differences in the performance of participants on a pragmatic test tapping into various aspects of pragmatic competence (e.g., speech acts, implicatures in a constraint linguistic context, pragmatic inference in a global context) can be explained by examining the type of explicit task that each participant must complete to participate in an experiment.