Pragmatic is a branch of language studies that deals with communication and the contextual meanings of our words. It is a more pragmatic approach to language than semantics, which concentrates on the actual objects or ideas that the words reference. The defining feature of pragmatics is that it deals with the social, cultural and situational considerations that must be taken into account when communicating.
The study of pragmatics encompasses several different areas of inquiry: it includes analytic and formal pragmatics; descriptive, theoretical and experimental pragmatics; semantics-based, cognitive and intercultural pragmatics. Moreover, it also has a wide range of applications: clinical, sociolinguistic, game-theoretic and neuropragmatics.
There are two major issues that pragmatics attempts to address: how do we know what a sentence is supposed to mean, and how do we make it meaningful to the speaker, hearer, or reader? The first issue is answered by pragmatic semantics, which tries to specify the rules for matching up sentences of a natural language with the propositions that they express. This is a relatively difficult task, given that the actual meanings of sentences are often determined not just by their semantic content, but also by a wide range of features of the context in which they occur.
The second issue is answered by pragmatic phonology, which describes how the sounds of a language are manipulated to convey certain meanings. This is also a fairly difficult area of research, as the phonology of any language may change significantly over time and across speakers. Nonetheless, it is an important part of the discipline.
Some pragmatic theorists have a narrow view of the meaning of an utterance. For example, they may limit the notion of semantic content to a set of conventions for semantic interpretation, such as precisification, disambiguation and reference fixing. Such theorists are called literalists, whereas others, such as minimalists and ‘hidden indexical’ theorists, admit some ambiguity into their definition of semantic content.
Most contemporary pragmatic theory, however, focuses on what is said, and this has been largely driven by the work of Paul Grice, who developed what are now known as the four Gricean Maxims. These are the principles of relevance, courtesy, truthfulness and politeness, which seem to hold for most situations and most languages. These are the rules that govern what is said and how it is said, and they help to explain why some expressions have a particular pragmatic force while others do not. They also explain how to teach pragmatics. In addition, they give rise to theories of meaning in discourse that are more broad than the traditional semantics-based theories that underlie language learning. Moreover, they are the foundation for many current pragmatic approaches to psycholinguistics and interactional semantics.