Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies context-dependent meaning. It examines how a speaker’s social and cultural circumstances can influence the interpretation of words in their speech and the ways that these factors interact with one another to produce certain pragmatic effects, including conversational implicature, deixis, and politeness. It is different from semantics, which focuses on the inherent meaning of words and sentences in isolation.
Various approaches to pragmatics are common in contemporary scholarship. There are those who see pragmatics, much in the Gricean tradition, as a philosophical project; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and those who take a more empirical psychological approach to utterance interpretation (i.e., Relevance Theory).
It is also possible to find pragmatic scholars who take a more interdisciplinary perspective. They embrace the view that a wide variety of disciplines contribute to human communication and the field of pragmatics should therefore be seen as a “meta-disciplinary” endeavor that intersects with many other fields, such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and literature. This interdisciplinary approach allows for a cross-pollination of ideas and theories that further enriches the study of pragmatics and highlights its critical connections with other areas of human life.
The field of pragmatics is particularly relevant to discussions of human behavior and language because it offers a lens through which we can view the social dimensions of discourse and the broader processes that shape people’s adaptive behaviors. Pragmatics has a critical role to play in intercultural communication because understanding and mastering the pragmatic rules of a culture is crucial for effective communication across cultures. For example, what is considered polite in one culture may be considered rude or bizarre in another.
People are often told that they need to be more pragmatic in their daily lives. This typically means that they need to focus more on the real-world options or courses of action rather than relying too heavily on their idealistic views of how things should be. It is also sometimes argued that in order to survive, business needs to be more pragmatic and focus on the bottom line. This is often seen as a positive thing and a way for businesses to be more successful.
Researchers in the field of experimental pragmatics must be cognizant of the fact that a person’s task demands will always be a part of the dynamic environment within which they are interpreting their own utterances. There is no neutral, task-free context from which utterance interpretation unfolds to produce pragmatic meanings, and so it is important that the pragmatic constraints inherent in every experimental setting be fully acknowledged by all relevant scholars. It is only by doing so that they will be able to develop meaningful and robust pragmatic theories. By contrast, those who ignore these constraints risk attempting to create a framework for their theories that will never be applicable in the real world of human communication. This, in turn, can have negative implications for how well such theories can be tested and validated.