The study of language and its use in context has gone by many names over the centuries, from rhetoric to semiotics to pragmatics. Today, it is a multidisciplinary field of research that includes philosophy, sociology, and psychology as well as linguistics. Pragmatics focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions and the strategies they use to convey those intentions, rather than on reference or grammar.
It encompasses the theory of how the meaning of an utterance varies from context to context owing to ambiguity, vagueness, indexicals, and other aspects of language use; the theory of conversational implicature; and speech act theory. It is a central aspect of our understanding of communication.
Think of how you might answer the question, “How are you?” Typically, you don’t respond by detailing every medical and personal detail about your health. Instead, you probably use your knowledge of pragmatics to determine the best way to reply. In doing so, you take into account social and cultural norms.
This article aims to bring together current thinking and new developments in the field of pragmatics, and to discuss how it may influence the theory of language acquisition and how we teach it. It is based on the proceedings of a symposium held at the Society for Language Learning and Development in Boston on November 12, 2015. The three invited speakers— Eve Clark, Jesse Snedeker, and Danielle Matthews—presented a range of classic and more recent findings and theorizing related to pragmatics, and the three papers that follow reflect the variety of topics, approaches and perspectives that characterize this dynamic and important area of inquiry.
Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as “meaning minus semantics.” This refers to the fact that while semantics refers to the literal meaning of an utterance, and grammar involves the rules for how words and sentences are put together, pragmatics takes into consideration other factors that affect the meaning of an utterance, such as the speaker’s intention, the context in which it is uttered, and how the listener might interpret it.
A good example of this is when the speaker says, “I discovered that painting by the tree.” The listener might interpret this as referring to the fact that the paint was found in or near a tree, or it might be interpreted more literally as referring to the fact that the speaker hung the painting there. The listener’s pragmatic knowledge of how the world works enables them to disambiguate the meaning and use the sentence in their intended way.
In a similar way, a child learner must be pragmatically competent to be able to use the information from their linguistic environment—including eye gaze and mental state recognition—to discover the meaning of novel words. It is a complex task that, at times, resembles a puzzle without a clear solution. The large literature on pragmatics enriches, restricts and reshuffles hypotheses about the relationship between linguistic-semantic and pragmatic meaning, but it is difficult to achieve a neat synthesis. Despite this, some basic principles are emerging.