Pragmatic is a subfield of the field of Linguistics, which studies human language and communication. The study of pragmatics is primarily concerned with understanding how language conveys meaning and how context contributes to meaning. It is also interested in what people https://jwtogel.me/ intend to communicate through their language and how this can be understood. In addition, it investigates the social and cultural aspects of communication and interaction through language. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians.
The term “pragmatic” is derived from the Latin verb “to practice.” The primary goal of pragmatics is to understand how the meaning of an utterance depends on the context in which it is said, including the speaker’s intentions, beliefs and values. This is done by examining the various ways that context influences the semantics, morphology and phonology of an utterance.
This process of constructing meaning is not a linear one, and is accomplished through the principle of relevance, which determines the relevance of a contextual feature to an interpretive hypothesis about the speaker’s informative intention. Relevance theory has become a central part of contemporary pragmatics and is responsible for its current focus not only on what is conveyed beyond saying, but on saying itself.
Some pragmaticists, especially those working with Speech Act Theory, examine illocutionary acts. An illocutionary act is an utterance that produces a particular effect. For example, in the Aboriginal Dyirbal language of Australia, it is a taboo to use the everyday lexicon when speaking to certain relatives. To avoid breaking the taboo, speakers have to resort to using a different lexicon when addressing those relatives. In doing so, the utterances produce and reinforce the social distance that is created. These types of utterances are known as “affinal” taboo indexes, and the way in which they operate is an important topic in the study of pragmatics.
Another approach to pragmatics is the one exemplified by the work of Kaplan and Grice. They argue that formal semantics and phonology deal with the ‘far side’ of communication, while the near side is dealt with by pragmatics. This approach has gained traction in the literature, and is often referred to as the “Gricean” view.
Some neo-Griceans, however, disagree with this notion of pragmatics as being separate from semantics and phonology. They argue that the far-side, formal side of linguistics can be dealt with in terms of a semantic framework, and that all of the far-side issues, such as resolving reference, can be handled by semantics. The neo-Griceans, therefore, treat the near side of pragmatics, such as the concepts of relevance and implicatures, as an extension of formal semantics and phonology.