Pragmatic is the study of language in its social and cultural contexts. In particular, it concerns the ways in which people use language to achieve their social and pragmatic goals. In the broader sense, it includes the theory of communication as an activity that takes place within and between people, as well as the various activities performed to produce and interpret utterances. This broader vision of pragmatics encompasses the idea that people’s adaptive behavior is never free of constraints, and that these constraints may be a consequence of their embodied, situated, cultural and interpersonal dynamics.
The field of pragmatics is richly interdisciplinary, and has long attracted psycholinguists, philosophers and cognitive scientists. It is also notoriously difficult to tame, with the experimental literature displaying huge variations in results, including failures to replicate (see the recent’replication crisis’).
This is not surprising; human language processing is a complex activity that involves numerous other underlying processes and interfaces with non-linguistic cognition in multiple ways. The interdisciplinary nature of the field also means that different research methodologies are needed to explore the many issues that are at play in experimental pragmatic studies.
One way to think about pragmatics is as a meta-methodology that can be used with a variety of research designs and methodologies. As such, it provides a framework that allows us to re-examine some of the assumptions we have made about the nature of language and communication.
While there is no pragmatist creed, it is possible to identify certain ideas that have loomed large for pragmatists, though they are not endorsed by all pragmatists. For example, the gremlin theory of children’s behavior is often cited as an essential tenet of pragmatism, and it certainly “works,” in that it provides explanations for some children’s behaviors.
The gremlin theory has its problems, however. For one, it fails to recognize that these children are not all the same; they are individuals with unique strengths and weaknesses. Another problem is that it ignores the fact that the behavior of these children is often determined by the behavior of their parents and other caregivers.
Finally, the gremlin theory is too broad. It explains only a small percentage of what happens to children when they are ill or injured, and it does not account for the fact that some behaviors are learned rather than innate.
The broader vision of pragmatics that this article describes aims to address these shortcomings. It proposes that future progress in experimental pragmatics will be made by establishing precise, theoretically motivated connections between the mechanisms that underlie pragmatic processes, on the one hand, and the semantic and cognitive processes that underlie individual phenomena, on the other. This will require a new approach to the study of experimental pragmatics. The articles in this special issue provide an important first step in this direction. They show that, in order to move forward, pragmatics must embrace the idea that pragmatics is always present in linguistic processing and that it must be acknowledged, and systematically investigated, within experimental pragmatic studies.