The word pragmatic is derived from the Latin praegere, meaning “to take into account,” and the Greek pragma, which means “practical action.” A person who is pragmatic tends to be concerned with results and consequences more than with ideas or principles. They are often described as practical or realists.
The field of pragmatics studies the way that speakers use language to convey intentions and the ways in which those intentions are interpreted by listeners. It is a subfield of both semantics and phonology. Pragmatics is distinct from semantics in that it focuses on the use of words rather than on meaning per se. It is also distinct from syntax, which deals with the rules that connect sentences, and grammar, which deals with the structure of individual words.
In the classroom, teachers often incorporate lessons in pragmatics because they want students to be able to interact successfully with people from other cultures. A lesson in pragmatics might focus on how to ask for help or make a request, for example. It might include discussion of differences in requests between the home and target languages as well as cultural norms for making such requests. A teacher might also introduce pragmatics through a class activity that asks students to come up with different responses to scenarios such as asking for money.
Pragmatics is a wide-ranging subject area that includes a huge number of subfields. There is formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical, experimental, and applied pragmatics; game-theoretical and clinical pragmatics; intercultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics; and neuropragmatics.
One of the most controversial areas in pragmatics is the relationship between pragmatism and other philosophical schools of thought. Some pragmatists, such as Peirce and Brandom, emphasize a pragmatic account of truth, denying that there is any sort of metaphysical property that ‘truth’ can possess. Other pragmatists, such as John Dewey, argue that pragmatic considerations must be taken into account in evaluating philosophy and science.
The research literature in pragmatics is enormously diverse, with many experiments yielding conflicting findings. Some of these conflicts may reflect genuine differences between individuals or between different experimental settings, but other difficulties stem from the sheer complexity of analyzing linguistic behavior. For example, it is difficult to determine how much of a difference the choice of the word u makes in a phrase such as ‘Elwood put his hands on Eloise.’ Some researchers have tried to address this issue by using methods that measure the time it takes for people to interpret various kinds of pragmatic meaning, such as measuring eye-movements.
The widespread interest in pragmatics has led to a proliferation of journals dedicated to the subject, and a wide range of different methodological approaches have been used. A recent trend in experimental pragmatics is to use a statistical method called meta-analysis to examine the overall pattern of results produced by a series of different studies and to try to determine whether there are any trends. This is a response to a general concern in psychology, dubbed the replication crisis, that has arisen from the fact that many published empirical findings appear not to be replicable by other investigators.