Pragmatic is the study of how people interpret linguistic expressions in real-world settings. It is a subfield of the broader study of language use, which includes semantics and conversation analysis. Pragmatics draws from a wide range of research fields, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, and sociopragmatics.
The word pragmatic comes from the Latin pragmata, which means “practical.” The idea behind pragmatism is that people should focus on what works in reality and not on abstract principles. This philosophy of action has been applied to a variety of fields, from business to social work to education. The word pragmatic is also used as a compliment, to describe someone who is practical and reasonable.
Pragmatism is often paired with another philosophical movement, empiricism. Empiricism emphasizes the importance of observing and experiencing things in order to gain knowledge, rather than relying on theoretical concepts and arguments. In addition, empiricism stresses the importance of making decisions based on experience. Both pragmatism and empiricism are important in many parts of the world, and they continue to influence the lives of people in those regions today.
The scholarly journal Pragmatics publishes innovative pragmatic scholarship, broadly conceived. Its aim is to foster theory development and integration across the broad spectrum of pragmatics research. The journal seeks research that contributes to the understanding of the emergence and realization of meaning in natural, mediated communication. Its scope is global and inclusive, covering a range of languages/dialects, cultures and social situations.
We encourage studies that are comparative and cross-linguistic as well as those that investigate the relation between pragmatics and neighboring research areas, including semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, phonology/orthography, media studies, sociology, psychology, and philosophy.
A key aspect of pragmatism is the recognition that there is no neutral point of view or task-free context from which utterance interpretation unfolds to produce pragmatic meanings. Rather, all language use is pragmatically situated from the very beginning of the processing phase, and theories of linguistic pragmatics must reflect this omnipresent reality.
To this end, we promote the use of various experimental techniques to examine the pragmatic meanings that are interpreted by speakers and listeners. For example, methods examining full phrase or sentence reading times provide evidence of the total effort that goes into interpreting certain kinds of pragmatic meanings (e.g., figurative meaning such as metaphor, idiom and irony). Other experimental techniques, like moving-window, eye-movement and verbal memory tasks, allow us to explore the local processing of specific words that convey different pragmatic meanings. These data, in combination with a theoretical framework, can help us create pragmatic theories that are capable of accounting for the diverse meanings that people actually understand. We call this a “broader vision of experimental pragmatics.” It recognizes that, within a pragmatic theory, we must acknowledge and systematically investigate the varying constraints on the adaptive behaviors of participants in our experiments. This is a necessary complement to the more formal and idealized interpretations that we too often find in traditional pragmatic theories.