What is Pragmatics?

Pragmatics is the study of what people mean when they use language. It’s different from semantics (the study of meanings) and syntax (the study of how words are put together). Pragmatics focuses on the intention of speakers, the contexts in which they speak, and their strategies for communicating those intentions.

In some ways, pragmatics is a set of general rules for interpreting non-literal utterances like irony or metaphors. It also includes understanding idioms and colloquial speech. But it also goes beyond those to consider how the meaning of an utterance can change depending on who is talking, what situation they are in, and what kind of relationship the speaker has with the listener. This is often referred to as social pragmatics.

The word pragmatic comes from the Latin pragma, which means “to get something done.” A person who is pragmatic is concerned more with results and less with theory or ideals. In the language classroom, pragmatics is a necessary part of instruction because the ability to disambiguate what someone else says is an important skill for learners.

This month’s Teacher’s Corner offers resources and ideas for teaching pragmatics to your students. Pragmatics relates to different language functions such as greetings, requests, complaints, invitations, and apologies. Lessons on pragmatics might be related to content in a textbook or might include information about home and target cultures.

Several studies in both clinical and healthy participants have found that pragmatic deficits are associated with various cognitive impairments. These include deficits in executive function and Theory of Mind. Researchers have also found that there is a connection between pragmatics and working memory.

The field of pragmatics is highly interdisciplinary and spans multiple disciplines such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, and computer science. There are many subfields of pragmatics, including formal and computational; theoretical and applied; intercultural and experimental pragmatics; and neuropragmatics. There is also a growing interest in the interaction between pragmatics and metalinguistics, which looks at the relationship between the meaning of words and their social and cultural contexts. This interaction is often discussed in terms of a continuum that moves from far-side pragmatics, which includes linguistic and psychological pragmatics, to near-side pragmatics, which focuses on the social and cognitive aspects of communication. There are even different types of pragmatics: figurative and literal; grammatical and non-grammatical; lexical and semantic; logical and illogical. All of this complexity adds up to an extremely wide and varied field that is only beginning to be understood.