Pragmatic focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions and their strategies to make them effective, as well as the ways that listeners understand these intended meanings in context. It’s also about how the social, cultural, and situational influences that shape our speech and language impact these intentions and understanding. This makes pragmatics an incredibly important topic to study.
The term “pragmatic” has many definitions, but the most basic one is that it’s a middle ground between idealistic and practical. It’s often used to praise choices or actions that are considered practical and reasonable, such as political positions or actions. It can also be applied to specific behaviors, such as compromising in order to achieve a goal.
As a philosophical movement, pragmatism has had a rich history of contributions, both in its classical era and its present day. In this entry, we’ll explore some of the key philosophical issues that pragmatists have contributed to, both in terms of how people use language and in what ways they think about the nature of truth, knowledge, and inquiry.
There are a variety of approaches to pragmatics, both philosophical and empirical, but all share a common core. A central theme in all pragmatist thinking is that language and thought should be grounded in the way people actually use them. This approach to language and communication lays the foundation for a theory of pragmatics that is not only grounded in the way we use language, but also in what we know about how the brain processes information.
This is an interdisciplinary field and pragmatics research draws inspiration from a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. This interdisciplinary approach helps to broaden our understanding of how language is used and understood in the real world.
For example, psychologists often use experimental pragmatics to test their theories of how we interpret and respond to linguistic meaning. They do this by examining people’s responses to various stimuli in controlled settings and then computing averages of these responses. However, they often strip away the task demands that are inherent to the pragmatics of their experiment, ignoring an important part of the whole picture. This can lead to flawed and misleading theoretical interpretations of the results of their experiments.
Pragmatics is also a crucial part of discourse analysis, and this is because it’s about how we communicate and interact with each other in real life. In fact, many aspects of a conversation are pragmatic, and these can be difficult to pinpoint without an understanding of the principles behind them. For example, when someone asks, “Can you pass me the bottle?” what they really mean is, “Do you mind if I ask you to pass me the bottle?”
Teaching pragmatics in the classroom can be challenging, but there are ways to help students learn and practice this important skill. In this month’s Teacher’s Corner, we’ll share some resources and ideas for incorporating pragmatics instruction in the classroom.