Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. It is a subfield of linguistics and philosophy. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. Pragmatics includes research on politeness, conversational implicature, turn-taking norms in speech, ambiguity resolution and other issues related to communication in everyday life.
People who have pragmatic language difficulties can KNOW what to do in a particular social situation but still struggle to carry out the appropriate behavior (receptive language deficit). Or, they may be able to answer a question correctly but they can’t understand what was asked in the first place (expressive language deficit). In both cases, their underlying problems are in their pragmatic language skills.
While there are many different definitions of pragmatics, the broadest one describes it as the study of how context contributes to meaning. A more narrow definition defines it as the study of speakers’ communicative intentions and the strategies they use to convey these intentions and what their hearers must do in order to interpret them. The pragmatic study of language also examines how these intentions and actions change over time as the listener’s understanding of the speaker’s perspective changes.
Some researchers distinguish between “classical pragmatics” and “near-side pragmatics.” Classical pragmatics refers to the parts of pragmatics that focus on communicative intention, including reference resolution (how a word is understood) and ambiguity resolution. Near-side pragmatics, on the other hand, involves understanding what is said.
There are many different pragmatic studies, each with its own set of theories and techniques. There are formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied pragmatics; intercultural, interlinguistic, and clinical pragmatics; and even neuropragmatics!
All of these pragmatic approaches share a common interest in the role of context in communication. They all examine how the meaning of a sentence is determined, not by its semantic content or grammatical form, but rather by what the speakers and hearers know and how they are motivated to act in a given situation.
Educators interested in pragmatics can find a wide range of resources online to help them incorporate pragmatics instruction into their English language classes. Teachers can choose to build information on pragmatics into existing lesson plans or they can create separate lessons on specific topics. For example, a teacher might create a lesson on taboo questions in various cultures around the world to teach students how to avoid inappropriate questions.
The goal of teaching pragmatics is to prepare students to communicate effectively and be able to interact with other cultures in their own language. For this reason, understanding the pragmatics of a new language is important for all learners. As a result, it is a valuable topic for EFL instructors to include in their curriculum. Whether you are interested in incorporating pragmatics into your class or just learning more about it, this month’s Teacher’s Corner has some excellent resources to get you started!