Pragmatic is an area of study that examines how language can be used to convey different meanings. It has as its domain speakers’ intentions, the context in which a particular language use occurs, and the strategies that listeners employ to determine those intentions and to understand what is being communicated. The word pragmatic is derived from the Greek root pragma, which means “practical”. It is thus considered to be the opposite of theoretical, as it seeks to investigate how language is actually used by people rather than how it should be used.
Pragmatists believe that a large portion of what makes language useful is pragmatic, not semantic. They recognize that a given word may have multiple meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. Pragmatics is the branch of language studies that focuses on these differences, as opposed to grammar or semantics, which deal with formal properties like meaning, truth, and reference.
In practice, pragmatics is all around us. It enables you to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines of someone else’s conversation, and navigate ambiguity in context. Whether you’re trying to figure out why a sentient tree might have found a stolen painting or how to interpret an ironic message in a newspaper article, pragmatics is the skill that enables you to disambiguate meaning and facilitate communication.
Despite its importance, many experimental pragmatic studies suffer from the same problems that plague other experiments in the psychology of cognition and perception. One problem is that they tend to strip away the task demands that participants must face in order to complete the tasks they are asked to do. This omission undermines the ubiquity of pragmatic effects and makes it difficult to characterize their impact on real-life language behavior.
To truly understand pragmatics, we must embrace that it is inherently task-dependent. All utterance interpretation begins with and depends on the explicit or implicit task demands that are presented to speakers and listeners in experimental pragmatic studies. To fully capture the complexities of real-life language use, scholars need to incorporate these omnipresent pragmatic constraints into their designs.
In doing so, we will be able to more accurately test pragmatic theories and create models that better reflect the diverse meanings that people actually understand when using language. We will also be able to more fully explore the dynamic nature of meaning production, which is the process by which individuals interpret the diverse meanings that are produced when different pragmatic messages are combined in context. We will also be able to more accurately evaluate the effects of different strategies in a given situation and discover their limitations and weaknesses. These new findings will allow us to better understand what kind of knowledge of language pragmatics is necessary in order to provide effective and useful communication. Ultimately, this will lead to better and more robust cognitive systems that are capable of dealing with the complexities of the real world.