Pragmatic is the study of language use in context, particularly the question of how linguistic meaning or propositions are determined. The term pragmatics is often contrasted with semantics, the more ‘rigorous’ discipline that studies the structure of words and sentences. However, the two disciplines share many goals and approaches. In particular, the theory of pragmatism is based on Gricean principles and focuses on how utterances convey information about speaker and listener intentions. Other important theories of pragmatics include Speech Act Theory (pioneered by J.L. Austin and John Searle) and the theory of Conversational Implicature (elaborated by Korta and Perry).
The central idea of pragmatics is that linguistic meaning depends on the way in which the speaker intends to convey a message to the hearer. This notion of communicative intention is the basis for all pragmatics.
One of the main challenges of pragmatics is how to distinguish between’meaning’ that is conventionally or literally attached to an utterance and other meaning that can be derived from a given utterance, in particular, its use in a specific discourse situation. This challenge is one of the reasons why there are so many different pragmatics theories.
In general, there are two broad categories of pragmatics theories: those that focus on ‘near-side’ phenomena and those that focus on ‘far-side’ phenomena. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the nature of certain facts that are relevant to determining what is meant by an utterance, such as the resolution of ambiguity or vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, and the determination of implicatures.
Far-side phenomena are those that can be uncovered by examining the speaker’s intended audience and the situation in which the utterance is used. For example, the theory of conversational implicature argues that certain grammatical features can imply information about the listener’s current state of knowledge, such as whether an alleged’mistake’ is actually a joke or not.
Another important issue that has been raised in pragmatics is the distinction between’referential’ and ‘nonreferential’ indices. Nonreferential indices such as definite articles and sex affixes have no ‘pragmatic’ significance but can signal, to some extent, the intended referent in a discourse. Referential indices, on the other hand, contribute directly to an utterance’s semantic meaning, such as when the lexical item ‘u’ is used to indicate that the speaker means ‘you’.
Despite these differences in theoretical approach, there is much agreement that the meaning of an utterance can only be fully understood by considering both the near-side and far-side pragmatics of that utterance. Some theorists, such as minimalists and ‘hidden indexical’ theorists, take this to mean that there is no pragmatically determined element of an utterance that cannot be triggered by a particular grammar; others argue that even nonreferential indices contribute to an utterance’s semantic content in certain contexts. In addition, some theorists also argue that a sentence can have more than one meaning. See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage and quotation evidence for the word.