Pragmatic is a term used to describe something practical or logical. It’s often contrasted with idealism, which means a focus on ideals. People who are pragmatic tend to prioritize actions and courses of action that will be most effective in the real world—rather than getting bogged down by idealistic theories that might not work in practice.
The word pragmatic comes from the Latin pragma, which means “to do.” The phrase is related to the words praxis and praxi, which mean action or practice. The pragmatic approach to life is one of the reasons we need a good GMAT prep course and not just study the theory.
In linguistics, pragmatics describes how meaning is created in conversation and other language uses. The field is distinct from semantics, which studies the actual objects or ideas to which a word refers, and syntax, which examines relationships among signs or symbols.
While the fields of semantics and syntax are central to language, pragmatics provides an additional layer of meaning that goes beyond the objects or ideas themselves. In addition, pragmatics has a strong connection to culture, since what is deemed polite or appropriate in one culture may be viewed as rude or bizarre in another. Pragmatics also plays an important role in intercultural communication, enabling people to understand how different cultures value different aspects of their language use.
In experimental pragmatics, researchers study how people understand linguistic expressions in context. This involves analyzing behavior such as how long it takes people to read certain phrases or sentences, or whether they infer a particular type of pragmatic meaning (e.g., scalar implicature).
One of the biggest challenges in conducting experiments in pragmatics is that people’s responses to a given set of stimuli are affected by many factors other than the linguistic expression under investigation. For example, a person’s mood, beliefs about the truth of an utterance, or their familiarity with the speaker will influence how they interpret it. Researchers attempt to minimize these influences by presenting participants with a range of stimuli, and then computing averages across the various conditions.
Despite these difficulties, experimental pragmatics remains a crucial part of research in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. To fully characterize the role that pragmatics plays in language understanding, we need to recognize the complex and dynamic relationship between task demands and pragmatic performance.
The Journal of Pragmatics welcomes invited reviews that offer a detailed, critical summary of current research findings on a particular topic or area of research. Authors should first get in touch with the co-Editors to discuss the proposed focus of their review article. We can then work with you to create an article that will meet our publication standards and guidelines. The aim of the Journal of Pragmatics is to provide readers with an in-depth, critical summary of current research and developments within the field of pragmatics. It is our hope that this will help to advance the field of pragmatics and its integration with other areas of psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics.