Pragmatic is the study of how people interpret the meanings of words, sentences, and conversations. It focuses on the relationships among those meanings and their contexts, the speakers’ intentions, their actions, and their results. It also explores how the environment influences what speakers say and how they say it.
In a pragmatic view, a thing is meaningful in a certain situation if it can achieve some practical goal, or in other words, if it will be useful to the speaker and listener. This perspective is based on the idea that reality is always experienced in the form of a problem to be solved, and the only things that are truly real are the problems we solve.
The original pragmatist triumvirate—James, Dewey, and Peirce—were all well-known philosophers at the turn of the 20th century, and their philosophy was widely taught in schools around the world. However, in the 1940s, pragmatism began to lose its popularity and influence. The primary reason for this was the rapid professionalization of philosophy as a specialized academic discipline. In that process, pragmatism was relegated to the margins, while analytic philosophy emerged as the dominant paradigm in the academy.
Despite the fading reputation of pragmatism, many philosophers and teachers continue to embrace its pragmatic approach to understanding language and culture. In particular, pragmatics is frequently taught in foreign-language classrooms, where it can provide an important complement to textbook content. For example, a teacher might supplement a unit on apologies with a lesson in the cultural and linguistic norms of making them.
Research on pragmatic awareness has primarily focused on language learners’ interaction with the home or target languages. However, there is a growing body of research showing that people have pragmatic awareness and understanding in multilingual situations. The challenge is to incorporate a broader pragmatics framework into experimental studies that address these cross-language phenomena.
The first step is to acknowledge that the specific people involved in a pragmatic study, along with the implicit or explicit tasks presented in the experiment, will affect the outcomes. There is no neutral point of view, no context-free, task-free environment from which utterance interpretation unfolds to produce pragmatic meanings. Rather, all language use is pragmatically situated from the very beginning of linguistic processing, and theories of linguistic pragmatics must reflect this omnipresent fact.
In addition, researchers need to pay more attention to within-individual variation in the pragmatic experiences they measure. Typical experimental studies of pragmatics examine individual participants’ responses to stimuli, usually using a variety of measurement techniques (e.g., full phrase or sentence reading time, moving-window techniques, eye movement).
These methods presumably tap into the various facets of pragmatic understanding, but they do not fully capture the complexity of the real-world processes that are at work. To do that, researchers should examine the people and the specific tasks they present as part of their experimental studies, and they should also systematically incorporate more of the complex bodily, linguistic, and situational factors that make up people’s pragmatic experience.