Pragmatic is an adjective that refers to an approach or attitude that emphasizes practicality, realism, and results-oriented thinking. Being pragmatic means that you make decisions based on what is realistically achievable and what will most likely achieve the desired outcome. For example, if you are interviewing for a job and you are offered a lower position than you want, you might accept it if you think that the salary is still reasonable and that you will be able to get the higher-level position in the future.
Many definitions of pragmatics contrast it with semantics, the study of the meaning that words have for speakers and the ways in which they are used. Some philosophers define pragmatics more broadly, as the relation of signs to their interpreters. Others have restricted the scope of pragmatics to a few aspects of meaning that are highly context-dependent, such as ambiguity and indexicality, or that involve conversational implicature.
There is some debate about what disciplines and methodologies should be included in a pragmatics project. Carston (2005) notes that there are at least three different general tendencies: those who see pragmatics as a philosophical project, with particular emphasis on Grice’s notion of communicative intention; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and those who take a broad empirical psychological view of utterance interpretation.
Some pragmatics researchers have focused on the way that children use language. They have found that basic pragmatic skills develop very early on, but that more sophisticated pragmatic behaviors are developed through the child’s interactions with family, peers, and other adults. Studies of children’s pragmatic development have also found that pragmatic skills are statistically independent from syntactic and semantic skills, as shown by Snyder et al’s [14] comparison of language-delayed children with normal children matched for utterance length.
Computational pragmatics is a part of the wider science of natural language processing, and involves developing methods for computers to process human communication in an attempt to make computer systems more like humans. For example, reference resolution, the process by which a computer determines the relevance of a word or phrase in a particular context, is one important task within computational pragmatics. Other areas include the pragmatics of ambiguity and vagueness, the pragmatics of indexicals and demonstratives, and the pragmatics of presupposition. Many of these problems involve the fusion of multiple levels of meaning, and are therefore a challenge for both the linguistics and philosophy of pragmatics communities.