Pragmatic is the study of what people mean when they say things and how these meanings depend on things like context and a speaker’s intentions. It is the opposite of semantics, which studies what things mean in a general sense and how they are related to one another.
In practice, pragmatics involves figuring out how to communicate something effectively in a given situation. This is not an easy task and the study of pragmatics has made important contributions to linguistic theory, sociology, psychology and philosophy as well as to communication studies itself.
The term pragmatics is derived from the Greek word pragma, which means “to deal with something as it actually is in a practical way.” It may also refer to a person who is practical rather than idealistic or insistent on doing the right thing.
It is generally believed that the first pragmatic philosopher was Gottlob Frege, who developed a logical system that was very much focused on the real world and how things actually work. He is often seen as the founding father of functional analysis, which focuses on how meanings arise in the actual use of language and which forms the basis of many modern linguistic theories.
During the classic period of pragmatics, there were at least three different tendencies: those who saw pragmatics, in Grice’s spirit, as a philosophical project; those who concentrated on its interaction with grammar and, more recently, those who have viewed pragmatics as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation. The latter are now considered to be the ‘near-side’ of pragmatics, with those parts of pragmatics that were in the focus of the classical period being ‘far-side’ pragmatics.
The emergence of experimental pragmatics in the 1970s caused a significant stir because it was seen to be a major departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics and developmental psychology on lexical, syntactic and semantic processing. At the same time, critics in linguistics and anthropology were skeptical of the idea that it would be possible to construct a scientific study of the human process of communicating meaning.
In the years that have passed since, experimental pragmatics has grown into a multi-faceted field with its own subfields of research. These include interlanguage pragmatics, conversational pragmatics, and pragmatics of humor, among others. The theory of ‘pragmatics’ is also now being used in other areas of human inquiry such as intercultural communication, communication disorders, computer-mediated communication and speech-act semantics. A number of textbooks on the subject have been published and it is a very active area of academic research. Several journals are also associated with it.