Pragmatic is the study of how people use language to achieve practical outcomes. It encompasses speech acts, context, politeness strategies, and the role of underlying assumptions and understandings in creating meaning in communication. Pragmatics also provides tools for exploring implicit meanings and navigating social relationships and power dynamics.
When used in a general sense, pragmatic describes something that is sensible, reasonable, or functional. It can also refer to a person who is pragmatic in their approach to life; for example, someone might be described as pragmatic in that they are willing to compromise or find an incremental solution to a problem rather than sticking rigidly to their ideals. Pragmatic is rooted in the Greek word pragmatikos, which means “to do,” and is related to praxis, which means action.
A central concept in pragmatics is that speakers are often trying to understand and be understood by their listeners. This notion of a shared goal underlies most pragmatic theories and research, including those in a variety of disciplines, such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, and cognitive science.
The field of pragmatics is closely tied to discourse analysis, an academic discipline that explores the ways that speakers construct and interpret meaning in their conversations. In particular, discourse analysis focuses on the ways that speakers structure their messages to make them as accessible as possible to their audience and how the participants in a conversation establish and maintain social relationships and hierarchies through the use of different types of language.
Pragmatics is at the intersection of several disciplines, incorporating elements from sociolinguistics and cognitive psychology as well as more traditional linguistic concerns such as syntax, phonology, and morphology. It is also linked to semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. Pragmatics is crucial for uncovering implicit meanings, interpreting speaker intentions and listener interpretations, and analyzing the structure of conversations.
As such, the field of experimental pragmatics is complex. Many experiments yield profoundly inconsistent results. This reflects a larger concern within psychological and linguistic research about how to account for contextual and individual differences in experimental settings. Some scholars argue that these differences should be considered when evaluating the validity of pragmatic theory, while others emphasize the importance of designing studies to minimize potential confounding factors.
One major source of variation in pragmatic studies is the level of cognitive demand involved in a task. For example, a typical pragmatic experiment might measure the reading time required to comprehend various forms of pragmatic meaning such as scalar implicature or ironic language. Using these measures, scholars can compare the average reading times of people who responded to each experimental condition and draw conclusions about how pragmatic meaning is produced and understood. However, this approach overlooks the fact that people may be influenced by different levels of effort in different tasks, even in the same experimental conditions. Thus, the relationship between these different levels of task demand and pragmatic theories needs more attention than is currently given.