Pragmatics

Pragmatics

1. Some Basic Notions

1. Definition

Pragmatics can be defined in various ways. A general definition is that it is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to affect successful communication. As the process of communication is essentially a process of conveying and understanding meaning in a certain context, pragmatics can also be regarded as a kind of meaning study. Pragmatics is a comparatively new branch of study in the area of linguistics; its development and establishment in the 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study of linguistics, especially that of semantics.

In our discussion of semantics, we made mention of several views concerning the study of meaning. One of them is the contextualist view, which places the study of meaning in the context in which language is used. This view proposed in the first half of the 20th century is often considered to be an initial effort to study meaning in a pragmatic sense.

Pragmatics studies such topics as related to language communication, including deixis, speech acts, indirect language, conversation, politeness, cross-cultural communication, and presupposition. In this chapter we will take a brief look at some of them.

2. Pragmatics vs. Semantics

As pragmatics and semantics are both linguistic studies of meaning, then how are they related, and how do they differ?

The publication of Saussure’s work Course in General Linguistics in the early 20th century marked the beginning of modern linguistics and at the same time laid down the key note for modern linguistic studies, i.e. language should be studied as a self-contained, intrinsic system; any serious study of language cannot afford to investigate the use of language and extra-linguistic factors were not to be considered.

For more than half a century this has been the dominant tradition of linguistic study. This is the spirit in which traditional phonology studied the sounds of...