What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of the relationship between language, context and meaning. It addresses questions such as: What do people mean by the words they use?
It's a philosophies of practical and sensible action. It's in opposition to idealism, which is the belief that you should always stick by your principles.
What is Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics examines the way that language users interact and communicate with each with one another. It is often thought of as a component of language, but it is different from semantics because pragmatics is focused on what the user is trying to communicate, not what the meaning is.
As a research area, pragmatics is relatively young and its research has grown rapidly over the last few decades. It is a linguistics academic field, but it has also had an impact on research in other fields such as psychology, sociolinguistics, and Anthropology.
There are a variety of perspectives on pragmatics, which have contributed to its growth and development. For example, one perspective is the Gricean approach to pragmatics, that focuses on the concept of intention and how it affects the speaker's comprehension of the listener's. Conceptual and lexical perspectives on pragmatics are also views on the subject. These views have contributed to the variety of topics that researchers in pragmatics have investigated.
The research in pragmatics has covered a broad range topics, such as pragmatic understanding in L2 and request production by EFL students, as well as the significance of the theory of mind in physical and mental metaphors. It has been applied to cultural and social phenomena such as political discourse, discriminatory speech, and interpersonal communication. Researchers studying pragmatics have employed various methods from experimental to sociocultural.
The amount of knowledge base in pragmatics is different according to the database used, as shown in Figure 9A-C. The US and the UK are among the top contributors to pragmatics research, but their rankings differ by database. This is because pragmatics is multidisciplinary and interspersed with other disciplines.
It is therefore difficult to rank the top authors in pragmatics solely according to the quantity of their publications. However it is possible to determine the most influential authors by looking at their contributions to pragmatics. For example, Bambini's contribution to pragmatics has led to concepts such as conversational implicature, and politeness theory. Grice, Saul, and Kasper are also highly influential authors of pragmatics.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is more concerned with the contexts and users of language as opposed to the study of truth, reference, or grammar. It studies the ways that an expression can be interpreted as meaning different things in different contexts, including those caused by indexicality or ambiguity. It also examines the strategies that listeners employ to determine which phrases are intended to be a communication. It is closely connected to the theory of conversational implicature, developed by Paul Grice.
The boundaries between these two disciplines are a subject of debate. While the distinction between these two disciplines is well-known, it is not always clear where the lines should be drawn. Some philosophers claim that the concept of sentence meaning is a component of semantics, whereas other claim that this type of problem should be treated as pragmatic.
Another issue is whether pragmatics is a subfield of philosophy of languages or a subset of the study of the study of linguistics. Some researchers have suggested that pragmatics is an autonomous discipline and should be treated as part of linguistics along with phonology. syntax, semantics, etc. Others, however have argued the study of pragmatics is a part of philosophy because it focuses on how our notions of the meaning and use of languages influence our theories about how languages work.
There are a few key issues in the study of pragmatics that have been the source of many of the debates. For instance, some scholars have claimed that pragmatics isn't a discipline in and of itself since it studies the ways that people interpret and use language without referring to any facts about what actually gets said. This type of approach is known as far-side pragmatics. Some scholars, however have argued that this field should be considered as an academic discipline because it examines how cultural and social factors influence the meaning and usage of language. This is known as near-side pragmatics.
The pragmatics field also discusses the inferential nature and meaning of utterances, as well as the significance of the primary pragmatic processes in determining what a speaker is saying in the sentence. These are the issues addressed in greater detail in the papers of Recanati and Bach. Both of these papers discuss the notions of saturation and free pragmatic enrichment. Both are crucial pragmatic processes in the sense that they shape the overall meaning of an expression.
What is the difference between explanatory and free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics examines how context affects linguistic meaning. It studies the way that humans use language in social interactions and the relationship between speaker and interpreter. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are referred to as pragmaticians.
A variety of theories of pragmatics have been developed over the years. Some, like Gricean pragmatics, focus on the communicative intention of the speaker. Relevance Theory for instance is a study of the processes of understanding that occur when listeners interpret utterances. Some approaches to pragmatics are merged with other disciplines, including cognitive science and philosophy.
There are also different views about the line between semantics and pragmatics. Morris is one philosopher who believes that semantics and pragmatism are two different topics. He says that semantics deal with the relationship of signs to objects which they may or may not denote, whereas pragmatics is concerned with the use of words in a context.
Other philosophers, like Bach and Harnish, have argued that pragmatics is a subfield within semantics. They distinguish between 'nearside' and 'far-side' pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics concerns the content of what is said, while far-side focuses on the logical implications of a statement. They believe that semantics already determines the logical implications of an expression, whereas other pragmatics is determined by pragmatic processes.
The context is one of the most important aspects in pragmatics. This means that the same phrase can have different meanings in different contexts, depending on factors such as indexicality and ambiguity. Other things that can change the meaning of an utterance are the structure of the speech, the speaker's intentions and beliefs, as well as listener expectations.
Another aspect of pragmatics is that it is culture-specific. This is due to different cultures having their own rules regarding what is acceptable to say in various situations. For instance, it is acceptable in certain cultures to look at each other but it is considered rude in other cultures.
There are numerous perspectives on pragmatics and much research is being conducted in this area. Some of the most important areas of study are formal and computational pragmatics; theoretical and experimental pragmatics; intercultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics; pragmatics in the clinical and experimental sense.
How does free Pragmatics compare to explanatory Pragmatics?
The pragmatics discipline is concerned with how meaning is communicated by language in context. It focuses less on the grammatical structure of an utterance and more on what the speaker is actually saying. Pragmaticians are linguists that focus in pragmatics. The subject of pragmatics is connected to other areas of linguistics such as syntax, semantics and philosophy sell of language.
In recent years, the field of pragmatics has developed in a variety of directions such as computational linguistics conversational pragmatics, and theoretical pragmatics. These areas are characterized by a variety of research that addresses topics such as lexical features and the interplay between discourse, language and meaning.
One of the main questions in the philosophical discussion of pragmatics is whether it is possible to provide an accurate, systematic understanding of the pragmatics/semantics interface. Some philosophers have suggested it isn't (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have claimed that the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is ill-defined and that semantics and pragmatics are actually the identical.
It is not uncommon for scholars to argue between these two views and argue that certain phenomena fall under either semantics or pragmatics. Some scholars believe that if a statement carries the literal truth conditional meaning, it's semantics. Others contend that the possibility that a statement may be interpreted differently is pragmatics.
Other researchers in pragmatics have taken a different stance and argue that the truth-conditional meaning of an expression is just one of the many ways in which an word can be interpreted and that all of these interpretations are valid. This is commonly referred to as far-side pragmatics.
Recent work in pragmatics has attempted to integrate the concepts of semantics and far-side trying to understand the full range of possibilities for interpretation of a utterance by modeling how a speaker's intentions and beliefs contribute to the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. (2019) combine the Gricean game theory model of the Rational Speech Act framework with technological innovations from Franke and Bergen (2020). This model predicts that the listeners will be able to consider a variety of possible exhaustified parses of a utterance that contains the universal FCI any which is what makes the exclusivity implicature so reliable when contrasted to other possible implicatures.