What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is a study of the connection between language and context. It addresses questions such as What do people mean by the terms they use?
It's a way of thinking that focuses on sensible and practical actions. It's in opposition to idealism, which is the belief that you must abide to your convictions.
What is Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is how language users communicate and interact with each other. It is often seen as a part of a language, however it differs from semantics in that it focuses on what the user wants to convey, not what the meaning is.
As a research field it is comparatively new, and its research has been expanding rapidly over the last few decades. It is a linguistics academic field however, it has also affected research in other areas like sociolinguistics, psychology and anthropology.
There are many different views on pragmatics, which have contributed to its growth and development. For example, one perspective is the Gricean approach to pragmatics which is focused on the concept of intention and how it interacts with the speaker's comprehension of the listener's. Other perspectives on pragmatics include conceptual and lexical aspects of pragmatics. These perspectives have contributed to the variety of subjects that researchers studying pragmatics have investigated.
The research in pragmatics has covered a broad range of subjects, including L2 pragmatic comprehension and request production by EFL students, and the role of the theory of mind in mental and physical metaphors. It is also applied to various social and cultural phenomena, like political discourse, discriminatory language, and interpersonal communication. Researchers studying pragmatics have employed diverse methodologies from experimental to sociocultural.
Figure 9A-C shows that the size of the knowledge base for pragmatics varies depending on which database is used. The US and the UK are among the top producers of pragmatics research, but their ranking varies by database. This is due to the fact that pragmatics is a multidisciplinary field that intersects with other disciplines.
This makes it difficult to classify the top authors of pragmatics by the number of publications they have. However it is possible to identify the most influential authors by examining their contributions to pragmatics. For instance Bambini's contribution to the field of pragmatics is a pioneering concept such as conversational implicature and politeness theory. Grice, Saul, and Kasper are also influential authors of pragmatics.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is more concerned with the contexts and users of language than it is with truth, reference, or grammar. It examines the ways in which one phrase can be understood to mean various things depending on the context as well as those triggered by ambiguity or indexicality. It also focuses on the strategies used by listeners to determine if phrases have a message. It is closely connected to the theory of conversative implicature which was pioneered by Paul Grice.
The boundaries between these two disciplines is a matter of debate. While the distinction is widely known, it isn't always clear where the lines should be drawn. For instance, some philosophers have argued that the notion of a sentence's meaning is an aspect of semantics. Others have argued that this type of thing should be treated as a pragmatic problem.
Another issue that has been a source of contention is whether the study of pragmatics should be regarded as to be a linguistics branch or as a component of philosophy of language. Some researchers have argued that pragmatics is a discipline in its own right and should be considered a distinct part of the field of linguistics along with syntax, phonology, semantics, etc. Others have suggested the study of pragmatics is an aspect of philosophy since it focuses on the way in which our beliefs about the meaning of language and how it is used influence our theories on how languages work.
There are a few key issues that arise in the study of pragmatics that have fuelled the debate. Some scholars have argued for instance, that pragmatics isn't a discipline in its own right because it examines how people interpret and use the language without necessarily referring to the facts about what actually was said. This sort of approach is known as far-side pragmatics. Others, however, have argued that this study is a discipline in its own right because it examines the ways the meaning and usage of language is affected by cultural and social factors. This is called near-side pragmatics.
The pragmatics field also discusses the inferential nature of utterances as well as the significance of the primary pragmatic processes in determining what a speaker is saying in a sentence. These are topics that are addressed in greater detail in the papers by Recanati and Bach. Both papers address the notions of saturation and free enrichment in the context of a pragmatic. These are important pragmatic processes that help shape the overall meaning an utterance.
What is the difference between free and explanatory Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of the role that context plays to the meaning of a language. It evaluates how human language is used in social interaction, and the relationship between the speaker and the interpreter. Pragmaticians are linguists who specialize in pragmatics.
Over the years, a variety of theories of pragmatism were developed. Some, such as Gricean pragmatics, click here focus on the communication intent of the speaker. Others, like Relevance Theory, focus on the understanding processes that occur during utterance interpretation by listeners. Certain practical approaches have been put with other disciplines such as cognitive science or philosophy.
There are also a variety of views on the borderline between pragmatics and semantics. Morris is one philosopher who believes that semantics and pragmatism are two different topics. He states that semantics is concerned with the relation of words to objects which they may or may not denote, whereas pragmatics is concerned with the use of the words in context.
Other philosophers like Bach and Harnish have suggested that pragmatism is an subfield within semantics. They distinguish between 'nearside and far-side' pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics focuses on the words spoken, while far-side pragmatics focuses on the logical consequences of saying something. They believe that semantics already determines certain aspects of the meaning of an utterance, while other pragmatics is determined by the pragmatic processes.
The context is one of the most important aspects of pragmatics. This means that the same phrase can have different meanings in different contexts, based on things like 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 a matter of culture. It is because every culture has its own rules for what is appropriate in different situations. In certain cultures, it's polite to look at each other. In other cultures, it's rude.
There are many different views of pragmatics, and lots of research is being conducted in the field. There are a myriad of areas of research, such as pragmatics that are computational and formal, theoretical and experimental pragmatism, intercultural and cross pragmatics in linguistics, and pragmatics that are experimental and clinical.
How does Free Pragmatics compare to Explanatory Pragmatics?
The discipline of pragmatics is concerned with the way meaning is communicated through language in context. It analyzes the way in which the speaker's intentions and beliefs influence interpretation, and focuses less on grammatical features of the utterance rather than what is said. Pragmaticians are linguists who specialize on pragmatics. The subject of pragmatics is linked to other areas of study of linguistics like semantics and syntax, or the philosophy of language.
In recent years the field of pragmatics has grown in various directions that include computational linguistics, pragmatics of conversation, and theoretic pragmatics. There is a broad range of research in these areas, addressing topics like the importance of lexical characteristics as well as the interaction between language and discourse and the nature of the concept of meaning.
In the philosophical discussion of pragmatics one of the most important issues is whether it is possible to give a rigorous and systematic account of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. Some philosophers have suggested that it isn't (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have argued the distinction between pragmatics and semantics isn't well-defined and that they're the same thing.
It is not uncommon for scholars to debate between these two perspectives and argue that certain events fall under either semantics or pragmatics. Some scholars say that if a statement is interpreted with an actual truth conditional meaning, it's semantics. Others contend that the fact that a statement can be read differently is a sign of pragmatics.
Other researchers in pragmatics have taken an alternative approach. They claim that the truth-conditional interpretation of a statement is just one of many possible interpretations, and that they are all valid. This is often described as "far-side pragmatics".
Recent research in pragmatics has sought to combine semantic and far side methods. It attempts to represent the full range of interpretive possibilities that a speaker's speech can offer by illustrating how the speaker's beliefs and intentions contribute to the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. (2019) combine a Gricean game-theoretic model of the Rational Speech Act framework with technological innovations from Franke and Bergen (2020). The model predicts that listeners will consider a range of possible exhaustified interpretations of an utterance containing the universal FCI any and this is what makes the exclusiveness implicature so strong when compared to other plausible implicatures.