Pragmatics is the study of language use that goes beyond the traditional realm of semantics and grammar. While semantics focuses on the actual objects or ideas that words reference and syntax examines relationships among signs, pragmatics focuses on a speaker’s communicative intention and the strategies hearers employ to determine the meaning of a particular expression.
For example, if you say “you’re on fire” to someone who has been burned, they will assume that you mean that you think they are on fire. You don’t need to explain that you are not referring to the burns because it is obvious to your listener that you are referring to the person’s state of being.
The same concept applies to the usage of demonstrative adjectives such as this, that, and there. These types of phrases, which are uttered in context, only make sense if the speakers know where the listener is located. Hence, they are reliant on context, and the term for this use of language is deixis.
While the theory of pragmatics has evolved greatly over the years, the basic idea remains the same. It is that people don’t always say what they mean, and that this lack of clarity can cause misunderstandings and conflicts. Pragmatics is the study of these misunderstandings, conflicts, and miscommunications.
There are many different pragmatic theories, but they all focus on determining what is communicated beyond the explicit content of an utterance, and how a hearer determines that meaning. The theory most often cited is Grice’s Maxims, which are four general pragmatic rules that appear to be universally applicable.
Other pragmatic theories also address the issue of how an utterance is likely to be understood, and this is called presupption. The theory of presupption explains how ambiguous statements can be interpreted in more than one way, and it is used in areas such as legal interpretation, forensic speech analysis, and medical interpretation.
Computational pragmatics, developed by Victoria Fromkin and colleagues at University of Melbourne, addresses how we can teach computers to respond appropriately to a given context in a manner that more closely approximates natural human language and information processing abilities. Reference resolution, how a computer can differentiate between two similar objects or concepts, is one of the central issues in computational pragmatics.
Pragmatic knowledge is what allows us to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines, negotiate turn-taking norms in conversation, and navigate ambiguity in context. The more you know about how to communicate pragmatically, the better off you will be in life! And the good news is that learning pragmatics is easy. Just like any other subject, the more you practice, the more fluent you will become. So go ahead and give it a try! You won’t regret it.
