The word pragmatic means “practical” or “concerned with practical matters.” A person who is pragmatic focuses on results and consequences rather than theory. So, for example, a four-year-old who wants a unicorn for their birthday probably isn’t being pragmatic.

Pragmatics is the study of the relationship between what speakers intend to communicate and the particular circumstances in which they say it. It is a broad field with a wide range of approaches. Some people see it as a philosophical project in the Gricean tradition, while others focus on its interaction with grammar; still others treat it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation. Then there are those, such as Bach and Harnish, who try to unify the two broad traditions by describing near-side pragmatics in terms of semantics and far-side pragmatics in terms of the structure of utterance interpretation.

One of the biggest differences between approaches is how they view context. Some, especially those who follow Grice, treat contextual factors as essential to pragmatics, whereas others rely on them to support an autonomous semantics in which the meanings of parts compositionally determine the meanings of wholes. The former group is often called neo-Griceans; the latter, linguistic pragmaticists.

There is also the question of whether a given pragmatic factor should be considered part of semantics or pragmatics. In general, the answer seems to be that if a factor is integral to the meaning of an utterance, it should be considered part of semantics. But if it is only a small part of the meaning, and there are other factors that are more important, then it should be considered part of pragmatics.

Another big difference between approaches is how they treat ambiguity, vagueness, and underdetermination. Most of these pragmatic theorists agree that ambiguity and vagueness are pragmatic issues that need to be resolved, but there is disagreement about how to resolve them.

A further issue is the degree to which pragmatics should interfere with semantics. In general, the answer to this question seems to be that pragmatics should only interfere when it will improve understanding of an utterance or make the utterance more meaningful. But it is possible to go too far in this direction, as in the case of the infamous “euphemistic substitution.”

The most significant development has been the rise of what is called critical pragmatism. The key idea of this approach is that there are two kinds of pragmatic issues: a’reflexive’ or ‘utterance-bound content’, and a’referential’ or ‘locutionary’ content. The’reflexive’ content is determined by conventional meanings, modes of composition and phonology; the’referential’ content is determined by a set of contextual extralinguistic facts that can be described as pragmatic.

These theorists are sometimes called minimalists because they believe that pragmatic considerations should not interfere with the autonomous domain of semantics any more than the facts of physics should interfere with the autonomy of biology. They do not deny that contextual facts and pragmatic reasoning are needed at the near side of what is said, but they argue that these issues should be dealt with by a new discipline called near-side pragmatics, which should be separated from formal semantics.