Pragmatics is one of 7 linguistic frameworks that build the foundation for language study (phonetics, phonology, morphology, grammar, syntax and semantics). Pragmatics studies how meaning is constructed in context.
The way we use language is very much based on context and the needs of our interlocutors. For example, if you say to someone “You’re on fire”, that is a highly figurative phrase and it makes sense only in the context of someone who is on fire. We also have other figurative phrases such as “They’re on the warpath”. Again, these are only meaningful in the context of people who are in a state of anger.
A key feature of pragmatism is that it is a form of inference. It is the process of making inferences from the context, what the speaker intends and the way their words are used. It can be done through induction, inference to the best explanation, or through a sort of reasoning specific to communication, such as Grice’s principles of conversational implicature.
There are several different approaches to pragmatics. The most prominent are the Relevance Theory and the Speech Act Theory. The main difference between these theories is that the former focuses on hearers’ understanding processes and the latter on speakers’ intentions and acts. In the latter, there is a strong focus on how to avoid ambiguity and to avoid indexicality, which are both important for pragmatics.
Other approaches to pragmatics include the Continuum Model and the Critical Pragmatics. The Continuum Model is a pragmatic approach that attempts to combine the two approaches and is considered to be near-side pragmatics, while the Critical Pragmatics is a far side approach.
The distinction between near and far side pragmatics is somewhat arbitrary but is usually defined by the extent to which the utterance’s conventional meaning closes to or deviates from the proposition it expresses. Some authors consider that a distinction is too fine-grained, as they would like to be able to study what is said in the context of how it is said rather than how it is said in the context of its conventional meaning.
The other key distinction in pragmatics is between literalists and minimalists. Minimalists and ‘hidden indexical’ theorists, on the other hand, do not make this distinction. They simply believe that any pragmatically determined element in utterance content is not triggered by grammar, whereas literalists think the opposite, namely that at some level, supposedly below the surface of grammar, i.e. the logical form of a sentence, there is an indexical which must be resolved pragmatically. Moreover, they believe that it is possible to resolve such an indexical in some cases and not in others. However, the difference between the two models is not as great as one might expect. This is because, as with other aspects of linguistics, there is a degree of overlap between semantics and pragmatics, and a lot can be worked out, particularly by using contextual information. The question is, however, whether this type of analysis is truly ‘pragmatic’.
