Pragmatics is an area of linguistic study focused on the ways that words convey and interpret meaning in real-world contexts. This means that pragmatics investigates how things like politeness, ambiguity, and turn-taking norms are managed in conversation, and how people can negotiate the social implications of utterances. It also encompasses the theory of how a single utterance can have different interpretations in different contexts, owing to ambiguity or indexicality, and speech act theory.
The field of pragmatics is a central one in the study of language and communication, and it offers a unique perspective on the nature of human language and thought. Its roots are in the pragmatist philosophy, which holds that the truth or meaning of a statement is measured by its practical consequences. William James and John Dewey were both pragmatists, and their influence remains to this day in the way that philosophers and psychologists approach the study of language and meaning.
A number of issues challenge the research on pragmatics. One difficulty is that experimental pragmatics tends to focus more on the “processes” of interpreting meaning than on the actual complex meanings people actually interpret in diverse situations. This relative neglect of pragmatic “products” is a consequence of the fact that many studies of pragmatics are designed to test specific theories and models of meaning making by comparing different experimental settings or stimuli. The comparisons are typically made by computing averages of participants’ behavioral performances, and so the resulting data offer no insight into the individual differences that always exist between people.
Another issue is that it can be difficult to establish a clear boundary between semantics and pragmatics, such as that between conventional meaning and contextually determined meaning. The distinction is especially problematic because semantics and pragmatics share many of the same theoretical foundations, including a strong emphasis on context, but there are important differences. Some philosophers have embraced the traditional view that pragmatics is simply a more sophisticated version of semantics, while others have rejected it.
Despite the challenges, pragmatics is an exciting and vital field of study, and its researchers are continuing to make valuable contributions in many areas. For example, current work on child pragmatic development is exploring how children’s early sensitivity to pragmatic principles and their growing ability to implement these principles in various pragmatic phenomena are related to their linguistic growth and cognitive skills. This work is helping us to understand how children develop the pragmatic abilities needed to politely hedge a request, infer an ironic message, or navigate a conversational ambiguity. In addition, it is showing that there are many mechanisms that allow children to develop these pragmatic skills. This work will continue to play a critical role in our efforts to understand the nature of human communication. This article is part of our Pragmatics Symposium, a series of articles highlighting the classic and cutting edge research in this exciting and rapidly developing area of language learning and development.
