Pragmatics is the study of what people mean when they use language. It examines how meaning is constructed, focuses on implied meanings and considers the context-dependence of language. It also relates to how people communicate with each other and how they interpret each other’s communication. Pragmatics is the foundation for understanding social communication and it is a crucial component of human interaction. People with autism and other developmental disabilities often struggle with the pragmatic aspects of communication (e.g. greetings, conversational turn-taking, requesting and/or demanding).
The philosophical tradition called pragmatism is one that understands knowledge of the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a very wide range of specific interpretations. These include: that all claims should be subject to scientific experiment, that a philosophical theory is worth considering only if it has practical consequences, that language is essentially a tool for making transactions with the world, that experience consists of transacting rather than reflecting nature, that articulated language rests on a deep bed of shared cultural practices that can never be fully made explicit, and so on.
Among contemporary philosophical pragmatic theories, the most prominent are the relevant theory and the speech act theory. Relevance theory emphasizes the notion of communicative intention as the key to interpreting utterances, and it is largely responsible for pragmatics’ current focus on what happens on the near side of the explicature. It is also the reason why a lot of pragmatics research concentrates on issues that seem to intrude into semantics’ territory, such as resolution of ambiguity and vagueness, indexicals and demonstratives, and presupposition.
Speech act theory, on the other hand, sees utterances as functional units that carry a certain amount of information about their context of use. It is not clear whether or not the information about the context of use is transmitted to a listener, but it does seem that the speaker’s communicative intention is influenced by the information that is conveyed. Speech acts also incorporate the concepts of implication and relevance, which are important to many aspects of pragmatics.
Most of the problems that arise in describing the pragmatics of a natural language concern issues that relate to semantics. The main problem is the difficulty of matching up sentences of a language with the propositions that they express. It is a philosophical problem to specify the rules that will allow us to do this, but it is not a pragmatics problem in the sense that the relevant rules will only be known on the basis of experience with natural language. Instead, it is a semantics problem to characterize the features of the context of use that influence which proposition a sentence expresses. This issue is separate from the problem of identifying what kinds of sentences are interesting, which is a problem for syntax.
