Pragmatics is the study of language use in context, meaning, and communication. It looks beyond the literal meaning of an utterance and considers things like what is implied, how to avoid ambiguity, and what is communicated through tone of voice. Pragmatics also focuses on how we negotiate meaning with other people through the use of language and body language.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Foot 1995) states: “Pragmatics deals with the way we make use of language, as opposed to its grammar, syntax, or semantics, that is, it studies ‘the actual ways in which linguistic expressions are used and what they actually convey.’ It is thus, not a branch of philosophy but an alternative approach to the study of language and its uses.”

What Is the Meaning of Pragmatic?

The word pragmatic was introduced into the English language by William James in 1907. In a series of lectures entitled “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,” James identified a fundamental and apparently irreconcilable clash of temperament between two opposing approaches to philosophical inquiry. One of these was a positivist commitment to experience and going by the facts, while the other was an a priori approach that appealed to the rationality of human reasoning. Pragmatism promised to bridge this gulf.

James distinguished between near-side and far-side pragmatics. The former involves the study of interesting types of speech acts and the characterization of the features of speech contexts that help determine which propositions are expressed by these speech acts. It is the study of these contextually relevant factors that characterizes the field of pragmatics that philosophers call near-side pragmatics.

Far-side pragmatics, on the other hand, relates to what happens in or through saying the words: what speech acts and implicatures are generated by saying the words; that is, what happens beyond the conventional meaning of the words and the logical context. This is the study of those elements of pragmatics that were the focus of classic pragmatism.

An example of a pragmatic use of language is when someone says, “Gosh, look at the time” without intending to give the person who hears this a clear instruction to do so. In this case, the speaker may simply be trying to end the conversation by implying that they want them to leave.

In other cases, a phrase or sentence may have a more literal meaning but is still useful as a tool for pragmatic communication. If you had to explain everything that you meant in full, slang wouldn’t exist, jokes probably wouldn’t be funny, and conversations would take twice as long. Pragmatics is key to the effective use of language in everyday life. Without it, we’d all be speaking in code.