Pragmatics is a key subfield of linguistics that explores the nuanced ways in which context influences the interpretation of meaning in language. It goes beyond semantics, the study of the literal meaning of words and sentences, to consider how language is used in real-world contexts to convey information, achieve social actions, and navigate interpersonal relations.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of being practical in how we approach life and the decisions we make. Pragmatists believe that the best way to live life is to take a realistic view of it, accepting what is and seeking to benefit from it as much as possible.
In the classroom, teachers can help learners become pragmatic in their use of English by teaching them to understand how different situations and cultures might affect the appropriateness of various language functions such as greetings, requests, complaints, invitations, and apologies. They can also incorporate lessons on pragmatics into their classroom materials by linking them to content from the textbook. For example, if they were going over a textbook unit on apologizing, the teacher might add a lesson on taboo questions when meeting someone for the first time in order to discuss how asking certain kinds of questions is inappropriate across cultures.
However, pragmatics is a complex subject. For one, a person’s understanding of an utterance may vary from one situation to the next depending on many overlapping factors such as their culture, personality traits, and previous experiences. This type of within-person variation is not well captured by the average scores that are typically reported in experimental studies on pragmatics, which are based on people’s responses to a given set of stimuli in an experiment.
There is a need for more empirical investigations into the diverse ways that people interpret pragmatic messages, both between and within individuals. Such investigations should pay closer attention to the specifics of the people we study, the tasks we use to assess their understanding, and the actual, highly complex meanings that they infer from particular utterances in various contexts. They should also consider how the physical and linguistic features of the people who produce and interpret these meanings influence their understanding.
The field of pragmatics is evolving rapidly. New technologies, such as computerized speech recognition and text analysis, are making it easier to gather and analyze data about the subtleties of how people use language in different situations and in different languages. This is enhancing the ability of pragmatics researchers to disentangle the multiple influences that shape the ways in which people understand other people’s utterances. It is also opening up new opportunities to study a variety of other topics, including emotion expressions and non-literal meanings. These developments point to the important role that pragmatics plays in the broader field of discourse analysis and its enduring value as a tool for revealing the ways in which language is used to construct knowledge, shape attitudes, and navigate social interactions. The future of pragmatics is bright.
