Pragmatic is a word that’s used to describe people who are practical or logical and have a focus on results. Often, pragmatic people are seen as being more able to deal with reality than someone who is an idealist or wants to stick to their beliefs no matter what. Pragmatic is also a term that can be applied to language and how we use it. The study of pragmatics is called pragmatism, and it has to do with speakers’ intentions and the ways that their listeners understand them.
In the realm of grammar, a pragmatic approach to language looks at the meanings of words in terms of what they mean for speakers to convey when they say them and the specific contexts that their utterances are spoken in. It is considered a subfield of semantics and is one of the domains that make up the field of linguistics, which focuses on language in use rather than in isolation from other aspects such as reference and truth.
When teaching English to learners, it’s important to incorporate lessons on pragmatics. This is because learners from many different cultures may have very different expectations of how language should be used in certain situations. For example, in an English class where students are learning to speak with people from another culture, lessons on pragmatics might include activities that help them understand the differences between greetings, requests, complaints, invitations, apologies, and other common functions.
The development of experimental pragmatics began in the 1970s as various psychologists, both those studying developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, started to explore how people understood pragmatic meaning. This was quite a departure from the traditional emphasis in linguistics and psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. Initially, some critics within linguistics and psycholinguistics were skeptical that pragmatics could be studied scientifically.
However, the field of experimental pragmatics has survived and is thriving. It has also expanded into the broader world of cognitive science as researchers have realized that it is impossible to fully separate the various contextual influences on people’s adaptive behaviors from the underlying physiology and neurobiology of their brains.
Consequently, scholars have come to see that a comprehensive theory of pragmatics must acknowledge the complex interplay between task-dependent performances and their underlying motivations and constraints. There is no neutral point of view and no context-free task from which utterance interpretation can emerge, and theories of linguistic pragmatics must be grounded in this omnipresent reality. This approach to pragmatics is sometimes referred to as “pragmatic metaphysics.” It views pragmatics as an integral part of all linguistic and behavioral phenomena. It is the framework from which theories of utterance interpretation, and ultimately, language acquisition and use, must be developed. As such, it represents an essential pillar of a complete and cohesive theoretical framework for human communication. It is also a crucial element in the process of understanding how languages evolve and change over time. Hence, it is a vital component in the study of morphology and syntax as well.
