Pragmatic is the study of how we understand and use language to communicate. It is a cross discipline of psycholinguistics and semantics. It focuses on the contextual effects of a sentence in real-life situations. It is sometimes compared to metasemantics, which deals with the meaning of individual words.

The word pragmatic is derived from the Greek verb pragma, which means “to do” or “to take action.” People are often described as pragmatic when they compromise their ideals to get things done. The opposite of pragmatic is idealistic, which refers to holding on to a set of principles no matter the cost.

A pragmatic person is one who is able to take into account the needs of other people when making decisions. They also consider the consequences of their actions and choose the most realistic options. This kind of person is able to achieve more in the long run than someone who only sticks to their principles no matter what.

It is common for politicians to take a pragmatic approach to their job, especially when trying to work with other parties. They may need to find ways to cooperate and agree on policies, or they may be required to make compromises to win votes. Teachers often instruct their students to be more pragmatic when they are in the classroom. This can include addressing the ways that people apologize in different cultures, as well as teaching students to listen for and interpret pragmatic cues.

Many of the same ideas that characterize pragmatics are also found in other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology. Pragmatics is an increasingly popular field of study because it is important for understanding communication and human behavior. For example, psychologists studying children and those on the autism spectrum have had to become more pragmatic in their research in order to better understand these populations. In the 1970s, various psychologists (including those in developmental and psycholinguistics) began to explore pragmatics in a scientific way. This was a departure from the traditional emphasis in these fields on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentences.

In experimental pragmatics, researchers collect data on task-dependent performances, and then test various hypotheses about the causes of these behaviors. Some of the most interesting aspects of pragmatics involve its interaction with grammar and semantics, as well as its influence on emotion and culture.

Another aspect of pragmatics involves the development of computer programs that can better emulate human utterances. This is known as computational pragmatics. Victoria Fromkin is a leading figure in this area, and she has developed an algorithm that can determine the context-dependent rules of reference resolution, or how a computer system knows what something is when it is not explicitly stated.

Throughout the history of pragmatics, there has been much debate over what is and is not part of the field. Some people argue that a discussion of how people understand the meaning of words belongs in semantics, while others believe that it should be considered a subset of pragmatics.