Pragmatics is the social meaning of language. It’s what allows us to politely hedge a request, cleverly read between the lines in conversation, or navigate ambiguity in context. Children pick up pragmatic language skills naturally, through observation of their peers and engaging socially with adults and other children. But for children with communication impairments, pragmatic language can be a challenging skill to master.

Students with strong pragmatic language skills have an easier time communicating their needs and wants, which leads to increased classroom participation and a more positive learning environment. Conversely, students with weak pragmatic skills may have difficulty interpreting and responding to social cues or constructing a cohesive group conversation, which can lead to frustration, miscommunication, and conflict with their classmates.

Unlike semantics, which studies the meaning of words and sentences, pragmatics takes context into consideration. For example, the word “today” means something different in a classroom than it does in a restaurant. In addition to considering the social and cultural context, pragmatics also considers the grammatical and syntactic structure of the sentence.

The field of pragmatics includes many different subfields, including:

Pragmatics is multifaceted and contains several different branches:

Near-side pragmatics examines the nature of certain facts that are relevant to determining what is said. This branch of pragmatics encompasses a number of topics, such as speech act theory, the theory of conversational implicature, and the principle of relevance.

Far-side pragmatics investigates the effect that a speaker’s beliefs, intentions, and desires have on what is said. This branch of pragmatics includes a number of topics, such as the notion of communicative intention, and is the broadest branch of pragmatics.

Contemporary philosophical approaches to pragmatics vary widely. Some scholars see pragmatics as a project of philosophy, in the Gricean tradition; others focus on its interaction with grammar; and still other scholars consider it an empirical psychological theory of utterance interpretation.

A few general tendencies can be identified, however:

Those who view pragmatics as a project of philosophy generally think that it is important to define interesting types of utterances and their contexts; those who view it as a problem of linguistic semantics usually take the point of view that a sentence must be interpreted relative to features of its context. In any case, most theorists would agree that there is a difference between semantics and pragmatics.