Pragmatic is the context-dependent study of language use that focuses on speakers’ intentions and the uses to which they put their words. It explains how one word or sentence can have many different meanings or propositions depending on the context in which they are used, ranging from literal meaning (as in the case of a stolen painting that is found by a sentient tree), to pragmatic inference (as in the case of a statement about what happened after a conversation). Pragmatics also studies strategies that listeners use to work out the implied meaning of what is being said, including turn-taking norms and ambiguity resolution.
The pragmatist view of the world is that there is no such thing as absolute truth, that knowledge is only true when it can be applied to real-life problems, and that what we believe is true is dependent upon how we use our beliefs. It is also a philosophy that stresses the importance of the context and the social and emotional dimensions of communication, and how our attitudes are often based on cultural values and expectations.
It is important to understand the role that pragmatics plays in our everyday interactions because it helps us to bridge the potential gap between what a speaker intends to communicate and what a listener comprehends. It is the ability to use a variety of pragmatic rules that allow people to politely hedge requests, cleverly read between the lines, negotiate turn-taking in conversation, and navigate ambiguity that makes it possible for humans to be such effective communicators.
In addition, a strong understanding of pragmatics is essential to cross-cultural communication. For example, what is considered polite and appropriate in some Western cultures may be perceived as rude or bizarre in Asian culture where subtlety and indirectness are valued. This is why the study of pragmatics is a vital component of discourse analysis, a discipline that combines elements of both linguistics and sociology to examine communication.
Although the field of experimental pragmatics has only been around for about 40 years, it has had a long history of controversy and debate. In the 1970s, psychologists—both those who were studying developmental psychology and those who were interested in psycholinguistics—began to create experiments designed to explore people’s understanding of pragmatic language. This was a significant departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning.
Initially, many critics were skeptical that it was possible to scientifically examine pragmatic meaning. Indeed, some argued that pragmatics was the “wastebasket of linguistics,” and that it was impossible to make sense of a human endeavor that seemed so utterly messy.
Today, however, there is a growing recognition that it is possible and even desirable to incorporate task demands into empirical pragmatic research designs. Ultimately, the time is right to take a more holistic approach and to acknowledge that the varying constraints of everyday pragmatic experiences should always be taken into account in creating theories about how people understand what others mean when they use language.
