Pragmatic is the branch of language and communication that deals with the use of language in specific situations. Pragmatic rules vary from one culture to another, so mastery of pragmatic rules is crucial for effective intercultural communication. For example, the directness valued in some Western cultures may be viewed as rude or bizarre in many Asian cultures, where indirectness and subtlety are prized.
A person who is described as pragmatic has a practical mindset that focuses on the outcome of actions rather than what could or should be. A pragmatic person can deal with reality, whereas an idealistic person tends to dwell on theories and possibilities.
In the field of linguistics, the word pragmatic is most often used to refer to people’s ability to make sense of a situation and determine the best course of action. The phrase was first introduced to English by the poet William Shakespeare in his play Cymbeline, where it was used to describe the character Prince Ubu. The term has since become a popular part of everyday speech, and is often used to praise people who make decisions that are considered reasonable and practical.
Several different research methods are used to study pragmatics. For instance, researchers can examine how long it takes for people to understand phrasal and sentence-level pragmatic meaning (e.g., metaphor, idiom, and irony) using timed reading experiments. Alternatively, they can use moving-window techniques to investigate the local processing of words that convey different pragmatic meanings.
There is also a growing body of experimental work on the semantic and syntactic processing of pragmatic meaning, as well as research on the cognitive abilities related to mind-reading and social understanding. For example, there are a number of studies showing that people understand irony relatively quickly and easily in natural discourse, suggesting that pragmatic knowledge plays an important role in online understanding of this figurative meaning (Gibbs, 1986a, b; Colston, 2007).
The development of experimental pragmatics began back in the 1970s as various psychologists—both developmental and psycholinguistic—began to explore how people process the social and situational meanings of language use. This was quite a departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on the lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. At the time, some critics questioned whether it was possible to scientifically investigate pragmatic meaning production and interpretation.
Fortunately, experimental pragmatics survived this initial wave of skepticism and has grown into a highly productive and vibrant subfield within the larger study of human language. The field is continually expanding and incorporating insights from other disciplinary areas, such as conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, and philosophy of language. The Journal of Pragmatics encourages the development and exploration of this interdisciplinary approach and is committed to publishing high quality research in all aspects of pragmatics. In addition to original articles and book reviews, the Journal also publishes discussion notes and research briefs. The Editors welcome proposals for special issues that reflect this interdisciplinary perspective.
