Pragmatic is the study of language that focuses on speakers’ communicative intentions, the uses of their words for such intentions, and the strategies hearers employ to determine those intentions. It differs from semantics, which concerns meaning in a decontextualized sense. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians.
One of the most important aspects of pragmatics is its consideration of the context in which a word is used. It’s often impossible to know the true meaning of a word without the help of context, such as the speaker’s intent, the speaker’s beliefs, and the situation. Pragmatics also considers what is not said, as silence can convey many things based on the context and other factors.
For example, when someone asks “How are you?” they may not actually be interested in a detailed account of how the person is feeling. A more common intention of this type of question is to establish rapport. Pragmatics explains how we can understand such inferences from context and other cues, such as the speaker’s tone of voice, facial expression, or body language.
Another area of pragmatics is the study of how people interpret sarcasm and other irony. These types of humor involve a divergence between the literal and intended meanings of words. Pragmatics can help us understand how we can interpret such meanings, and how we might avoid making the mistake of interpreting them literally.
Other pragmatics deals with the ways that children learn and use language. For example, researchers have found that children who have been taught to express emotions in their speech tend to be more empathetic and understanding of others. They are also more likely to be able to communicate their needs and wants in social situations. These researchers have attributed the pragmatics of child language to an emphasis on expressing emotions and a lack of grammatical rules in early childhood.
There are many subfields of pragmatics, including computational and theoretical; formal and informal; and game-theoretic, clinical, experimental and even neuropragmatics. Each of these has its own implications for linguistics and communication theory.
Pragmatics is sometimes used as a tool to enhance students’ communication skills in the classroom. For example, Bataineh cites an experiment in which students were exposed to literary discourse in the form of Othello, and demonstrated enhanced productive and receptive pragmatic competence as a result.
Other pragmatics research focuses on teaching language learners to recognize the implied, contextualized meaning of their communication rather than a decontextualized reading of a text. This type of pragmatics is particularly useful in academic studies, such as content analysis, where a researcher must not only interpret the literal words but also understand what they mean in the context of their use. It can be helpful for language learning as well, as it teaches the student to glean the implied meanings of words, which are more meaningful than their literal meanings alone. It can also teach the student how to interpret metaphor, irony and sarcasm more effectively.
