Pragmatics is the study of how context affects linguistic meaning. It deals with the ways in which conventional or literal significance is attached to words and grammatical constructions, as well as to whole sentences, and the additional significance that can be worked out using contextual information. It encompasses the theory of figurative language (metaphor, idiom and irony), the speech act theories of initiation and turn-taking, as well as conversational implicature (e.g., scalar and presupposition).
The term pragmatic is also used to describe a person or behaviour that is concerned more with matters of fact than with idealistic notions. For example, a four-year-old who wants a unicorn for their birthday is not being pragmatic. Similarly, the philosophy of pragmatism is a practical approach to life, one that focuses on results and consequences rather than with what might be or should be.
As such, researchers in pragmatics aim to understand the real-world impact of our choices and how they are conveyed through our speech and actions. This is an extremely broad and complex field, with a range of sub-disciplines including computational, theoretical, game-theoretic, clinical and experimental pragmatics; intercultural, sociocultural and cross-linguistic pragmatics; and historical pragmatics.
While a lot of the pragmatics research that has been conducted involves observing what people do in naturalistic settings, there is also an increasing interest in investigating the processes involved in experimental pragmatic studies. This includes the use of measures that tap into different aspects of pragmatic interpretation, such as full phrase or sentence reading time studies, lexical decision tasks and measuring the time it takes to work out the meaning of a figurative utterance.
These measures presumably capture the total cognitive effort that is required to interpret different kinds of pragmatic meanings, and they offer an alternative to measures that only look at what individual participants say or write when they are responding to a particular stimulus. However, it is important to recognize that these experimental techniques may also depend on the explicit task that participants are asked to complete. This influences the kind of interpretation they are required to undertake, and therefore how these experimental findings can be interpreted.
There is a growing understanding that pragmatics is not something that just happens at some later point during linguistic interaction, and that it should be integrated into broader theories of human cognition. In short, pragmatics is a critical part of the human condition. A more radical vision of pragmatics would see it as a dynamic system of varying constraints that have interactive influences on our adaptive behavior. This broader view of pragmatics, and the need to acknowledge this within empirical pragmatic studies, is a major challenge for scholars in the field. The future of pragmatics depends on how we address it. The more we understand how pragmatics works, the better we can predict its impact. This will help us to make a more realistic, practical and effective world for everyone.
