What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics studies the relationship between language and context. It poses questions such as What do people really think when they use words?
It's a philosophy of practical and reasonable action. It differs from idealism which is the idea that one should adhere to their beliefs regardless of the circumstances.
What is Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is how language users communicate and interact with each and with each other. It is typically thought of as a part of the language however it differs from semantics in the sense that pragmatics looks at what the user intends to convey rather than what the actual meaning is.
As a field of study the field of pragmatics is relatively new and its research has been expanding rapidly over the last few decades. It is a language academic field, but it has also had an impact on research in other fields like sociolinguistics, psychology, and Anthropology.
There are a myriad of ways to approach pragmatics that have contributed to the development and growth of this discipline. One example is the Gricean approach to pragmatics, which is focused on the concept of intention and how it interacts with the speaker's understanding of the listener's. Other perspectives on pragmatics include the lexical and conceptual approaches to pragmatics. These views have contributed to the diversity of topics that pragmatics researchers have researched.
The research in pragmatics has focused on a variety of subjects, including L2 pragmatic comprehension and production of requests by EFL learners and the role of the theory of mind in physical and mental metaphors. It is also applied to various social and cultural phenomena, like political discourse, discriminatory language, and interpersonal communication. Pragmatics researchers have also employed various methods that range from experimental to sociocultural.
Figure 9A-C shows that the size of the knowledge base for pragmatics varies according to the database used. The US and UK are two of the top performers in pragmatics research. However, their ranking varies depending on the database. This is due to the fact that pragmatics is a multidisciplinary field that intersects with other disciplines.
This makes it difficult to classify the top authors in pragmatics based on their number of publications alone. It is possible to identify influential authors by looking at their contributions to the field of pragmatics. Bambini for instance, has contributed to pragmatics through concepts such as politeness theories and conversational implicititure. Other authors who have been influential in pragmatics include Grice, Saul and Kasper.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is more concerned with the contexts and language users than it is with truth, reference, or grammar. It examines how a single word can be understood in different ways in different contexts. This includes ambiguity and indexicality. It also examines the strategies that hearers use to determine if phrases are intended to be communicative. It is closely related to the theory of conversational implicature, which was developed by Paul Grice.
The boundaries between these two disciplines are a matter of debate. While the distinction is widely recognized, it's not always clear how they should be drawn. For example philosophers have suggested that the concept of sentence meaning is an aspect of semantics while others have argued that this kind of thing should be viewed as a pragmatic issue.
Another controversy concerns whether pragmatics is a subfield of philosophy of language or a subset of the study of the study of linguistics. Some researchers have suggested that pragmatics is a subject in its own right and should be considered distinct from linguistics alongside phonology, syntax, semantics and more. Others have argued that the study of pragmatics is a part of philosophy since it focuses on how our notions of meaning and uses of languages influence our theories of how languages work.
There are a few major aspects of the study of pragmatics that have been the source of much of this debate. Some scholars have suggested for instance that pragmatics isn't a discipline by itself because it examines how people interpret and use the language, without necessarily referring to actual facts about what was said. This kind of method is known as far-side pragmatics. Some scholars have argued that this research ought to be considered an independent discipline because it examines the ways that cultural and social factors influence the meaning and use of language. This is called near-side pragmatics.
Other areas of discussion in pragmatics include the manner we think about the nature of utterance interpretation as an inferential process and the role that the primary pragmatic processes play in the determination of what is being spoken by an individual speaker in a sentence. These are the issues discussed a bit more extensively in the papers by Recanati and Bach. Both papers discuss the notions the concept of saturation and free enrichment of the pragmatic. These are crucial processes that influence the meaning of utterances.
What is the difference between free and explanatory Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to linguistic meaning. It studies the way that humans use language in social interactions and the relationship between the speaker and interpreter. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are referred to as pragmaticians.
Over the years, many different theories of pragmatism have been developed. Some, like Gricean pragmatics, concentrate on the communication intention of the speaker. Others, such as Relevance Theory concentrate on the processes of understanding that occur during the interpretation of utterances by hearers. Some practical approaches have been put with other disciplines, such as philosophy or cognitive science.
There are also differing opinions regarding the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics. Some philosophers, such as Morris believes that semantics and pragmatics are two distinct topics. He says that semantics deal with the relationship of signs to objects which they may or not denote, while pragmatics deals with the use of words in context.
Other philosophers, like Bach and Harnish have suggested that pragmatics is a field that is part of semantics. They differentiate between "near-side" and "far-side" pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics focuses on what is said, whereas far-side focuses on the logical implications of a statement. They believe that some of the 'pragmatics' in the words spoken are already determined by semantics, while other 'pragmatics' are determined by the pragmatic processes of inference.
The context is among the most important aspects of pragmatics. This means that the same utterance could have different meanings in different contexts, based on things such as indexicality and ambiguity. Other factors that could alter the meaning of an expression include discourse structure, speaker intentions and beliefs, and the expectations of the listener.
Another aspect of pragmatics is that it is culturally specific. This is due to different cultures having different rules for what is acceptable to say in various situations. For instance, it is polite in some cultures to make eye contact while it is rude in other cultures.
There are many different views of pragmatics, and a great deal of research is being conducted in the field. There are a myriad of areas of research, such as pragmatics that are computational and formal, theoretical and experimental pragmatics, cross and intercultural pragmatics in linguistics, and pragmatics that are experimental and clinical.
How is free Pragmatics similar to Explanatory Pragmatics?
The linguistic discipline of pragmatics is concerned with the way meaning is conveyed by language use in context. It focuses less on the grammatical structure of an spoken word and more on what the speaker is actually saying. Pragmaticians are linguists who focus in pragmatics. The subject of pragmatics has a link to other areas of the study of linguistics like semantics and syntax or the philosophy of language.
In recent years, the field of pragmatics has developed in a variety of directions, including computational linguistics, pragmatics in conversation, and theoretical pragmatics. There is a variety of research conducted in these areas, addressing topics such as the role of lexical features, the interaction between language and discourse, and the nature of meaning itself.
In the philosophical debate about pragmatism one of the main questions is whether it is possible to provide a thorough and systematic explanation of the interplay between semantics and pragmatics. Some philosophers have claimed that it isn't (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have claimed that the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is unclear and that pragmatics and semantics are actually the identical.
It is not uncommon for scholars to argue back and forth between these two perspectives and argue that certain events fall under either pragmatics or semantics. For instance, some scholars argue try what she says that if an expression has a literal truth-conditional meaning then it is semantics, whereas others believe that the fact that a statement can be interpreted in a variety of ways is a sign of pragmatics.
Other pragmatics researchers have taken an alternative route. They claim that the truth-conditional interpretation of a sentence is only one of many possible interpretations and that they are all valid. This method is sometimes referred to as "far-side pragmatics".
Recent work in pragmatics has sought to integrate semantic and far-side approaches, attempting to capture the entire range of possibilities of an utterance's interpretation by modeling how a speaker's beliefs and intentions influence the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. (2019) combine an Gricean game-theoretic model of the Rational Speech Act framework with technical innovations from Franke and Bergen (2020). This model predicts that the listeners will consider a range of possible exhaustified versions of an utterance containing the universal FCI any, and that this is what makes the exclusivity implicature so reliable when in comparison to other possible implicatures.