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What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics studies the connection between language and context. It asks questions like What do people actually think when they use words?
It's a philosophy that is focused on practical and reasonable actions. It is in contrast to idealism, the notion that you must always abide by your principles.
What is Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics focuses on how language users interact and communicate with each other. It is often viewed as a part of language however, it differs from semantics in the sense that pragmatics looks at what the user is trying to convey rather than what the actual meaning is.
As a field of research the field of pragmatics is still relatively new and its research has expanded rapidly in the last few decades. It has been primarily an academic area of study within linguistics but it also influences research in other fields like psychology, speech-language pathology, sociolinguistics and Anthropology.
There are a myriad of methods of pragmatics that have contributed to the development and growth of this discipline. One perspective is the Gricean pragmatics approach, which is based primarily on the notion of intention and its interaction with the speaker's knowledge about the listener's comprehension. Other perspectives on pragmatics include the conceptual and lexical aspects of pragmatics. These perspectives have contributed to the diversity of topics that pragmatics researchers have studied.
The research in pragmatics has covered a wide range topics, such as pragmatic understanding in L2 and request production by EFL students, and the importance of the theory of mind in mental and physical metaphors. It has been applied to social and cultural phenomena like political discourse, discriminatory speech, and interpersonal communication. Pragmatics researchers also have employed various methods that range from experimental to sociocultural.
Figure 9A-C demonstrates that the size of the knowledge base on pragmatics is different depending on the database used. The US and the UK are among the top contributors to pragmatics research, however their ranking varies by database. This difference is due to the fact that pragmatics is a multidisciplinary field that intersects with other disciplines.
It is therefore hard to classify the top pragmatics authors according to the quantity of their publications. However it is possible to determine the most influential authors by looking at their contributions to the field of pragmatics. Bambini for instance, has contributed to pragmatics by introducing concepts such as conversational implicititure and politeness theories. Grice, Saul, and Kasper are also influential authors of pragmatics.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is focused on the contexts and users of language use instead of focusing on reference, truth, or grammar. It examines how a single utterance may be understood differently in different contexts. This includes ambiguity as well as indexicality. It also focuses on strategies that hearers use to determine which phrases are intended to be communicative. It is closely linked to the theory of conversative implicature which was developed by Paul Grice.
The boundaries between these two disciplines is a matter of debate. While the distinction is widely known, it isn't always clear where the lines should be drawn. Some philosophers argue that the concept of sentence meaning is a part of semantics, whereas others insist that this particular problem should be considered pragmatic.
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 argued that pragmatics is a discipline in its distinct from the other disciplines and should be treated as an independent part of linguistics alongside phonology, syntax semantics, etc. Others, however, have suggested that the study of pragmatics should be viewed as part of the philosophy of language since it examines the ways in which our concepts of the meaning and uses of language affect our theories of how languages function.
The debate has been fuelled by a few key issues that are central to the study of pragmatics. Some scholars have argued, for example, that pragmatics isn't a discipline by itself because it studies how people interpret and use the language, without necessarily referring to the actual facts about what was said. This kind of approach is referred to as far-side pragmatics. Some scholars, however have here argued that this study should be considered as an academic discipline because it examines how social and cultural influences influence the meaning and use language. This is known as near-side pragmatism.
Other topics of discussion in pragmatics include the way we think about the nature of utterance interpretation as an inferential process, and the role that primary pragmatic processes play in the determination of what is being spoken by the speaker in a particular sentence. Recanati and Bach discuss these topics in greater detail. Both papers explore the notions a saturation and a free pragmatic enrichment. These are important pragmatic processes that help shape the meaning of an utterance.
How is Free Pragmatics Different from Explanatory Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics focuses on how context affects linguistic meaning. It studies the way that the human language is utilized in social interactions and the relationship between speaker and interpreter. Pragmaticians are linguists who focus on pragmatics.
Over the years, many different theories of pragmatism have been developed. Some, such as Gricean pragmatics, focus on the intention of communication of the speaker. Others, such as Relevance Theory concentrate on the understanding processes that occur during utterance interpretation by listeners. Certain practical approaches have been put with other disciplines such as philosophy or cognitive science.
There are also a variety of opinions on the boundary between pragmatics and semantics. Some philosophers, such as Morris believes that pragmatics and semantics are two distinct subjects. He claims semantics is concerned with the relationship between signs and objects they could or might not represent, while pragmatics is concerned with the use of words in a context.
Other philosophers, like Bach and Harnish have suggested that pragmatics is a subfield of semantics. They differentiate between 'near-side and 'far-side' pragmatism. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the content of what is said, while far-side is focused on the logical implications of saying something. They believe that semantics determines certain aspects of the meaning of a statement, whereas other pragmatics are determined by the pragmatic processes.
The context is among the most important aspects in pragmatics. This means that the same phrase could have different meanings in different contexts, depending on factors such as indexicality and ambiguity. The structure of the conversation, the beliefs of the speaker and intentions, and expectations of the listener can alter the meaning of a phrase.
Another aspect of pragmatics is that it is culture-specific. This is because different cultures have different rules for what is appropriate to say in different situations. For example, it is acceptable in certain cultures to keep eye contact while it is rude in other cultures.
There are various perspectives on pragmatics and lots of research is being conducted in this field. There are many different areas of research, including computational and formal pragmatics as well as experimental and theoretical pragmatics, intercultural and cross pragmatics in linguistics, and clinical and experimentative pragmatics.
How does Free Pragmatics compare to Explanatory Pragmatics?
The discipline of pragmatics is concerned with how meaning is communicated through language in context. It examines the ways in which the speaker's intention and beliefs affect the interpretation, and focuses less on grammatical features of the utterance than on what is said. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The topic of pragmatics has a connection to other areas of the study of linguistics, such as syntax and semantics or philosophy of language.
In recent years, the field of pragmatics has developed in a variety of directions, including computational linguistics, conversational pragmatics, and theoretical pragmatics. These areas are distinguished by a variety of research, which focuses on aspects like lexical features and the interaction between language, discourse, and meaning.
One of the most important questions in the philosophical discussion of pragmatics is whether or not it is possible to provide an exhaustive, systematic view of the semantics/pragmatics interface. Some philosophers have suggested that it isn't (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have suggested that the distinction between pragmatics and semantics is unclear and that semantics and pragmatics are in fact the same thing.
The debate over these positions is often a back and forth affair and scholars arguing that particular events fall under the rubric of semantics or pragmatics. For example some scholars believe that if an expression has an actual truth-conditional meaning, then it is semantics, whereas other argue that the fact that an expression can be interpreted in a variety of ways is pragmatics.
Other researchers in pragmatics have taken an alternative approach. They argue that the truth-conditional interpretation of a statement is just one of many possible interpretations and that all interpretations are valid. This method is often described as "far-side pragmatics".
Recent work in pragmatics has tried to integrate semantic and far side approaches. It attempts to represent the entire range of interpretive possibilities for a speaker's utterance by demonstrating how the speaker's beliefs as well as intentions affect the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. (2019) combine a Gricean game-theoretic model of the Rational Speech Act framework with technological advances from Franke and Bergen (2020). This model predicts that listeners will consider a range of possible exhaustified interpretations of a speech that contains the universal FCI any which is what makes the exclusiveness implicature so reliable when in comparison to other possible implicatures.