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Pragmatics

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Pragmatics Summary

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Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

pragmatics

A subdiscipline of linguistics developed from different linguistic, philosophical and sociological traditions that studies the relationship between natural language expressions and their uses in specific situations. The term pragmatics comes from Morris’ (1938) general theory of signs: in this semiotic model (semiotics), pragmatics refers to the relationship of the sign to the sign user. In linguistics the distinction between pragmatics and semantics and syntax on the one hand and, in a broader sense, between pragmatics and sociolinguistics on the other hand depends wholly on the particular theory. Pragmatics can hardly be considered an autonomous field of study (as is the case for phonology, for example). In British-American linguistics, the term ‘pragmatics’ has only been in use for a relatively short time; this area was previously subsumed under the term ‘sociolinguistics’. The distinction between pragmatics and semantics, both of which investigate different aspects of linguistic meaning, is even less clear-cut. While semantics is concerned with the literal and contextually non-variable meaning of linguistic expressions or with the contextually non-variable side of the truth conditions of propositions or sentences, pragmatics deals with the function of linguistic utterances and the propositions that are expressed by them, depending upon their use in specific situations. Consequently, issues such as whether deixis is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon are controversial; as a way of placing utterances in contexts deictic expressions are part of pragmatics, as factors in establishing the truth conditions of sentences they are part of (indexical) semantics. Similar uncertainties arise with regard to topicalization, theme vs rheme structure and presupposition, among others. In the early 1970s, pragmatics became almost exclusively identified with speech act theory. Later it was concerned above all with empirical studies in conversation analysis. drawing on Grice’s (1975) maxims of conversation. It has also dealt with issues involving the differentiation of pragmatics and semantics (as in the case of deixis and presupposition mentioned above). As a result of a growing awareness of the close interaction of meaning and use, there has been a recent trend towards treating them together under the heading of a more broadly conceived semantics, especially in formally oriented work such as ‘situation semantics’ (Gawron and Peters 1990) and ‘illocutionary logic’ (Vanderveken 1990–1), which integrate complex circumstances and speech act theory, respectively, into semantics.

References

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