What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics examines the connection between language and context. It asks questions like: What do people really mean when they speak in terms?
It's a philosophies of practical and reasonable action. It differs from idealism which is the belief that one should adhere to their principles regardless of the circumstances.
What is Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics focuses on the way that language users interact and communicate with each with one another. It is often seen as a component of language, but it is different from semantics because pragmatics is focused on what the user is trying to communicate, not what the actual meaning is.
As a research area the field of pragmatics is still relatively new and its research has expanded rapidly in the last few decades. It is a linguistics academic field, but it has also affected research in other areas like sociolinguistics, psychology, and Anthropology.
There are a variety of perspectives on pragmatics, which have contributed to its development and growth. For example, one perspective is the Gricean approach to pragmatics, which focuses on the notion of intention and how it relates to the speaker's comprehension of the listener's. The lexical and concept perspectives on pragmatics are also views on the subject. These views have contributed to the diversity of subjects that pragmatics researchers have investigated.
The research in pragmatics has been focused on a variety of subjects, including L2 pragmatic comprehension as well as production of requests by EFL learners, and the role of theory of mind in both mental and physical metaphors. It has been applied to social and cultural phenomena such as political discourse, discriminatory speech, and interpersonal communication. Researchers studying pragmatics have employed diverse methodologies from experimental to sociocultural.
Figure 9A-C shows that the size of the knowledge base for pragmatics varies depending on the database used. The US and the UK are two of the top producers in the field of pragmatics research. However, their position varies depending on the database. This is due to pragmatics being multidisciplinary and interspersed with other disciplines.
It is therefore difficult to determine the best pragmatics authors solely according to the quantity of their publications. However, it is possible to identify the most influential authors by examining their contributions to pragmatics. Bambini for instance, has contributed to pragmatics by introducing concepts like politeness theories and conversational implicititure. Grice, Saul, and Kasper are also highly influential authors of pragmatics.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is more concerned with the contexts and users of language than it is with truth, reference, or grammar. It studies the ways in which one utterance can be interpreted as meaning different things from different contexts and also those caused by ambiguity or indexicality. It also focuses primarily on the strategies used by listeners to determine which phrases have a message. It is closely linked to the theory of conversational implicature, which was developed by Paul Grice.
While the distinction between pragmatics and semantics is a well-known, long-established one, there is much debate regarding the exact boundaries of these disciplines. Some philosophers argue that the notion of meaning of sentences is a component of semantics, whereas other argue that this kind of problem should be considered pragmatic.
Another issue that has been a source of contention is whether the study of pragmatics should be considered a branch of linguistics or an aspect of philosophy of language. Pragmatic KR have argued pragmatics is an independent field and should be considered a part of linguistics, along with phonology. syntax, semantics etc. Others have suggested that the study of pragmatics should be viewed as part of the philosophy of language because it focuses on the ways that our concepts of the meaning and uses of language affect our theories of how languages function.
There are a few major issues that arise in the study of pragmatics that have fueled many of the debates. For example, some scholars have claimed that pragmatics isn't a subject in and of itself because it studies the ways that people interpret and use language, without being able to provide any information about what actually gets said. This sort of approach is known as far-side pragmatics. Others, however, have argued that this study is a discipline in its own right because it examines the ways the meaning and usage of language is affected by cultural and social factors. This is called near-side pragmatics.
Other topics of discussion in pragmatics are the ways in which we understand the nature of the interpretation of utterances as an inferential process and the role that the primary pragmatic processes play in the analysis of what is being said by a speaker in a given sentence. These are topics that are discussed a bit more extensively in the papers by Recanati and Bach. Both papers explore the notions saturation and free enrichment of the pragmatic. These are important pragmatic processes that shape the overall meaning an utterance.
How is Free Pragmatics Different from Explanatory Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics examines how the context affects the meaning of linguistics. It evaluates how human language is used in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the speaker and the interpreter. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are referred to as pragmaticians.
Over the years, many different theories of pragmatism have been proposed. Some, such as Gricean pragmatics, concentrate on the communication intention of a speaker. Others, like Relevance Theory are focused on the processes of understanding that occur during utterance interpretation by hearers. Some pragmatics theories have been merged with other disciplines, like cognitive science and philosophy.
There are also different views regarding the boundary between pragmatics and semantics. Morris is one philosopher who believes that semantics and pragmatism are two different subjects. He argues that semantics is concerned with the relationship between signs and objects they could or might not refer to, whereas pragmatics is concerned with the use of words in a context.
Other philosophers, like Bach and Harnish have also argued that pragmatics is a subfield within semantics. They differentiate between 'near-side and far-side' pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics focuses on what is said, while far-side pragmatics focuses on the logical consequences of saying something. They believe that semantics determines the logical implications of an utterance, while other pragmatics are determined by the pragmatic processes.
One of the most important aspects of pragmatics is that it is context dependent. This means that the same word can have different meanings in different contexts, based on things like ambiguity and indexicality. Other factors that could alter the meaning of an expression include the structure of the discourse, speaker intentions and beliefs, as well as expectations of the listener.
Another aspect of pragmatics is that it is culture-specific. This is because different cultures have their own rules regarding what is appropriate to say in various situations. For example, it is acceptable in certain cultures to make eye contact while it is rude in other cultures.
There are various perspectives on pragmatics and lots of research is being conducted in this area. The main areas of research are computational and formal pragmatics theoretic and experimental pragmatics; cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics; clinical and experimental pragmatics.
How does free Pragmatics compare to Explanatory Pragmatics?
The discipline of pragmatics, a linguistic field, is concerned with how meaning is conveyed by language use in context. It is less concerned with the grammatical structure of an spoken word and more on what the speaker is actually saying. Pragmaticians are linguists that focus in pragmatics. The topic of pragmatics has a connection to other areas of study of linguistics like syntax and semantics, or the philosophy of language.
In recent years, the area of pragmatics has been developing in several different directions that include 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.
In the philosophical discussion of pragmatism, one of the major questions is whether it's possible to give a precise and systematic analysis of the interface between pragmatics and semantics. Some philosophers have claimed that it's not (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have claimed that the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is not clear and that pragmatics and semantics are in fact the same thing.
The debate between these two positions is usually a back and forth affair and scholars arguing that certain instances fall under the umbrella of either pragmatics or semantics. Some scholars believe that if a statement carries a literal truth conditional meaning, it is semantics. Others believe that the fact that a statement could be interpreted differently is pragmatics.
Other researchers in pragmatics have taken an alternative approach. They claim that the truth-conditional interpretation of a sentence is only one of many possible interpretations, and that all of them are valid. This approach is often called "far-side pragmatics".
Recent research in pragmatics has attempted to combine semantic and far side methods. It attempts to capture the full range of interpretive possibilities that can be derived from a speaker's words by demonstrating the way in which the speaker's beliefs and intentions affect the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. (2019) combine an Gricean game-theoretic model of the Rational Speech Act framework with technological innovations from Franke and Bergen (2020). This model predicts that the listeners will be able to consider a variety of possible exhaustified versions of a utterance that contains the universal FCI any which is what makes the exclusiveness implicature so strong when in comparison to other possible implicatures.