Pragmatics

Definition and Key Concepts

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics developed in the late

1970s

1. The study of what speakers mean, or ‘speaker meaning’.

2. Concerned with the study of meaning as communicated
by a speaker(or writer) and interpreted by a listener(or
readers) [Yule: 1996]

It has, consequently, more to do with the analysis of what

people mean by their utterances than what the words or
phrases in those utterances might mean by
themselves. Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning.

The utterance' I’ve got a headache' carries a variety of

meanings according to when it is used, who uses it, who the
person is talking to, where the conversation takes
place, and so forth:
• If a patient said it to a doctor during a medical examination,
it could mean: I need prescription.
• If a mother said it to her teenage son, it could mean:
Turn down the music.
• If two friends were talking, it could mean:
I was partying last night.
• If it were used as a response to an invitation from one friend
to another, such as Do you fancy going for a walk?,
it could simply mean: No

Therefore, depending on the context it occurs in, the

utterance I’ve got a headache can function as an appeal, an
imperative, a complaint or a refusal, and so on. In any
language, what is said is often quite distinct to what is meant,
or to put it another way, form is often very different to
content. As such pragmatics does not assume a one-to-one
relationship between language form and utterance function,
but is concerned instead with accounting for the processes
that give rise to a particular interpretation of an utterance
that is usedin a particular context.

Pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a

communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech
situation which is usually a conversation (hence
*conversation analysis).
It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or
communicative act of verbal communication. One is the
informative intent or the sentence meaning, and the other the
communicative intent or speaker meaning (Leech, 1983;
Sperber and Wilson, 1986). The ability to comprehend and
produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic
competence (Kasper, 1997) which often includes one’s
knowledge about the social distance, social status between
the speakers involved, the cultural knowledge such as
politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.
Here are a few definitions of pragmatics that give a clearer
insight into what pragmatics involves:

(i) Pragmatics is “the investigation into that aspect of

meaning which is derived not from the formal
properties of words, but from the way in which
utterances are used and how they relate to the
context in which they are uttered.” Notice the word
“utterances” not necessarily sentences. (Leech &
Short)
(ii) ii) - Pragmatics is “the study of meaning in relation to
speech situations”. The speech situation enables the
speaker use language to achieve a particular effect on
the mind of the hearer.” Thus the speech is goal-
oriented (i.e. the meaning which the speaker or writer
intends to communicate(Leech (1983:6)).
(iii) Pragmatics is “the study of those aspects of the
relationship between language and context that are
relevant to the writing of grammars.” Notice in this
definition that interest is mainly in the inter-relation
of language and principles of language use that are
context dependent (Levinson 1983:9.)
Yule as seen above focuses on this definition of pragmatics in
terms of study; i.e. pragmatics is
1) the study of speaker meaning, i.e. the study of meaning as
communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a
listener (or reader);
2) the study of contextual meaning, i.e. the interpretation of
speaker meaning in its context, since context affects what is
said;
3) the study of how more gets communicated than is said.
In a communicative act, the speaker usually interacts with a
listener, who is called to make inferences about what is said
in order to interpret the speaker’s intended meaning; 4) the
study of the expression of relative distance, i.e. the physical,
social, or conceptual distance (or closeness) between the
speaker and the listener.
Pragmatics is the only field of linguistic analysis to be
concerned with humans and their verbal (and non-verbal)
interactions. This inevitably poses a series of problems, which
decrease or increase depending on the degree of familiarity
between the speaker and the listener, that is on what ‘Yule’
refers to as the relative distance between the speaker and the
listener: the closer the distance between speakers, (e.g. a
familiar social group), the more successful their interaction.
Most definitions of pragmatics pay lip service to Charles
Morris’s famous definition of pragmatics as “the study of the
relation of signs to interpreters” (1938). In a modern,
communication-oriented terminology, we prefer to talk about
‘messages’ and ‘language users’; in contrast to traditional
linguistics, which first and foremost concentrates on the
elements and structures, such as sounds and sentences that
the language users produce, pragmatics focuses on the
language-using humans. Put differently, pragmatics is
interested in the process of producing language and in its
producers, not just in the end-product, language.
Pragmatics, as suggested is indeed a new paradigm of
research; hence it is obliged to come up with a new definition
of the object of that research. What would such a new
definition imply with regard to the research object in
question, language, in its ‘old’ vs. its ‘new’ interpretation
which is, language as a human product vs. language in its
human use? Or one could simply divide the study of language
into two independent parts: one, a description of its structure
(as dealt with by the traditional methods of grammar), the
other, a description of its use (to be taken care of by
pragmatics).

The Scope of Pragmatics

By scope, we mean the levels to which the study of

pragmatics has been extended. For the purpose of our
present study, we must mention that linguistic pragmatics as
it is used today is a lot more restricted than when the term
“pragmatics” was first used by Charles Morris (1938). Morris
was interested in Semiotics – the general study of signs and
symbols.

Pragmatics was defined as the “relation of signs to the

interpreters.” We shall look at this in detail in the next unit.
Morris then extended the scope of pragmatics to include
psychological, biological and sociological phenomena which
occur in the functioning of signs (Levinson, 1983). This will
include what is known today as psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistic, neurolinguistics among others. Today,
linguistic pragmatics mostly dwells on those factors of
language use that govern the choices individuals make in
social interaction and the effects of those choices on others.

In recent times however, extended researches in cultural

studies and social discourse argue in favour of discourse
pragmatics rather than the traditional linguistic pragmatics.
Fairclough (1989) for instance argues that rather than see
language use as an individual’s strategies of encoding
meaning to achieve some particular effects on the hearer or
reader, we should be concerned with the fact that social
conventions and 116 ideologies, define peoples roles,
identities and language performances; people simply
communicate in some particular ways as the society
determines. While people can manipulate language to achieve
certain purposes, they in some circumstances are actually
ruled by social conventions. In the same vein, pragmatic
study has thrown some lights in the study of literature giving
rise to literary pragmatics, while the application of
pragmatics to computational linguistics has also developed
into computational pragmatics, etc.