What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics examines the connection between language and context. It deals with questions like: What do people mean by the words they use?
It's a philosophies of practical and sensible action. It is in contrast to idealism, the belief that you must always abide by your principles.
What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of ways in which language users find meaning from and each with each other. It is often thought of as a component of language, but it differs from semantics because pragmatics focuses on what the user wants to convey, not what the actual meaning is.
As a field of study it is comparatively new and research in the area has been expanding rapidly over the last few decades. It is a linguistics-related academic field, but it has also had an impact on research in other fields like sociolinguistics, psychology and the field of anthropology.
There are many different approaches to pragmatics that have contributed to the growth and development of this field. One is the Gricean pragmatics approach, which focuses on the notions of intention and its interaction with the speaker's understanding of the listener's comprehension. The lexical and concept strategies for pragmatics are likewise perspectives on the subject. These perspectives have contributed to the diversity of subjects that researchers studying pragmatics have investigated.
The research in pragmatics has focused on a wide range of topics such as L2 pragmatic understanding as well as request production by EFL learners and the role of theory of mind in physical and mental metaphors. It is also applied to cultural and social phenomena, like political discourse, discriminatory language and interpersonal communication. Pragmatics researchers have also used diverse methodologies, from experimental to sociocultural.
The size of the knowledge base in pragmatics is different according to the database, as illustrated in Figure 9A-C. The US and the UK are two of the top performers in pragmatics research. However, their position is dependent on the database. This difference is due to the fact that pragmatics is multidisciplinary and intersects with other disciplines.
This makes it difficult to determine the top authors in pragmatics by their publications only. It is possible to determine influential authors by looking at their contributions to the field of pragmatics. Bambini for instance, has contributed to pragmatics by introducing concepts like politeness theories and conversational implicititure. Other highly influential authors in the field of pragmatics are Grice, Saul and Kasper.
What is Free Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is more concerned with the contexts and users of language rather than with truth or reference, or grammar. It examines how a single phrase can be interpreted differently in different contexts. This includes ambiguity as well as indexicality. It also focuses on the strategies that listeners employ to determine if phrases are intended to be communicative. It is closely related to the theory of conversational implicature pioneered by Paul Grice.
The boundaries between these two disciplines are a subject of debate. While the distinction between these two disciplines is widely recognized, it's not always clear where they should be drawn. Some philosophers claim that the notion of meaning of sentences is a part of semantics, whereas other argue that this kind of problem should be considered pragmatic.
Another issue is whether pragmatics is a subfield of philosophy of language or a subset of the study of linguistics. Some researchers have argued that pragmatics is a field in its distinct from the other disciplines and should be treated as distinct from the field of linguistics, alongside syntax, phonology semantics and so on. Others, however have argued the study of pragmatics is a part of philosophy since it focuses on the way in which our beliefs about the meaning and use of languages influence our theories on how languages work.
There are a few major issues that arise in the study of pragmatics that have fuelled many of the debates. Some scholars have suggested for instance, that pragmatics isn't an academic discipline in its own right because it studies how people perceive and use the language, without necessarily referring to actual facts about what was said. This kind of approach is called far-side pragmatics. Some scholars have argued that the subject should be considered a field in its own right since it examines the ways the meaning and use of language is influenced by social and cultural factors. This is called near-side pragmatics.
The field of pragmatics also discusses the inferential nature of utterances as well as the importance of the primary pragmatic processes in determining the meaning of what a speaker is expressing in a sentence. Recanati and Bach examine these issues in greater in depth. Both of these papers discuss the notions of saturation and free pragmatic enrichment, which are important pragmatic processes in the sense that they aid in shaping the overall meaning of an utterance.
How is Free Pragmatics Different from Explanatory Pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics is the way in which context influences the meaning of language. It focuses on how the human language is utilized in social interactions and the relationship between the speaker and interpreter. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians.
Many different theories of pragmatics have been developed over time. Some, such as Gricean pragmatics, concentrate on the communicative intention of the speaker. Others, like Relevance Theory concentrate on the processes of understanding that occur during the interpretation of words by listeners. Some pragmatic approaches have been combined with other disciplines such as philosophy or cognitive science.
There are also a variety of views on the borderline between semantics and pragmatics. Some philosophers, such as Morris believes that pragmatics and semantics are two distinct topics. He says that semantics deals with the relation of words to objects which they may or not denote, while pragmatics deals with the use of the words in context.
Other philosophers like Bach and Harnish have argued that pragmatism is a subfield within semantics. They define "near-side" and "far-side" pragmatics. Near-side pragmatics is focused on what is said, whereas far-side pragmatics concentrates on the logical implications of saying something. They argue that semantics determines certain aspects of the meaning of a statement, whereas other pragmatics are determined by pragmatic processes.
One of the most important aspects of pragmatics is that it is a context-dependent phenomenon. This means that a single utterance could have different meanings based on factors like indexicality or ambiguity. Other things that can change the meaning of an utterance include the structure of the discourse, speaker intentions and beliefs, and the expectations of the listener.
Another aspect of pragmatics is that it is culturally specific. This is because each culture has its own rules about what is appropriate in various situations. For instance, it is polite in some cultures to make eye contact while it is rude in other cultures.
There are numerous perspectives on pragmatics, and a lot of research is being conducted in this field. Some of the most important areas of research include: formal and computational pragmatics theoretic and experimental pragmatics; cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics; pragmatics that are experimental and clinical.
How is Free Pragmatics Similar to Explanatory Pragmatics?
The discipline of pragmatics in linguistics is concerned with how meaning is conveyed by the use of language in a context. It is less concerned with the grammatical structure that is used in the 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 the study of linguistics, such as syntax and semantics or philosophy of language.
In recent years, the field of pragmatics has grown in various directions, including computational linguistics, conversational pragmatics, and theoretical pragmatics. There is a wide range of research in these areas, with a focus on topics such as the role of lexical elements as well as the interaction between discourse and language, and the nature of meaning itself.
In the philosophical discussion of pragmatism one of the main questions is whether it is possible to give a precise and systematic explanation of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. Some philosophers have suggested that it's not (e.g. Morris 1938, Kaplan 1989). Other philosophers have claimed that the distinction between pragmatics and semantics is ill-defined and that pragmatics and semantics are really the identical.
The debate over these positions is often a back and forth affair, with scholars arguing that particular instances fall under the rubric of semantics or pragmatics. Some scholars argue that if a statement has a literal truth conditional meaning, it is semantics. Others argue that the possibility that a statement may be interpreted differently is pragmatics.
Other researchers in the field of pragmatics have taken a different approach in arguing that the truth-conditional meaning of an expression is only one among many ways in which an utterance may be interpreted, and that all interpretations are valid. This approach is often known as far-side pragmatics.
Recent research in pragmatics has attempted to integrate semantic and far side methods. It attempts to represent the full range of interpretational possibilities for a speaker's utterance by demonstrating the way in which the speaker's beliefs and intentions contribute to the interpretation. For example, Champollion et al. (2019) combine an Gricean game-theoretic model of the Rational Speech Act framework with technological advances from Franke and Bergen (2020). This model predicts that the listeners will consider a range of possible exhaustified interpretations of a speech that contains the universal FCI any, and that this is what makes the exclusivity implicature so 슬롯 strong when compared to other plausible implicatures.