What is Pragmatics?

by Shaozhong Liu

Definition

A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, 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.

Focus and content

Some of the aspects of language studied in pragmatics include:

--Deixis: meaning 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication however, deixis in its
narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense, what
the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context.
--Presupposition: referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically
associated with or entailed by a sentence.
--Performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only says something but
also does certain things: giving information, stating a fact or hinting an attitude. The
study of performatives led to the hypothesis of Speech Act Theory that holds that a
speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act and a
perlocutionary act (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969).
--Implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived from
context that is not present from its conventional use.
Pragmaticians are also keen on exploring why interlocutors can successfully converse
with one another in a conversation. A basic idea is that interlocutors obey certain
principles in their participation so as to sustain the conversation. One such principle is the
Cooperative Principle which assumes that interactants cooperate in the conversation by
contributing to the ongoing speech event (Grice, 1975). Another assumption is the
Politeness Principle (Leech, 1983) that maintains interlocutors behave politely to one
another, since people respect each other's face (Brown & Levinson 1978). A cognitive
explanation to social interactive speech events was provided by Sperber and Wilson
(1986) who hold that in verbal communication people try to be relevant to what they
intend to say and to whom an utterance is intended.
The pragmatic principles people abide by in one language are often different in another.
Thus there has been a growing interest in how people in different languages observe a
certain pragmatic principle. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies reported what is
considered polite in one language is sometimes not polite in another. Contrastive
pragmatics, however, is not confined to the study of a certain pragmatic principles.
Cultural breakdowns, pragmatic failure, among other things, are also components of
cross-cultural pragmatics.
Another focus of research in pragmatics is learner language or *interlanguage. This
interest eventually evolved into interlanguage pragmatics, a branch of pragmatics which
specifically discusses how non-native speakers comprehend and produce a speech act in a
target language and how their pragmatic competence develops over time (Kasper &
Blum-Kulka, 1993; Kasper, 1995). To date, a handful of cross-sectional, longitudinal and
theoretical studies on classroom basis have been conducted and the potentials along the
interface of pragmatics with SLA research have been widely felt. Topics of immediate
interest to which language teachers at large may contribute seem just numerous. What are
some of the pragmatic universals underlying L2 acquisition? What influences L1 exerts
on the learner's L2 acquisition? How shall we measure the learner's pragmatic
performance with a native pragmatic norm? These are but a few of the interesting ones
and for more discussions see Kasper & Schmidt (1996), Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford
(1996), Takahashi (1996), House (1996) and Cohen (1996).

History

Although pragmatics is a relatively new branch of linguistics, research on it can be dated

back to ancient Greece and Rome where the term pragmaticus’ is found in late Latin and
pragmaticos’ in Greek, both meaning of being practical’. Modern use and current practice
of pragmatics is credited to the influence of the American philosophical doctrine of
pragmatism. The pragmatic interpretation of semiotics and verbal communication studies
in Foundations of the Theory of Signs by Charles Morris (1938), for instance, helped
neatly expound the differences of mainstream enterprises in semiotics and linguistics. For
Morris, pragmatics studies the relations of signs to interpreters’, while semantics studies
the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable’, and syntactics
studies the formal relations of signs to one another.’ By elaborating the sense of
pragmatism in his concern of conversational meanings, Grice (1975) enlightened modern
treatment of meaning by distinguishing two kinds of meaning, natural and non-natural.
Grice suggested that pragmatics should centre on the more practical dimension of
meaning, namely the conversational meaning which was later formulated in a variety of
ways (Levinson, 1983; Leech, 1983).
Practical concerns also helped shift pragmaticians' focus to explaining naturally occurring
conversations which resulted in hallmark discoveries of the Cooperative Principle by
Grice (1975) and the Politeness Principle by Leech (1983). Subsequently, Green (1989)
explicitly defined pragmatics as natural language understanding. This was echoed by
Blakemore (1990) in her Understanding Utterances: The Pragmatics of Natural Language
and Grundy (1995) in his Doing Pragmatics. The impact of pragmatism has led to
crosslinguistic international studies of language use which resulted in, among other
things, Sperber and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory which convincingly explains how
people comprehend and utter a communicative act.
The Anglo-American tradition of pragmatic study has been tremendously expanded and
enriched with the involvement of researchers mainly from the Continental countries such
as the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. A symbol of this development was
the establishment of the IPrA (the International Pragmatic Association) in Antwerp in
1987. In its Working Document, IPrA proposed to consider pragmatics as a theory of
linguistic adaptation and look into language use from all dimensions (Verschueren,
1987). Henceforward, pragmatics has been conceptualized as to incorporate micro and
macro components (Mey, 1993).
Throughout its development, pragmatics has been steered by the philosophical practice of
pragmatism and evolving to maintain its independence as a linguistic subfield by keeping
to its tract of being practical in treating the everyday concerned meaning.

Criticisms

A traditional criticism has been that pragmatics does not have a clear-cut focus, and in
early studies there was a tendency to assort those topics without a clear status in
linguistics to pragmatics. Thus pragmatics was associated with the metaphor of 'a
garbage can' (Leech, 1983). Other complaints were that, unlike grammar which resorts to
rules, the vague and fuzzy principles in pragmatics are not adequate in telling people
what to choose in face of a range of possible meanings for one single utterance in
context. An extreme criticism represented by Marshal (see Shi Cun, 1989) was that
pragmatics is not eligible as an independent field of learning since meaning is already
dealt with in semantics.
However, there is a consensus view that pragmatics as a separate study is more than
necessary because it handles those meanings that semantics overlooks (Leech, 1983).
This view has been reflected both in practice at large and in Meaning in Interaction: An
Introduction to Pragmatics by Thomas (1995). Thus in spite of the criticisms, the impact
of pragmatics has been colossal and multifaceted. The study of speech acts, for instance,
provided illuminating explanation into sociolinguistic conduct. The findings of the
cooperative principle and politeness principle also provided insights into person-to-
person interactions. The choice of different linguistic means for a communicative act and
the various interpretations for the same speech act elucidate human mentality in the
relevance principle which contributes to the study of communication in particular and
cognition in general. Implications of pragmatic studies are also evident in language
teaching practices. Deixis, for instance, is important in the teaching of reading. Speech
acts are often helpful for improving translation and writing. Pragmatic principles are also
finding their way into the study of literary works as well as language teaching
classrooms.

(See also: communicative competence, sociolinguistics as a source of discipline,

psycholinguistics as a source of discipline, competence and performance, discourse
analysis, interlanguage, negotiation of meaning, sociolinguistic/sociocultural
competence, procedural/declarative knowledge)

References
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words, New York: Oxford University Press
Blakemore, D. (1990) Understanding Utterances: The Pragmatics of Natural Language,
Oxford: Blackwell.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1978) 'Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena',
in Goody, E. (ed.) Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, pp56~311,
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Green, G. (1989) Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Grice, H. P. (1975) 'Logic and Conversation', in Cole, P. & Morgan, J. (eds.) Syntax and
Semantics 3: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press.
Grundy, P. (1995) Doing Pragmatics, London: Edward Arnold.
Kasper, G. & Blum-Kulka, S. (eds.) (1993) Interlanguage Pragmatics, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kasper, G. (1995) 'Interlanguage Pragmatics', in Verschueren, J. & Östman Jan-Ola &
Blommaert, J. (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics 1995, pp1~7, Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Co.
Kasper, G. (1997) 'Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught?' (Network #6:
http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/sltcc/F97NewsLetter/Pubs.htm), a paper delivered at the 1997
TESOL Convention.
Leech, G. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman.
Levinson, S. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mey, J. (1993) Pragmatics. An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.
Morris, C. (1938) 'Foundations of the Theory of Signs', in Carnap, R. Et al (eds.)
International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 2:1, Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.
Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Shi Cun (1989) 'Speeches at the IPrA Roundtable Conference' (1, 2,3), Xi'an: Teaching
Research Issues 2,3,4.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Thomas, J. (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics, London:
Longman.
Verschueren, J. (1987) Pragmatics as a Theory of Linguistic Adaptation, Working
Document #1, Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association.

Further reading

Bardovi-Harlig, K. & Hartford, B. S. (1996) 'Input in an institutional setting', in Studies

of Second Language Acquisition, vol. 18, pp171~188.
Blum-Kulka, S., Kasper, G. & House, J. (eds.) (1989) Cross-Cultural Pragmatics:
Requests and Apologies, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Cohen, A. D. (1996) 'Developing the ability to perform speech acts', in Studies of Second
Language Acquisition, vol. 18, pp253~267.
Davis, S. (ed.) (1991) Pragmatics. A Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
House, J. (1996) 'Developing pragmatic fluency in English as a foreign language:
Routines and metapragmatic awareness', in Studies of Second Language Acquisition, vol.
18, pp225~252.
Kasper, G. & Schmidt, R. (1996) 'Developmental issues in interlanguage pragmatics', in
Studies of Second Language Acquisition, vol. 18, pp149~169.
Kasper, G. (1996) 'Introduction: interlanguage pragmatics in SLA', in Studies of Second
Language Acquisition, vol. 18, pp145~148.
Takahashi, S. (1996) 'Pragmatic transferability', in Studies of Second Language
Acquisition, vol. 18, pp189~223.

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