Pragmatics
In linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association.
Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation, as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax, which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. Pragmatics, together with semantics and syntactics, is a part of semiotics. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. In 1938, Charles Morris first distinguished pragmatics as an independent subfield within semiotics, alongside syntax and semantics. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J. L. Austin and Paul Grice.
History
The intellectual roots of pragmatics trace back to early 20th-century philosophy and semiotics. The term pragmatics was first introduced by the semiotician Charles Morris in 1938, when he proposed dividing the study of signs into three parts: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In Morris's formulation, pragmatics would specifically study the relationship between signs and their interpreters, bringing an external perspective that considers users' context and responses. This idea was influenced by the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, which emphasized practical consequences and usage in meaning. Mid-century logical philosophers like Rudolf Carnap built on Morris's approach by suggesting that pragmatics should explicitly analyze the interaction between language, speakers, and the referents of words, thereby making the study of meaning more context-sensitive. Around the same time, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel argued that certain "indexical" elements of language – words like I, here, and now whose reference shifts with context – must be a central focus of pragmatics. These early insights laid a foundation for viewing meaning as fundamentally tied to context and use, even before pragmatics was recognized as a distinct linguistic discipline.In the mid-20th century, a broader "pragmatic turn" took place in the study of language, largely driven by philosophers of language examining how meaning depends on use. The later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein encapsulated this shift with the dictum that "meaning is use," suggesting that words only gain meaning through their function in language games. Around the same period, ordinary language philosophers at Oxford began analyzing language not just as an abstract system but as actions performed in particular contexts. A landmark was the work of J. L. Austin, who in the 1950s developed Speech Act Theory. Austin's posthumously published lectures How to Do Things with Words demonstrated that utterances can perform actions and distinguished different levels of speech acts. His colleague John Searle extended this framework in the late 1960s, elaborating a taxonomy of speech act types and the rules governing acts like asserting, questioning, commanding, etc., thereby firmly establishing speech acts as a core topic in pragmatics.
The 1967 book Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin, and Don D. Jackson, is an early book that featured the word pragmatics in its title, but it was used in its own interpretation of Morris's earlier conception of the word. The book is not about linguistics, but rather about psychology and family therapy. The book relates to Morris's idea of pragmatics because it considers, broadly speaking, how communication is affected by context; the focus of the book, however, is rather on how communication is affected by different participants interpreting whose behavior was caused by whose in different ways. For instance, one example in the book is that of a husband saying "I withdraw because she nags" and the wife saying "I nag because he withdraws"; a different example is the husband saying he does not act because the wife dominates, and the wife saying she takes over because the husband is passive. The book would later influence research on psychotherapy and interpersonal communication, as well as the four-sides model, but not linguistics.
A key figure in linguistic pragmatics, H. Paul Grice, advanced the study of pragmatics in the late 1960s and 1970s by explaining how people mean more than they literally say. Grice's theory of conversational implicature proposed that speakers and hearers are guided by a cooperative principle and a set of rational conversational maxims. By adhering to or deliberately flouting these maxims, speakers can imply additional meanings which listeners infer in context. For example, if Alice asks, "Can you pass the salt?" and Bob responds, "There's a salt shaker on the table," Bob's literal statement is simply informative, but pragmatically it implies an answer without directly saying so. The pioneering contributions of Austin and Grice in the 1950s–1970s are often credited with establishing pragmatics as its own subfield within linguistics. Indeed, before this period, many aspects of meaning that depend on context had been regarded as outside the scope of linguistic theory, but Austin and Grice showed these could be studied systematically.
In the 1970s, pragmatics began to gain broader recognition among linguists as a necessary complement to syntax and semantics; in Boston in 1970, the International Symposium on the Pragmatics of Natural Language was held. As the generative grammar revolution led by Noam Chomsky focused on formal syntax and semantics, it became clear that certain phenomena—such as deixis, presuppositions, and other context-dependent interpretations—could not be adequately explained by grammar and truth-conditional semantics alone. Pragmatics emerged to address this "leftover" territory: those aspects of meaning and understanding that require speaker intentions, listener inferences, and real-world knowledge. During this time, two different scholarly traditions in pragmatics crystallized. The first was the Anglo-American tradition, rooted in analytic philosophy of language and exemplified by the work of Austin, Searle, Grice, and their followers. The second was a European continental approach, which treated pragmatics as a more holistic perspective on all language behavior, influenced by fields like sociology and anthropology. Despite differing emphases – the Anglo-American school often analyzing micro-level utterances and logical inference, and the Continental school viewing pragmatics as a general functional dimension of language – both contributed to the growth of the field in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 1980s, the institutional and scholarly maturity of pragmatics was evident: a dedicated Journal of Pragmatics was founded in 1977, comprehensive textbooks and monographs on pragmatics appeared in 1983, and an International Pragmatics Association was established in 1987 to coordinate research in the field. These milestones marked pragmatics' definitive emergence as an independent discipline within linguistics, concerned specifically with language use and contextual meaning.
Areas of interest
Introductory textbooks and handbooks generally converge on the idea that pragmatics investigates how language users encode and infer meanings in context, going beyond sentence-level meaning to recover speakers' intentions and manage social relations. Surveys of the field typically distinguish a number of overlapping core areas:- Speaker meaning, communicative intention, and inference – the study of meaning as something speakers intentionally convey and hearers recover, rather than something fixed by sentence form alone. Work in this area asks how hearers infer what a speaker means on a given occasion from what is literally said, shared background assumptions, and general principles of rational cooperation.
- Context, common ground, and indexicality – the study of how utterance interpretation depends on physical setting, participants, time, preceding discourse, social roles and other aspects of context, including what interlocutors mutually take for granted. This area also investigates indexicals and demonstratives, whose reference varies systematically with the situation of use, and more broadly the ways in which expressions are context-sensitive.
- Implicature and other pragmatic inferences – the study of what is communicated indirectly or implicitly, including conversational implicatures, scalar implicatures, and many forms of nonliteral language such as irony, understatement and metaphor. These inferences explain how hearers routinely grasp "more than is said."
- Presupposition and conventional meaning – the study of information that an utterance takes for granted and of conventional implicatures and other meaning components that are part of linguistic convention but interact with pragmatic reasoning. Research examines how presuppositions are triggered, accommodated into common ground, or challenged in discourse.
- Speech acts, illocutionary force, and interactional norms – the study of how utterances perform actions, the conditions under which such actions are felicitous, and the ways they are organized in conversation and institutional settings. This area encompasses classic speech act theory as well as later work on indirect speech acts, institutional discourse and dialogue-act tagging.
- Politeness, politeness and social distance – the study of how linguistic choices index and negotiate social relations, including degrees of familiarity, social distance, power, and respect. This includes research on honorifics, address forms, facework, politeness strategies and impoliteness, often drawing on cross-cultural and sociolinguistic data. This work elaborates earlier characterizations of pragmatics as concerned with how speakers encode "distance" and social meaning in interaction.
- Reference, anaphora and information structure – the study of how speakers choose between alternative referring expressions and how these choices interact with discourse structure, given/new information, topic–focus articulation and common ground management. This includes research on anaphora, accessibility and information packaging.
- Discourse, conversation and interaction – the study of larger stretches of talk and text, including turn-taking, repair, discourse markers, narrative structure, and how pragmatic principles accumulate across sequences of utterances in conversation, institutional talk and written discourse. This area overlaps with conversation analysis and discourse analysis.
- Pragmatic failure, misunderstanding and metapragmatic awareness – the study of cases where intended and interpreted meanings diverge, and of speakers' explicit reflections on appropriate or inappropriate language use. This includes the notion of pragmatic failure and work on how speakers learn to monitor and adjust their pragmatic behavior.
- Formal, experimental and computational pragmatics – the study of context-dependent meaning using formal tools, psycholinguistic and neuroscientific experiments, and computational modeling. Formal and probabilistic approaches model pragmatic reasoning as structured inference, while experimental pragmatics tests such models against behavioral data.
- Developmental and clinical pragmatics – the study of how pragmatic competence emerges in typical first-language acquisition, how it is affected in second-language learning, and how pragmatic skills are disrupted in developmental and acquired disorders. This research distinguishes social-pragmatic aspects from more linguistic aspects, and has become central in speech-language pathology and clinical linguistics.