Definition, Background, and Scope of Pragmatics

Definition, Background, and Scope of Pragmatics

            Pragmatics is the study of language which focuses attention on the users and the “context” of language use rather than on reference, truth, or grammar. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Fotion 1995).

            Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which we will mean specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language. Logic and semantics traditionally deal with properties of types of expressions, and not with properties that differ from token to token, or use to use, or, as we shall say, from utterance to utterance, and vary with the particular properties that differentiate them. Pragmatics is sometimes characterized as dealing with the effects of context. This is equivalent to saying it deals with utterances, if one collectively refers to all the facts that can vary from utterance to utterance as ‘context.’ One must be careful, however, for the term is often used with more limited meanings.

            We must ask ourselves, then, what is context: is it simply the reality which fills in meaningful details missed by a theory such as the invariant core theory? No, it is not. Context can be divided into four subparts of which reality is but the first. We call the aspect of context the physical context; that is, where the conversation take place, what objects are present, and what actions are taking place. Second, we have an epistemic context, background knowledge shared by the speakers and hearers. Third, we have a lingual context, utterances previous to the utterance under consideration. Finally, we have a social context, the social relationship and setting of the speakers and the hearers.