Pragmatics

In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning.

Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation,[2] as well as nonverbal communication.

The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.

[3][4][5] In 1938, Charles Morris first distinguished pragmatics as an independent subfield within semiotics, alongside syntax and semantics.

In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others.

Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language.

However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue.

This is an example of lexical ambiguity, as the word bank can either be in reference to a place where money is kept, or the edge of a river.

By contrast, the meaning of an utterance can be inferred through knowledge of both its linguistic and non-linguistic contexts (which may or may not be sufficient to resolve ambiguity).

In mathematics, with Berry's paradox, there arises a similar systematic ambiguity with the word "definable".

The meaning of the proposition does not rely on whether or not Santa Claus is eating cookies at the time of its utterance.

[19] In addition, individuals within the scope of discourse cannot help but avoid intuitive use of certain utterances or word choices in an effort to create communicative success.

[19] The study of referential language is heavily focused upon definite descriptions and referent accessibility.

[20] (In layman's terms: why reiteration of certain names, places, or individuals involved or as a topic of the conversation at hand are repeated more than one would think necessary.)

[20] They are also a means of connecting past and present thoughts together to create context for information at hand.

Analyzing the context of a sentence and determining whether or not the use of referent expression is necessary is highly reliant upon the author/speaker's digression- and is correlated strongly with the use of pragmatic competency.

[20][19] Michael Silverstein has argued that "nonreferential" or "pure" indices do not contribute to an utterance's referential meaning but instead "signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables.

J. L. Austin introduced the concept of the performative, contrasted in his writing with "constative" (i.e. descriptive) utterances.

Roman Jakobson, expanding on the work of Karl Bühler, described six "constitutive factors" of a speech event, each of which represents the privileging of a corresponding function, and only one of which is the referential (which corresponds to the context of the speech event).

The six functions of language Emotive ----------------------- Conative There is considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community.

Influences of philosophy and politics are also present in the field of pragmatics, as the dynamics of societies and oppression are expressed through language [24] Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social phenomena; it thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology.

Because pragmatics describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts.

[23] According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas to which a word refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships among signs or symbols.

[25] That process, integral to the science of natural language processing (seen as a sub-discipline of artificial intelligence), involves providing a computer system with some database of knowledge related to a topic and a series of algorithms, which control how the system responds to incoming data, using contextual knowledge to more accurately approximate natural human language and information processing abilities.

Particularly interesting cases are the discussions on the semantics of indexicals and the problem of referential descriptions, a topic developed after the theories of Keith Donnellan.

[27] A proper logical theory of formal pragmatics has been developed by Carlo Dalla Pozza, according to which it is possible to connect classical semantics (treating propositional contents as true or false) and intuitionistic semantics (dealing with illocutionary forces).

Over the past decade, many probabilistic and Bayesian methods have become very popular in the modelling of pragmatics, of which the most successful framework has been the Rational Speech Act[28] framework developed by Noah Goodman and Michael C. Frank, which has already seen much use in the analysis of metaphor,[29] hyperbole[30] and politeness.

As such, a simple schema of the Rational Speech Act reasoning hierarchy can be formulated for use in a reference game such that:[32]

Jacques Derrida remarked that some work done under Pragmatics aligned well with the program he outlined in his book Of Grammatology.

They draw three conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative utterance does not communicate information about an act second-hand, but it is the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) There is no distinction between language and speech.