1. science
2. social science
3. linguistics

Definitions of pragmatics
Pragmatics is a branch of general linguistics like other branches that
include: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics.
1. Charles Morris’s famous definition of pragmatics was “the study
of the relation of signs to interpreters-”
2. Levinson’s consideration of pragmatics was “the study of those
relations between language and context that is grammaticalized,
or encoded in the structure of a language.”
3. Mey’s definition was “Pragmatics studies the use of language in
human communication as determined by the conditions of
society.”.
4. Ran Yongping expressed his idea in his book A Survey of
Pragmatics : “Pragmatics is a discipline not only concerning the
sense, but also concerning the derivation of sense and the
understanding of underlying meaning as its objects.
Other definitions
1.“Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning.”
2: “ Pragmatics is the study of contextual
meaning”
3:“ Pragmatics is the study of how more gets
communicated than is said”
4:“ Pragmatics is the study of the expression of
relative distance.” ( Yule:2008).
Background of Pragmatic
The origin of pragmatics goes back to ancient Greek and
Roman academic works.
pragmatics develops from philosophy. Why?
1. The term “pragmatics” first appeared in linguistic
philosophy in 1930s, for then western philosophers
began to shift their focus onto the studies of language
symbols, which developed into semiology later.
The early pragmatics was just a branch of semiology that
was under the philosophers’ studies, which means that
pragmatics originates from the philosophers’ studies on
language.
2. The theoretic basis for pragmatics is from philosophy. To
be more specific, pragmatics originates from the
following aspects: the studies of semiology; the studies
of linguistical philosophy in the 20th century and the
studies of function linguistics on language forms.
Background of Pragmatic
Charles Morris (1903 – 1979) Was concerned
with the study of the science of signs, which
he called semiotic; Distinguished 3 branches
of semiotics: syntactics (or syntax), which
studies the formal relation among different
signs; semantics, the study of the relation
between the signs and the objects they
denote; and pragmatics, the study of the
relation of signs to their interpreters, i.e.
people.
The development of pragmatics
1. Morris, is the one who played the most important
role in the first stage of the development of
pragmatics.
2. He held an opinion that the studies of pragmatics
must involve the aspects of society, of psychology,
of nerve, of culture and of other things that
affected the symbols and their meanings.
3. The most influent thing that he did on pragmatics
was that in 1938 he had divided semiology into
three parts: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics.
The development of pragmatics
The famous philosopher Carnap had very similar ideas with
Morris
1. He made some supplement, and he thought that the studies
of pragmatics should be on the relationship between users
and words as well as the reference of words. He made the
aims of pragmatics studies more specific, that is the
relationship between language users and words and the
reference relationship.
2. He divided studies into pure theoretic ones and descriptive
ones.
Bar-Hiller, the student of Carnap, suggested that the studies of
pragmatics should have definite aims and he claimed that the
definite aims should be on decitics such as “I”, “Here”, “Now”.
Austin and Searle put forward the Speech Act Theory, which
was the most influent topic in the studies of pragmatics
during the second stage.
The development of pragmatics
Now, pragmatics has new development, in
which many scholars begin to do cross studies,
such
as
interactional
sociolinguistics,
interlanguage
pragmatics,
cross-cultural
pragmatics, pragmatics and translation,
pragmatics and language teaching which
contains
two:
pragmalinguistics
and
sociopragmatics, cognitive pragmatics and
clinical pragmatics.
The three Stages in the Development
of Pragmatics
The first stage is from the late 1930s to late 1940s, during
this period, some philosophers such as Pierce, Morris and
Carnap considered pragmatics to be a branch of semiology
and all the studies were within the domain of philosophy.
The second stage is from the beginning of 1950s to late
1960s. During this period, three famous philosophers
called Austin, Searle and Grice made studied on speech act
and implicature theory, and their achievements sustained
the basic theory of pragmatics.
The third stage is after 1970s, the biggest three issues
happened and pragmatics became an independent
discipline .
Schools of Pragmatics
The studies of Pragmatics are divided into two big schools
British & American School and European School which can
be subdivided into France School, Prague School and
Copenhagen School.
1. British & American School is traditionally centering on
studying the sentence structure and grammar, and their
studies of pragmatics is also restricted to several definite
topics such as deictic expressions, conversational
implicature, presupposition, speech and conversation
structure.
2. European School has a wide visual and understanding, and
their studies even include conversation analysis, cultural
anthropology, social linguistics and psycholinguistics
during intercommunication.
Types of Pragmatics
There are three divisions of Pragmatics:
1.Micro-pragmatics
2. Macro-pragmatics
3. Meta-pragmatics
1. Micro-pragmatics
The studies of Micro-pragmatics are, on the
level of language using, centering upon the
discussion of pragmatic tasks aroused by the
understanding of language symbols’ reference
and implicature during conversation, including
Context, Conversational implicature,
Reference, Pragmatic Principles, speech Acts
and Conversation Analysis.
2. Macro-pragmatics
The studies of Macro-pragmatics are, on the
level of society & culture, focus on the
problems of how to use language for language
user during the process of communication,
including Pragmatic Acts, Literary Pragmatics,
Pragmatics Across Cultures and the Social
Aspects of Pragmatics.
.
3. Metapragmatics
Metapragmatics which can be considered as a
review, a survey or a reflection of pragmatics
itself, including making statements about
itself, questioning itself, improving itself,
quoting itself and rethinking the
methodologies and theoretic system during
the process of its studies
Levels of Language and Linguistics
TEXT]
Discourse analysis
Text linguistic
Meaning
semantics
Situation and context
pragmatics
Sentences, clauses, phrases,
words
Grammar(Morphology& syntax)
Sounds and lettes
Phonology and phonetics
Pragmatics and other linguistics
aspects
• In contrast to phonetics and phonology,
morphology, syntax, and semantics, which
describe different levels of language structure,
Pragmatics deals with language use. It is still a
fairly young discipline in linguistics, and is thus
defined in a variety of ways. However,
Pragmatics is mostly used in connection with
the relationship between linguistic signs and
their users (as depicted in the cartoon above).
It investigates how context (both situational
and linguistic contexts) affects the meaning of
utterances.
The essence of pragmatics
Syntax addresses the formal relations
of signs to one another, semantics
deals with the relation of signs to
what they denote, and pragmatics
has a big deal with the relation of
signs to their users and interpreters
The central rationale for pragmatics
sentence meaning (semantics) in natural
languages vastly underdetermines
speaker’s meaning (intentions).
The goal of pragmatics is to explain how
the gap between sentence meaning and
speaker’s meaning is bridged
The difference between grammatical
analysis and pragmatic analysis
• First, grammatical studies look for rules while
pragmatic studies look for principles. Rules are
black and white, i.e. you are either right or
wrong. For instance, you have to say “He studies
linguistics”; the –s is required by a rule. Principles
are not black and white; you can obey them to
some extent and violate them to some extent.
For example, one principle says we should tell the
truth and another says we should be polite in our
speech.
• Secondly, in grammar studies, we end up with
products while in pragmatics we always deal
with processes. In other words, after we have
analyzed a sentence grammatically, our job is
done; in a pragmatic inquiry, we deal with an
ever-unfolding process-as the discourse goes
on and on, the extra meaning of some words
become clearer and clearer.
Summary
• The field of pragmatics deals with the principles
of language use that explain how extra meaning
is conveyed without being encoded in language.
Therefore, we need to investigate the speaker
meaning, i.e. how meaning is communicated by
the speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a
listener (or reader). Thus, pragmatics
concentrates more on the analysis of what people
mean by their utterances than what the words or
phrases in those utterances might mean by
themselves (which is analysed in semantics).