Pragmatics
Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. It is a subfield of linguistics.
Context here must be interpreted as situation as it may include any imaginable extralinguistic factor, including social, environmental, and psychological factors.
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2 Related fields 3 Significant Works 4 See also 5 External Links |
A distinction is made in pragmatics between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of the sentence, while the speaker meaning is the concept that the speaker is trying to convey.
The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
Methodology and Presuppositions
Pragmatics is interested predominantly in utterances, usually in the context of conversations, and made up of sentences.Related fields
According to Morris, Pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs and interpretations, while Semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas that a word refers to, and Syntactics examines the relationship between signs.Significant Works
See also
See also: Speech act, Presupposition, entailment, Deixis, Implication, Universal pragmaticsExternal Links