Pragmatics

pragmatics

In linguistics and philosophy, the study of the use of natural language in communication; more generally, the study of the relations between languages and their users. It is sometimes defined in contrast with linguistic semantics, which can be described as the study of the rule systems that determine the literal meanings of linguistic expressions. Pragmatics is then the study of how both literal and nonliteral aspects of communicated linguistic meaning are determined by principles that refer to the physical or social context (broadly construed) in which language is used. Among these aspects are conversational and conventional “implicatures” (e.g., “John has three sons” conversationally implicates that John has no more than three sons; “He was poor but honest” conventionally implicates an unspecified contrast between poverty and honesty). Other aspects include metaphor and other tropes and speech acts.

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pragmatics [prag′mad·iks]

(communications)

The branch of semiotics that treats the relation of symbols to behavior and the meaning received by the listener or reader of a statement.

(computer science)

The fourth and final phase of natural language processing, following contextual analysis, that takes into account the speaker's goal in uttering a particular thought in a particular way in determining what constitutes an appropriate response.

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Pragmatics 

a branch—more precisely, an aspect—of semi-otic that investigates and studies the relation between a given system of signs and the system’s interpreters and users. The fundamental ideas of pragmatics were formulated by C. Peirce. Substantial contributions were made by C. Morris, who also invented the term “pragmatics,” and a number of other scholars.

Pragmatics is distinguished from syntactics and semantics. Syntactics studies the purely structural relations between correctly constructed expressions in a sign system, without regard for the expressions’ possible interpretations (even though the interpretations may be kept in mind). Semantics focuses precisely upon these interpretations. Pragmatics studies the characteristics and relations of a given sign system through the unexpressed means and resources of this same system. These resources include the stylistic characteristics of a language that ensure the most adequate reception of messages, the degree to which a text can be condensed without losing its comprehensibility, the criteria for the optimal structure of such a condensed text, and the interpreters’ individual capacities for “solutions.” Thus, pragmatics proposes to take maximum account of the characteristics and capacities of the human intellect and in turn claims to reveal the conditions that ensure success in creating models of these characteristics and capacities.

In more concrete terms, one can mention the trends and scientific research in which the application of the concepts and ideas of pragmatics is extremely promising and often leads to direct practical results. This includes problems of heuristic programming, machine translation and the very difficult task of automatic recognition of homonymy, automatic (machine) abstracting, and the development of information-retrieval systems and specialized languages. It also includes the development of languages for outer-space communications—Lincos, the lingua cosmica of the Dutch mathematician H. Freudenthal—and the whole range of problems connected with planning and constructing any kind of robot. These are tasks for which the resources of the concrete sciences and syntactic and semantic considerations alone are clearly insufficient. The ideas of pragmatics are also widely applied in “speculative” areas, such as the development of mathematical principles and mathematical logic; examples are seen in works by the Dutch mathematician G. Mannoury and in ultraintuitionism. At the same time, pragmatics makes wide use of material gleaned from the data of psychology (especially engineering psychology), ethology (the science of animal behavior), social psychology, linguistics, and other sciences; these sciences are, in turn, influenced by pragmatics.

REFERENCES

Carnap, R. Znachenie i neobkhodimost’. Moscow, 1959. (Translated from English.)
Logika i metodologiia nauki: IV Vses. simpozium, Kiev, iiun’ 1965. Moscow, 1967. Pages 56–67. (Translated from English.)
Vychislitel’nye mashiny i myshlenie. Moscow, 1967. (Translated from English.)
Integral’nye roboty. Moscow, 1973. (Collection of articles translated from English.)
Nilsson, N. Iskusstvennyi intellekt. Moscow, 1973. (Translated from English.)
Ajdukiewicz, K. Logika pragmatyczna. Warsaw, 1965.
Morris, C. W. Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Chicago, 1938.
Russell, B. An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth. New York [1940].
Martin, R. M. Toward a Systematic Pragmatics. Amsterdam, 1959.
Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers, 2nd ed., vols. 5–6. Cambridge, Mass., 1960.