According to Nordquist in his article on Pragmatics on the ThoughtCo. journal, “Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the use of language in social contexts and the ways in which people produce and comprehend meanings through language.” In other words, pragmatics is in contrast with semantics as semantics is about getting meanings of texts while pragmatics is about getting meanings depending on the context such as background knowledge, setting and speakers (p. 248). This paper studies the domains of pragmatics by looking at three topics; Speech Act Theory, Grice’s Maxims, and the Politeness Theory.
The Speech Act theory is concerned with how words are used to pass information as well as perform actions. A philosopher known as J.L Austin introduced this theory and later developed by Searle who introduced that there are levels of actions utterances are expected to perform. The two generally wanted to express that people use language differently to achieve different objectives (p. 252).
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The second pragmatic domain is Grice’s Maxims, also known as the cooperative principle, which claims that people in a conversation will talk in a cooperative manner to ensure that the conversation is smooth (p.253). In his theory, Grice gives a list of four maxims; maxim of quantity where one tries being informative, the maxim of quality where tries being truthful, the maxim of relation where one tries being relevant, and the maxim of manner where one tries being clear. Conversations greatly make use of this principle (P.256).
The last theory in the discussion is the Politeness Theory, which was drawn from face theory. It talks about the different face –threatening acts that people can pull when talking to each other depending on power, distance, and rank that could either be a positive or negative face (p.257). For example, one could pull a positive face when talking to a boss and a negative face when talking to a new incompetent intern at work.
Pragmatics is about getting meaning depending on context. Different theories such as the Speech Act Theory, Grice’s Maxims, and the Politeness Theory are there to show pragmatics in action. They all in one way or another present how a language could pass information depending on the current situation, which is very different from its semantic.
- References
Nordquist, R. (2018, February 20). Pragmatics (Language). ThoughtCo . Retrieved May 10, 2018, from https://www.thoughtco.com/pragmatics-language-1691654
Ronald, W., & Janet, F. M. (2015). Pragmatics. In W. Ronald, & F. M. Janet, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (7th ed., pp. 248-261). Wiley Blackwell. Retrieved May 10, 2018, from http://lx16.yolasite.com/resources/%5BRonald_Wardhaugh%2C_Janet_M._Fuller%5D_An_Introductio(BookZZ.org).pdf
