Pragmatics
In
linguistics and
semiotics,
pragmatics is concerned with bridging the explanatory gap between
sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. The study of how
context influences the interpretation is then crucial. In this setting,
context refers to any factor â€" linguistic, objective, or subjective â€" that affects the actual
interpretation of signs and expressions.
Pragmatics is interested predominantly in utterances, made up of sentences, and usually in the context of
conversations.
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.
According to
Charles W. 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
syntax (or "syntactics") examines the relationship between signs.
*
Paul Grice's
cooperative principle and
conversational maxims
*
Brown & Levinson's Politeness Theory*
Geoffrey Leech's
politeness principle*
Levinson's Presumptive Meanings*
Jürgen Habermas's
universal pragmatics*
Dan Sperber and
Deirdre Wilson's
relevance theory*
Entailment*
Deixis*
Implicature*
Practical reason*
Presupposition*
Speech act* Austin, J. L. (1962)
How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press.
* Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. (1978)
Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
* Carston, Robyn (2002)
Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
* Cole, Peter, ed.. (1978)
Pragmatics. (Syntax and Semantics, 9). New York: Academic Press.
* Dijk, Teun A. van. (1977)
Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman.
* Grice, H. Paul. (1989)
Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
* Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983)
Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
* Levinson, Stephen C. (1983)
Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
* Levinson, S. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press.
* Mey, Jacob L. (1993)
Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).
* Potts, Christopher. (2005)
The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Thomas, Jenny (1995)
Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Longman.
* Verschueren, Jef. (1999)
Understanding Pragmatics. London, New York: Arnold Publishers.
* Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, eds. (1995)
Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
* Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson (1967)
Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York: Norton.
* Wierzbicka, Anna (1991)
Cross-cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
* Yule, George (1996)
Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study). Oxford University Press.
*
Charles Peirce*
Charles Peirce (Bibliography)*
Paul Grice*
Semiotics*
Sign relation*
Sitz im Leben*
Stephen C. Levinson* Liu, Shaozhong, "What is Pragmatics?",
Eprint
