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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Semantics and Pragmatics

Pragmatics

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/præɡˈmætɪks/nounCore term

In linguistics & grammar, pragmatics means: The study of how context affects meaning: how speakers mean more than they actually say, and how listeners work out intended meanings, politeness and hints.

In Turkish: edimbilim, pragmatik, kullanımbilim

How it is used

Used in linguistics and language teaching (pragmatic competence, pragmatic failure). Typical topics are speech acts, implicature, deixis and politeness. In everyday English the adjective pragmatic means practical or realistic, which is a different sense.

Example sentences

  1. 'Can you pass the salt?' asks about ability, but pragmatics explains why everyone hears it as a request.

  2. Learners with good grammar can still struggle with pragmatics, for example by sounding too direct in emails.

Common collocations

  • pragmatic competence
  • pragmatic failure
  • cross-cultural pragmatics
  • politeness
  • semanticsThe study of meaning in language: what words, phrases and sentences mean, and how their meanings relate to each other and to the world.
  • contextThe situation, surrounding text and shared knowledge in which something is said or written, which help listeners and readers understand the intended meaning.
  • speech actAn utterance seen as an action, such as promising, apologizing, requesting, warning or thanking, rather than only as a way of giving information.
  • implicatureMeaning that a speaker suggests without saying it directly and that a listener works out from context, as when 'Some students passed' suggests that not all of them did.
  • deixisThe use of words whose meaning depends on who is speaking, where and when, such as I, you, here, there, now, this and yesterday.

More terms: Semantics and Pragmatics

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