A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

pragmatics 379
pragmalinguistics (n.) A term sometimes used within the study of pragmatics,
to refer to the study of language use from the viewpoint of a language’s
structural resources; it contrasts with those pragmatic studies which examine
the conditions on language use which derive from the social situation (sometimes
referred to as sociopragmatics). A pragmalinguistic approach might
begin with the pronoun system of a language, and examine the way in which
people choose different forms to express a range of attitudes and relationships
(such as deference and intimacy). The latter approach might begin with the
social backgrounds of the participants in an interaction, and examine the way
in which different factors (such as age, sex, class) lead people to choose particular
pronouns.
pragmatics (n.) A term traditionally used to label one of the three major divisions
of semiotics (along with semantics and syntactics). In modern linguistics,
it has come to be applied to the study of language from the point of view of
the users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter
in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has
on the other participants in an act of communication. The field focuses on an
‘area’ between semantics, sociolinguistics and extralinguistic context;
but the boundaries with these other domains are as yet incapable of precise
definition. At present, no coherent pragmatic theory has been achieved, mainly
because of the variety of topics it has to account for – including aspects of
deixis, conversational implicatures, presuppositions, speech acts and discourse
structure.
Partly as a consequence of the potentially vast scope of the subject, several
conflicting definitions have arisen. In a narrow linguistic view, pragmatics deals
only with those aspects of context which are formally encoded in the structure
of a language; they would be part of a user’s pragmatic competence. At the
opposite extreme, it has been defined as the study of those aspects of meaning
not covered by a semantic theory. In this connection, some semanticists see the
subject as contrasting with truth-conditional semantics: it is suggested that
the difficulties which arise in relation to the latter (e.g. how to handle the notion
of presupposition) are more readily explicable with reference to pragmatics.
More inclusively, it has been characterized as the study of the principles and
practice of conversational performance – this including all aspects of language
usage, understanding and appropriateness. Especial attention has been paid
to the range of pragmatic particles which are found in speech (e.g. you know,
I mean, sort of, tag questions) which play an important role in controlling the
pragmatic nature of an interaction.
Several derivative terms have been proposed in order to classify the wide range
of subject-matter involved. Pragmalinguistics has been used by some to refer to
the more linguistic ‘end’ of pragmatics, wherein one studies these matters from
the viewpoint of the structural resources available in a language. Sociopragmatics,
by contrast, studies the way conditions on language use derive from the social
situation. General pragmatics is the study of the principles governing the
communicative use of language, especially as encountered in conversations –
principles which may be studied as putative universals, or restricted to the study
of specific languages. Literary pragmatics applies pragmatic notions (especially