Pragmatics

Pragmatics studies how context, speaker intentions, and social conventions shape meaning in language use. It distinguishes what an utterance communicates from what its words encode.

Implicature: Meaning conveyed indirectly by an utterance rather than explicitly stated. It explains how an utterance can communicate more than its literal content.
Semantics: The study of conventional meaning in words, phrases, and sentences. Its focus on encoded meaning contrasts with pragmatics’ attention to use and context.
Charles W. Morris: An American philosopher who distinguished syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics in the study of signs. His framework helped establish pragmatics as a distinct dimension of semiotic analysis.
Politeness theory: The study of linguistic strategies for managing face, respect, and social relations. It shows how social expectations shape indirectness and the form of requests.
Truth-conditional semantics: An approach that characterizes sentence meaning through the conditions under which sentences are true. It models literal content, while pragmatic interpretation also accounts for context-dependent inference.
Presupposition: An assumption treated as already accepted or established when an utterance is made. Pragmatic interpretation often depends on assumptions an utterance takes for granted.
Syntax: The system of rules governing how words combine into sentences. Pragmatic interpretation operates on expressions whose structure syntax describes.
J. L. Austin: A British philosopher whose work developed the theory of performative utterances and speech acts. His account made the actions performed through language central to pragmatic inquiry.
Conversational implicature: An implied meaning inferred from an utterance and conversational expectations. It captures how speakers convey intended meanings without stating them directly.
Formal semantics: The use of formal tools to analyze linguistic meaning and compositional structure. Its focus on encoded structure highlights what pragmatic analysis adds through use.

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