Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a topic that intersects many social science fields including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and communication. This entry defines pragmatics and outlines approaches to its study, including some key contributors to pragmatic theories and concepts. The most basic definition of pragmatics is the study of signs as used in actual situations. The root of the word derives from prassein, Greek for “to do,” indicating the association of pragmatics with practice or action. In semiotics, the term was first used by Charles Morris in 1937 to distinguish sign behavior from structure (syntactics) and meaning (semantics). The less specialized definition of pragmatics (as something that is practical, concrete, or realistic) contributed to philosophical pragmatism in the late 1800s, which similarly concerns itself with usefulness and practical consequences, but not necessarily with a semiotic or linguistic focus. The semiotic concept of pragmatics (the use of signs) has influenced distinct research traditions in relational communication and discourse studies.

Pragmatics of Communication

An important theory of interpersonal communication developed out of cybernetics and systems theory. In 1951, Jürgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson introduced the concept of metacommunication (communication about communication) and pointed out that all communicative messages have a pragmatic, metacommunicative aspect—that is, every message is both a report that comments on previous messages in a sequence and also a command that indicates the communicative response expected. Every message functions pragmatically as a metamessage that defines the relationship between the communicating parties and manages their interaction. For example, a female student passing one of her professors in the hallway makes eye contact, smiles, and says, “Hi, Dr. Jones.” Her message functions pragmatically to produce a patterned sequence of interaction (eye contact; friendly, but formal greeting; return greeting) and thereby also both reflects the status of her relationship with the professor (report) and signals her expectation that it will continue as such (command). Thus, as the student and professor communicate, they also implicitly metacommunicate about the system of interaction that constitutes their relationship.

Paul Watzlawick and a network of family therapists that became known in the 1960s as the Palo Alto Group extended this theory in numerous writings, especially Pragmatics of Human Communication in 1967, which opened with a discussion of Charles Morris's semiotic concept of pragmatics and went on to present a series of axioms explaining how interpersonal relationships form self-maintaining cybernetic systems that can be both highly dysfunctional and difficult to change. L. Edna Rogers and other communication scholars have further extended this theory in research on control patterns in interpersonal relationships, and the underlying concept of interaction pragmatics has been widely influential in communication studies.

Discourse Pragmatics

Discourse pragmatics, the study of language in use, is concerned with the intended meaning of speakers beyond what is explicitly stated. Around the time of Morris's definition of pragmatics, six functions of language were defined by Roman Jakobson: referential (refers to a phenomenon), expressive (describes feelings), conative (attempts to elicit behavior), phatic (builds relationships between speakers), metalingual (references self), and poetic (attends to text). Ludwig Wittgenstein further emphasized the contextual and pragmatic dependence of linguistic meaning in his work Philosophical Investigations.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution