PRAGMATICS

GROUP 1
1. INDRASARI 1652044001
2. Nurul Fahmi1652044002
3. Wulandari Pertiwi 1652044034
 DEFINITION OF PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the use of

language in social contexts and the ways in which people produce
and comprehend meanings through language.

Stalnaker 1970: “Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the

contexts in which they are performed.”
Kempson 1988: “Pragmatics provides an account of how
sentences are used in utterances to convey information in context.”

(Nerlich, [1956], 1992: 3): In the third stage (of its evolution),
semantics merges with what one would nowadays call
“pragmatics”: word-meaning is now seen as an epiphenomenon of
sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning.
PRAGMATICS AND HUMAN LANGUAGE
BEHAVIOR

pragmatics is needed if we want

In real life, that is, among real
a fuller, deeper, and generally
language users, there is no such thing
more reasonable account of
as ambiguity--excepting certain, rather
human language behavior.
special occasions, on which one tries
to deceive one's partner or 'keep a door
open. (Jacob L. Mey, Pragmatics: An
Introduction, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell,
2001)
 ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS OF PRAGMATICS
The definition of pragmatics as concerned with
encoded aspects of context may be less
restrictive than it seems at first sight:
(a) principles of language usage have as
corollaries principles of interpretation.
(b) principles of language usage are likely in
the long run to impinge on grammar . So the
multiplicity of alternative definitions may well
seem greater than it really is."(Stephen C.
Levinson, Pragmatics. Cambridge Univ. Press,
1983)
"It should be noted that, outside the USA, the
term pragmatics is often used in a much broader
sense, so as to include a great number of
phenomena that American linguists would
regard as belonging strictly to sociolinguistics:
such as politeness, narratives, and the signaling
of power relations." (R.L. Trask, Language and
Linguistics: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed., ed. by
Peter Stockwell. Routledge, 2007)
 PRAGMATICS AND GRAMMAR
"Since the nature of grammar is held essentially to
resolve into issues of the knowledge of so-called rules
of composition (or competence) and, on the other
hand, pragmatics is concerned with characterizing the
behavior of language users (as performance)

This means that they address the formative impact of actual

instances of language use on the system as a whole, and
that meaning intentions, as a result of them being
intertwined with form in any one such instance, play a
crucial role at every level of organization, from the
morpheme, over idioms and formulae, to constructional
templates.
This is how meaning (purpose), use (behavior), and
linguistic knowledge can be seen as interrelated ......”
(Frank Brisard, "Introduction: Meaning and Use in
Grammar."Grammar, Meaning and Pragmatics, ed. by
Frank Brisard, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jef Verschueren.
John Benjamins, 2009)
 PRAGMATICS AND SEMANTICS

The boundary between what counts as semantics and what counts as

pragmatics is still a matter of open debate among linguists. There is also
an intuitive sense in which the two are distinct: Most people feel they
have an understanding of the 'literal' meaning of a word or sentence as
opposed to what it might be used to convey in a certain context. Upon
trying to disentangle these two types of meaning from each other,
however, things get considerably more difficult."
(Betty J. Birner, Introduction to Pragmatics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)