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Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic. Another perspective is that pragmatics deals with the ways we reach our goal in communication. Suppose a person wanted to ask someone else to stop smoking. This could be achieved by using several utterances. The person could simply say, 'Stop smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear semantic meaning; alternatively, the person could say, 'Whew, this room could use an air purifier' which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning.

Pragmatics is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to grasp, and can only truly be learned with experience.



While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics, pragmatics continues its tradition. Also influential were Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.

Non-referential uses of languageEdit

Roman Jakobson identified six functions of language, only one of which is the traditional system of reference.

  • referential: conveys information about some real phenomenon
  • expressive: describes feelings of the speaker
  • conative: attempts to elicit some behavior from the addressee
  • phatic: builds a relationship between both parties in a conversation
  • metalingual: self-references
  • poetic: focuses on the text independent of reference

Émile Benveniste discussed pronouns "I" and "you", arguing that they are fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject.

Michael Silverstein has argued that the "non-referential index" communicates meaning without being explicitly attached to semantic content.

Related fieldsEdit

There is a considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community. However, sociolinguists tend to be more oriented towards variations within such communities.



Suzette Haden Elgin has also written a number of books known of as the Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense series, where she extensively outlines structured methods like those surveyed in pragmatics to defend against the use of pejoratives in various common situations, drawing parallels between applied linguistics and martial arts techniques.

Linguistic anthropologyEdit


Pragmatics in philosophyEdit

Jaques Derrida once remarked that some of linguistic pragmatics aligned well with the program he outlined in Of Grammatology.

Linguistic pragmatics underpins Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. In Gender Trouble, she claims that gender and sex are not natural categories, but called into being by discourse. In Excitable Speech she extends her theory of performativity to hate speech, arguing that the designation of certain utterances as "hate speech" affects their pragmatic function.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics"). They draw three conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative utterance doesn't communicate information about an act second-hand—it does the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) The distinction between language and speech is untenable. This last conclusion attempts to simultaneously refute Saussure's division between langue and parole and Chomsky's distinction between surface structure and deep structure. [2]

Significant worksEdit

Topics in pragmaticsEdit

See alsoEdit


  1. Duranti, Alessandro (1997). Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.



External linksEdit


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