Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context — how speakers use language to do things, and how listeners infer what speakers intend beyond what is literally said. Where Semantics asks what does this sentence mean?, pragmatics asks what does the speaker mean by saying this, here, now?
Grice's Cooperative Principle
Paul Grice (1975) proposed that conversation operates on a Cooperative Principle: speakers are assumed to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. This generates four maxims:
| Maxim | Principle |
|---|---|
| Quantity | Say enough, but not too much |
| Quality | Say what you believe to be true |
| Relation | Be relevant |
| Manner | Be clear, brief, orderly |
When speakers deliberately violate a maxim, they generate implicature — meaning that must be inferred. "It's getting cold in here" violates Relation if taken literally (no one asked about the temperature) but implicates a request to close the window. Understanding implicature is a major challenge for L2 learners.
Politeness Theory
Brown and Levinson (1987) proposed that speakers manage face — the public self-image everyone claims. Face-threatening acts (requests, refusals, criticism) require mitigation strategies:
- Positive politeness — attend to the hearer's desire to be liked ("That's a great idea, but...")
- Negative politeness — respect the hearer's autonomy ("Could you possibly...?", "I was wondering if...")
- Off-record — use hints and implicature ("It's a long walk to the station" = please offer a ride)
Politeness strategies vary dramatically across cultures, making this a critical area for intercultural communicative competence.
Pragmatic Competence in ELT
Pragmatic competence is a core component of communicative competence (Bachman, 1990; Canale & Swain, 1980). Learners may be grammatically accurate but pragmatically inappropriate — too direct, too indirect, or misreading implicatures.
- Speech Acts — the primary unit of pragmatic analysis. Teaching Language Functions (requesting, apologizing, complaining) is essentially teaching speech act realization patterns.
- Deixis — context-dependent reference is inherently pragmatic. Learners must track who I, you, here, now, this refer to in shifting contexts.
- Discourse markers — words like well, so, actually, you know carry pragmatic rather than semantic meaning, signaling attitude, hedging, or topic management.
- Cross-cultural pragmatics — L1 pragmatic norms transfer to L2 use, causing misunderstandings. Teaching pragmatic awareness — not just linguistic forms — is essential.