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?
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.
Brown and Levinson (1987) proposed that speakers manage face, the public self-image everyone claims. Face-threatening acts (requests, refusals, criticism) require mitigation strategies:
Politeness strategies vary dramatically across cultures, making this a critical area for intercultural communicative competence.
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.