In a sense, pragmatics is seen as an understanding between people to obeycertain rules of interaction. In everyday language, the meanings of words and
phrases are constantly implied and not explicitly stated. In certain
situations, words can have a certain meaning. You might think that words always
have a specifically defined meaning, but that is not always the case.
Pragmatics studies how words can be interpreted in different ways based on the
situation.
Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk
in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology,
linguistics and anthropology. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is
conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how
the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge
(grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener but also on the context of
the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent
of the speaker, and other factors. In that respect, pragmatics explains how
language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since meaning relies on
the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance.
The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic
competence.
Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguisticsas outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure. In many cases, it expanded upon his ideathat language has an analyzable structure, composed of parts that can bedefined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being. The field did not gain linguists' attention until the 1970s, when two different schools emerged: the Anglo-American pragmatic thought and the European continental pragmatic thought (also called the perspective view)
