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Article In: Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

Towards an interdisciplinary definition of pragmatics

ORCiD logo with link | King Khalid UniversityAbha
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Abstract
The definition of pragmatics has long oscillated between two views: as a component of linguistics and as a perspective on language use (Haberland, Hartmut, and Jacob Mey. 1977. “Editorial: Linguistics and Pragmatics.” Journal of Pragmatics 11: 1–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Verschueren, Jef, and Jan-Ola Östman (eds). 2009. Key Notions in Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The perspective view, now dominant (Rajagopalan, Kanavillil. 2009. “Pragmatics Today: From a Component of Linguistics to a Perspective of Language.” In Language in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob Mey — A Festschrift, ed. by Bruce Fraser, and Ken Turner, 335–341. Bingley: Emerald. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), commits the field to interdisciplinary inquiry but leaves its conceptual core unsettled. Within Caffi’s (Caffi, Claudia. 2006. “Metapragmatics.” In The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by Keith Brown, 82–88. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2010. “Weakening or Strengthening? A Case of Enantiosemy in Plato’s Gorgias.” In New Approaches to Hedging, ed. by Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch, and Stefan Schneider, 181–202. Bingley: Emerald. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) metapragmatic framework, this study analyzes 365 single-sentence definitions of pragmatics (1938–2025) from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and communication studies. Semantic-field coding and frequency analysis identify five shared core components: contextual relationality, meaningful usage, cognitive communication, functional action, and social system. These inform a unified definition: pragmatics is the study of how language users negotiate context-dependent, socially situated meaning through intentional, inferential, and rule-mediated communication. Countering Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar reductionism and Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. 1971. “Out of the Pragmatic Wastebasket.” Linguistic Inquiry 2 (3): 401–407.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar “wastebasket” critique, this framing positions pragmatics as an interdisciplinary nexus of cognition, interaction, and culture.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A metapragmatic framework
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results and analysis
    • 4.1Contextual relationality
    • 4.2Meaningful usage
    • 4.3Cognitive communication
    • 4.4Functional action
    • 4.5Social system
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process
  • Author queries
  • References
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