Pragmatics
What is Pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of how people use language in context to communicate meaning beyond the literal words they say. It examines how tone, body language, shared knowledge, and social norms help us interpret what someone truly means in a conversation.
The Basic Idea
Let’s explore the different ways we can interpret the sentence “I never said she was boring.” Depending on where the emphasis is placed by the speaker, the meaning of the sentence can vary quite a bit.
Even though the words are consistent and follow the same order, making them semantically identical, multiple potential meanings can be inferred from this simple six-word phrase. We can successfully decode the intention of the speaker thanks to pragmatics, the study of how linguistic utterances are typically used to convey meaning beyond the literal words and grammatical structures of phrases.1 It contrasts with semantics, which looks at the literal meaning of words and sentences.
While words and grammar can be thought of as the building blocks of language, pragmatics is the blueprint that tells us how to build a meaningful conversation. Things like context, emphasis, tone, facial expressions, and body posture can all transform the meaning of a phrase. Pragmatics helps us read between the lines and decode if someone is asking a question, being sarcastic, is annoyed with us, or is excited. Pragmatics can be explored in spoken speech, written text, and even digital forms of communication like text messaging, making it an integral aspect of navigating our everyday interactions.
Words are fluid, and can mean different things in different circumstances. [...] And what we draw upon in memory is not a lexicon of definitions but a network of associations among words and the kinds of events and actors they typically convey.
— Steven Pinker, Canadian psycholinguist, in his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature2
About the Author
Emilie Rose Jones
Emilie currently works in Marketing & Communications for a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed her Masters of English Literature at UBC in 2021, where she focused on Indigenous and Canadian Literature. Emilie has a passion for writing and behavioural psychology and is always looking for opportunities to make knowledge more accessible.
