Read the notes, then try the practice. It adapts as you go.When you're ready.
Session Length
~17 min
Adaptive Checks
15 questions
Transfer Probes
8
Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies how context shapes meaning in communication. While semantics examines the literal meaning of words and sentences, pragmatics investigates how speakers convey and listeners interpret meaning beyond what is explicitly stated. This includes the study of implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, and conversational structure. Pragmatics recognizes that successful communication depends not only on grammatical competence but also on the shared knowledge, social relationships, and situational factors that surround every utterance.
The field emerged from the work of philosophers of language such as J.L. Austin, John Searle, and H.P. Grice, who demonstrated that language use is a form of social action. Austin's speech act theory showed that utterances do not merely describe reality but perform actions such as promising, requesting, and apologizing. Grice's Cooperative Principle and its associated maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner provided a framework for understanding how listeners infer meanings that speakers imply but never explicitly state, a phenomenon known as conversational implicature.
Today, pragmatics is a vibrant interdisciplinary field with applications in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, and clinical speech-language pathology. Researchers study how politeness strategies vary across cultures, how children acquire pragmatic competence, how conversational context is managed through turn-taking and topic shifts, and how pragmatic impairments manifest in conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and traumatic brain injury. The field continues to expand as scholars integrate insights from cognitive science, sociology, and information theory to build richer models of human communication.
One step at a time.
Meaning that a speaker implies and a listener infers from an utterance without it being explicitly stated, relying on shared assumptions about cooperative communication as described by Grice's Cooperative Principle.
Example: When asked 'Did you enjoy the movie?' and someone replies 'The popcorn was good,' the implicature is that the movie itself was not enjoyable.
The theory, developed by J.L. Austin and John Searle, that utterances are not merely statements about the world but actions performed through language, classified into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.
Example: Saying 'I promise to be there at noon' is not just a description of a future event but the act of making a promise, which creates a social obligation.
The principle that participants in a conversation are expected to cooperate by making their contributions as informative, truthful, relevant, and clear as required for the current purposes of the exchange.
Example: If someone asks 'Where is the bank?' and you reply 'There is one around the corner on Main Street,' you follow the maxims by being relevant, truthful, and sufficiently informative.
Background information or assumptions that a speaker takes for granted as already known or accepted by the listener when making an utterance, and which remain constant whether the statement is affirmed or negated.
Example: The sentence 'Have you stopped texting during class?' presupposes that the listener was previously texting during class, regardless of whether they answer yes or no.
Expressions whose meaning depends entirely on the context of the utterance, including the identity of the speaker, the time and place of speaking, and the gestural or discourse context. Categories include person, spatial, temporal, social, and discourse deixis.
Example: In 'I will meet you here tomorrow,' every content word except 'meet' is deictic: 'I,' 'you,' 'here,' and 'tomorrow' all shift reference depending on who is speaking, where, and when.
A framework developed by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson describing how speakers manage 'face' -- the public self-image that every person wants to maintain -- through positive politeness, negative politeness, indirect speech, and off-record strategies.
Example: Instead of directly saying 'Close the window,' a speaker might use negative politeness: 'Would you mind closing the window?' to avoid threatening the listener's autonomy.
A cognitive approach to pragmatics proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, which argues that human communication is driven by the search for relevance and that listeners interpret utterances by maximizing cognitive effects while minimizing processing effort.
Example: When someone says 'It's getting late' during a party, the listener does not just register the time but infers the most relevant interpretation -- the speaker wants to leave -- with minimal processing effort.
The intended communicative function of an utterance -- such as asserting, questioning, commanding, promising, or apologizing -- which may differ from its grammatical form.
Example: The sentence 'Can you pass the salt?' has the grammatical form of a yes/no question but carries the illocutionary force of a request.
More terms are available in the glossary.
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