Talk:Pragmatics

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Pragmatics subordinated
Isn't it highly debateable to state, firmly in the beginning of the article, that pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics? --Xact (talk) 20:35, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Why is that debatable? Why wouldn't pragmatics be considered a subfield of linguistics? KadedraDobyne (talk) 22:14, 3 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Speech pragmatics is also a field related to speech pathology. It is taught to autistic children.  It's not just context.  It has to do with nonverbal communication. https://www.asha.org/public/speech/development/Pragmatics/  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Skysong263 (talk • contribs) 17:15, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Intent or pragmatics with random, success, selection
Put a bunch of marbles in a bag. Pick one out without looking at it. Would this be a random selection or a selection at random ? It would be a selection at random but the intent is that consciousness is involved. Usually the symbol string "random" is not associated with consciousness. The symbol string randomness is usually associated with purposelessness.


 * There was an accumulation of sand over time on the moon. No intent -  LogosCalamus
 * There was an accumulation of fish by the fishermen. Intent
 * There was a natural accumulation of sand over time on the moon.  No intent
 * There was a natural selection of sand over time on the moon. No intent
 * There was a selection of fish by the fishermen. Intent
 * There was a natural accumulation of fish by the fishermen. What would be the intent? 
 * There was a natural selection of fish by the fishermen. What would be the intent?
 * There was an artificial selection of fish by the fishermen. Why would a conscious selection be artificial - what is so artificial about it?
 * The present Toyota model descended with modification. Intent
 * Descent with modification as used by Darwin - Who did the modifying - was there intent?
 * http://www.perrymarshallspeaks.com and http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ for the pattern - design distinction.TongueSpeaker (talk) 05:53, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Vague name references

 * According to Morris, Pragmatics tries to understand ...

Which Morris is referred to here? Do we have an article on him/her? Can we put his/her full name here and link to the article? --Jim Henry 18:03, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Some google searching on my part suggests this probably refers to someone named Charles Morris. There's also the question of who "Leech" and "Sperber and Wilson" are. These are probably references to specific works of theirs and it would be nice to know which those were as well. --Taak 21:20, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Many references are not cited in the subsections of the article. LesleyMich1 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 02:52, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Pragmatics != pragmatism
Pragmatics is a philosophical movement founded by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James - this article seems more than a little confused. Steven Zenith 01:38, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Are you sure you aren't thinking of pragmatism, Steven? -Seth Mahoney 06:47, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)


 * Seth's right. Pragmatism is the philosophical movement - I am not sure what confused me here. Someone editing this page might consider relating pragmatics, to logic, syntax and semantics - and adding an explanation of pragmatics in the context of Pragmatism and Pragmaticism.  --Steven Zenith 08:26, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Moves and merges
Shouldn't the co-operative principle and conversational maxims pages be integrated? --shudder 20:24, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree, maybe they should be; there's a lot of redundancy between them. But which should be the primary article into which the other article's content is merged?
 * Also, I suspect that Implication (pragmatics) might should be moved to Implicature. If you knows more about this than I do (as you probably do), please comment on Talk:Implication (pragmatics). --Jim Henry | Talk 18:08, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * No, it really shouldn't. Grice's theory is only ONE pragmatics theory, and furthermore one considered outdated by many. The articles should certainly be linked, but definitely not merged into one - otherwise we'd also have to merge in Relevance Theory, Speech Acts, and all other pragmatics topics. It'd become unmanagable. Yamx 00:01, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

the speech act link at the bottom of the page seems a little outt place. Kɔffeedrinksɔ|you 15:53, 17 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Why? Speeach Act Theory is definitely a topic in Pragmatics - or wasn't that what you meant? Yamx 00:01, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism
Someone put that a pragmatist scholar was poke-master at the top of the origins section. I dont know what it said before that. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Sjcarlin (talk • contribs) 23:24, 7 February 2007 (UTC).

Examples please!
This article is singularly lacking in illustrative examples, which makes it hard for non-experts to understand. (Unfortunately this is an increasing trend with Wikipedia, it seems.)

It would be nice to have a few examples, with explanations, following Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of the sentence, while the speaker meaning is the piece of information (or proposition) that the speaker is trying to convey.

For example,

What are you drinking? (in a social context) means What would you like to drink, and can I buy it for you?

Would you like to sweep the floor? (said by boss to worker) means I command you to sweep the floor

I really love my mother-in-law may well mean the exact opposite, depending on context.

--84.9.95.214 21:41, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

linking Austin's acts to the Jakobson's uses of language
having looked at Austrin's Illocutionary, locutionary, perlocutionary acts I really can't see how they link to referential, poetic and connative functions at all. Poetic certainly seems unrelated to locutionary, and I think we need an expert to reconsider this...

Yeah, you're right. I added that originally, but it was kind of dumb. There is sort of a correspondence (and indeed, I used "sort of" to describe the connection) but that's not really encyclopedic. I should probably delete all those. Superabo 00:41, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Can we make this article really good?
Yes, we can! This seems like the best place to overview a bunch of topics at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy/theory: speech acts, performativity, indexicality, etc. are all related. Superabo 00:47, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Messy ending
There are a ton of different sections, and I feel compelled to add one for references.


 * 1) 5 Significant works
 * 2) 6 Topics in pragmatics
 * 3) 7 Bibliography
 * 4) 8 See also
 * 5) 9 External links

Can these be collapsed a little?

Definition of Pragmatics
There was no definition of pragmatics, so I took a stab at it (first two paragraphs at top). I know this will need refining and correcting, but hopefully it will be a start. I wonder whether the three paragraphs/sentences following the first two paragraphs belong up at the top... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Viverechristus (talk • contribs) 20:45, August 29, 2007 (UTC)
 * That definition seems to unduly privilege Speech Act theory. I've made a second stab at it; let's hope I'll be revised in fewer than twenty months. Cnilep (talk) 18:51, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Literal Meaning (Recanati, Searle)
Inre: the introduction to this article: "Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated" I think it might be useful to either reformulate this (toss it out) or include some discussion of "pragmatic"-ish theories of literal meaning (see, e.g., "Literal Meaning" by Recanati, or the short essay of the same name by Searle) - namely, the claim that there is nothing "explicitly stated" so to speak, but "literal meaning" itself comes from language as utterance in conversation. This provides an interesting counterpoint to different "levels" of theories of meaning - to vastly oversimplify, one could say there are three schools leading up to a [more purely] pragmatic theory: intentionalist semantics (Grice, etc), formal [truth-conditional] semantics (Searle, Frege, early Wittgenstein), and use-theory (later Wittgenstein). A pragmatic theory of meaning (which might mean different things to Habermas, Recanati, or Bakhtin) then stands as a move towards unifying and rectifying the individual flaws of these three former schools of meaning. While I don't think this article would be a suitable place to fully delve into, for example, Habermas' notion of communicative rationality (where he brings together the aforementioned schools through the tripartite structure of validity claims to sincerity, [objective] truth, and [inter-subjective] rightness) I do think it could be quite useful to present pragmatics as offering a unified theory of meaning. As it currently stands, the introduction makes it sound like pragmatics is looking at body language etc as an addition to the literal meaning of the words themselves, which - in my mind - sorely misrepresents the fullness of a pragmatic theory of meaning.

Any objections, then, to at least countering passages such as "The person could simply say, 'Stop smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear semantic meaning; alternatively, the person could say, 'Whew, this room could use an air purifier' which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning." with the more "extreme" claims of, e.g., Recanati that there is no meaning but pragmatic meaning? After all, if this is an article about pragmatics, it should present the full-on [potential] conclusions of the discipline...

I'll gladly do the editing, I just wanted to see why none of this is currently mentioned.

V krishna (talk) 01:55, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Request
All those of you watching this page, please come and have a look at linguistics. There is a gross misrepresentation and censorship taking place there. Post-structural linguistics has been deleted and censored by the community there, and I urge you to participate in the discussion to restore a balanced view for the article.  Supriya  13:10, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Philosophy Section
Ok, almost everyone who has done early work on this subject were anglo-american philosophers, most of the reading list consists of anglo-american philosophers, but the philosophy section consists of an incoherent few paragraphs about Derrida et al? Ailun (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 15:27, 6 March 2009 (UTC).

Minor huh in Origin

 * While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological linguistics[clarification needed], pragmatics continues its tradition.

why is this relevant here? Paragraph is too sketchy and compact for a non-linguist to understand. One or a few introductory sentences on anthropological linguistics, why it developed, and how Chomsky repudiated it, would be interesting to read. The section Origin reads like kind of a message from one professional linguist to another. ... said: Rursus (bork²) 11:01, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Tigers are obligate carnivores, not omnivores.
Just fixed a factual error in one of the examples. Lyricthrope (talk) 16:58, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Citations?
This article is missing a lot of citations. In some places, such as the section at the end on literary theory, there are direct references to works by Butler, Derrida, and Benveniste, without any page numbers or a formal citation to cross-reference any of the work to. There is only one citation in the Ambiguity section (ambiguity being one of the easiest ways to demonstrate pragmatics and pragmatic failure) and the link is broken. It brings up a 404 message. I was also looking for some sort of citations when discussing honorifics and the T-V distinction. -Barnyard sand (talk) 22:28, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Deictic Expressions
This article contains a lot of allusions to deixis, and "the rooting of utterances in the speech situation". Indeed, this is more or less what the study of pragmatics is- how context and speech situation relates to meaning. Despite being central to the subject, deixis is referenced only once in the article, and then incorrectly. "The autumn leaves have all fallen now" is said to be deictic, yet not a single word or word combination of that sentence is a relative pronoun that could differ based on context. The article could be made much clearer with description and accurate examples of deictic words, including "you", "here", and "tomorrow". -Barnyard sand (talk) 22:43, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Misleading Information
In the section Referential uses of Language there is reference to Peircean Semeiotics, specifically, the Peircean Trichotomy. The section states that,"A second way to define the signified and signifier relationship is C.S. Peirce's Peircean Trichotomy," yet this is directly contradictory to Peirce's project. The signifier/signified relatioship is dyadic while the Peircean is triadic, that is, Icon, Index, and Symbol are not founded on Signifier/Signified, they are in fact another theory on the same level as Signifier/Signified. Specifically, Peirce ground this triad--Icon, Index, and Symbol--on another triad: Representamen, object and interpretant. This is backed up by Thomas (T). L. Short's book Peirce's Theory of Signs (pg xiii, 16-21), "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs" from Philosophical Writings of Peirce (pg 89-95) Selected and Edited by Justus Buchler (pg 98-119), and An Introduction to Peirce's Philosophy by James Feibleman. Thus it is misleading to consider Peirce's semeiotic as "a second way to define the signified and signifier relationship." However, how should this edit be made? A simple clarification? A separation from the Saussurean model? A separate subsection? Garland41 (talk) 00:06, 26 February 2020 (UTC)Garland41

Class Project
Hello! I added 3 new sources, various hyper links, a link to a journal about Referential Expressions, as well as a sub heading section about Referential Expressions. My edits were completed for a class project in a Linguistics course I am taking. Thank you!! Agebauer (talk) 01:50, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Etymology
That might be the etymology of the world "pragmatics" as a whole, but I don't think that's really relevant. The origin of the term "pragmatics" specifically as a subfield of linguistics would be more suitable, if you're gonna have a section on the etymology at all. Farleigheditor (talk) 18:51, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Pragmatics
Movement of pragmatics from philosophical pragmatics threading cognitive pragmatics to neo-gricean pragmatics 197.156.137.151 (talk) 09:15, 18 April 2022 (UTC)