User:MickeyG453/Pragmatics

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In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance, conversation, as well as Nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice. This avenue of language study can also have broader societal and cultural implications, as individuals and groups, and their correspondence to language is examined.

Additional Areas Of Study

 * The study of the speaker's meaning focusing not on the phonetic or grammatical form of an utterance but on what the speaker's intentions and beliefs are.
 * The study of the meaning in context and the influence that a given context can have on the message. It requires knowledge of the speaker's identities, and the place and time of the utterance.
 * The study of implicatures: the things that are communicated even though they are not explicitly expressed.
 * The study of relative distance, both social and physical, between speakers in order to understand what determines the choice of what is said and what is not said.
 * The study of what is not meant, as opposed to the intended meaning: what is unsaid and unintended, or unintentional.
 * Information structure, the study of how utterances are marked in order to efficiently manage the common ground of referred entities between speaker and hearer.
 * Formal Pragmatics, the study of those aspects of meaning and use for which context of use is an important factor by using the methods and goals of formal semantics.
 * The study of the role pragmatics in the development of children with autism spectrum disorders or developmental language disorder (DLD)

Related Fields
There is considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both share an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community. However, sociolinguists tend to be more interested in variations in language within such communities. Influences of philosophy and politics are also present in the field of pragmatics, as the dynamics of societies and oppression are expressed through language