PRAGMATICS
PRAGMATICS. A branch of LINGUISTICS which originally examined the problem of how listeners uncover speakers' intentions. It is sometimes defined as the study of ‘speaker meaning’, as opposed to linguistic meaning: the utterance I'm thirsty might need to be interpreted as Go and buy me a drink and should not necessarily be taken at face value as a simple statement. The term is usually attributed to the British philosopher Charles Morris (1938–71), who distinguished between SYNTAX (the relations of sings to one another), SEMANTICS (the relations of signs to objects), and pragmatics (the relations of signs to interpretations). Recently, pragmatics has expanded into a wide and somewhat vague topic which includes anything relating to the way in which people communicate that cannot be captured by conventional linguistic analysis. Within pragmatics, discourse analysis (the study of language in discourse) has become a major focus of attention.
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PRAGMATICS
