PRAGMATICS
PRAGMATICS A. DEFINITION OF PRAGMATICS & ACCORDING TO EXPERTS Pragmatics dates back to philosophical thinking of the early 19th century and was introduced by the American philosopher Charles W. Morris (1901-1979) as one of the three components of semiotics, the science of signs. Specifically, Morris defined pragmatics as “the study of the relation of signs to interpreters” (1938, p. 6). In modern linguistics, pragmatics is broadly defined as the study of language use in context. See definitions below. Pragmatics can be analyzed from two perspectives, the Cognitive-Philosophical view (or Anglo-American pragmatics) and the Sociocultural-Interactional view (or European-Continental pragmatics) (Haugh, 2008; Huang, 2007). The first is referred to as the ‘component view,’ and it examines the ‘systematic study of meaning by virtue of, or dependent on, the use of language’ (p. 341). It is mainly concerned with central topics such as implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, and...