Pragmatic meaning

With the many words in the English language, I’m sure you’ve come across some of them that have a similar ring. Those words might confuse you as to what to use. Take ‘pragmatic’ and ‘practical,’ for example. They might seem similar, but there’s also a sure difference between them. What Is The Difference Between ‘Pragmatic’ And ‘Practical?’ The main difference between ‘pragmatic’ and ‘practical’ is their usage. We use ‘pragmatic’ mainly to express a way of thinking or an attribute, while we use ‘practical’ to describe people, actions, ideas, and the like. Though we can interchange them at times, they are not always synonymous. We use ‘pragmatic’ more to describe a person’s characteristic or a particular way of realistic thinking. For example, ‘Their proposed solution was very pragmatic’ shows that the way they thought of a solution was logical, feasible, and sensible. On the other hand, we use ‘practical’ more to describe people or actions that are logical and functional. It refers to what is realistic and possible. For example, ‘June wore heels today, they weren’t practical for hiking’ shows that June wearing heels was not a logical or realistic action. What Does ‘Pragmatic’ Mean? We use ‘pragmatic’ to describe a way of thinking or an idea that is logical and feasible. It simply means that if something or someone is ‘pragmatic,’ it is sensible, and it matches the actual and current conditions of the situation. According to ‘Pragmatic’ follows the principle of the philosoph...

When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’; When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’; When he says no, he is not a diplomat. — Voltaire (Quoted, in Spanish, in Escandell 1993.) These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — may or may not be fair to diplomats, but are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, it is possible for different speakers in different circumstances to mean different things using those words. How is this possible? What’s the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions that pragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughly speaking, serve to characterize the field of pragmatics. Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which we will mean specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language. Logic and semantics traditionally deal with properties of types of expressions, and not with properties that differ from token to token, or use to use, or, as w...

"Intrinsic to this decision-making process [in using language to communicate] are several principles that concur to define the nature of pragmatic competence. In particular, individuals make choices and build strategies based on some of the unique properties of pragmatic/communicative competence, such as: • variability: the property of communication that defines the range of communicative possibilities, among which is formulating communicative choices; • negotiability: the possibility of making choices based on flexible strategies; • adaptibility; the ability to modulate and regulate communicative choices in relation to the communicative context; • salience: the degree of awareness reached by communicative choices; • indeterminacy: the possibility to re-negotiate pragmatic choices as the interaction unfolds in order to fulfill communicative intentions; • dynamicity: development of the communicative interaction in time." (From "From Pragmatics to Neuropragmatics" by M. Balconi and S. Amenta) Sources • Thomas, Jenny. "Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure," 1983. Rpt. in World Englishes: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, Vol. 4, ed. by Kingsley Bolton and Braj B. Kachru. Routledge, 2006 • Balconi, M.; Amenta, S. "From Pragmatics to Neuropragmatics." Neuropsychology of Communication, Springer, 2010 • Cook, V.J.; M. Newson, M. "Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction." Wiley-Blackwell, 1996) Nordquist, Richard. "Pragmatic Competence." ThoughtCo, Aug. 26, 2020, thoughtco.com/pr...