History of Pragmatics / Origin of Pragmatics

A Brief Introduction to Pragmatics

Written by 刘吉林，语言学2005研究生

(1) What is Pragmatics

As it is known to most of us,. Pragmatics is one branch of general linguistics, which also includes phonetics, phonology, morphology and semantics. But when we talk about pragmatics, we may ask what it is. So we should define it, and there are a lot of philosopher and linguists who have given their respective ideas about it. Such as Charles Morris’s famous definition of pragmatics as “the study of the relation of signs to interpreters-”, Levinson’s consideration of pragmatics as being “the study of those relations between language and context that is gammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language.”, and Mey’s definition as “Pragmatics studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society.”. But I prefer a definition given by a Chinese professor Ran Yongping, who expressed his idea in the book A Survey of Pragmatics :”Pragmatics is a discipline not only concerning the sense, but also concerning the derivation of sense and the understanding of underlying meaning as its objects. It aims to decipher the negotiation and derivation of meaning in communication. So pragmatics studies, aiming at the derivation of sense during intercommunication, are by-directional dynamic studies.” (语用学不单纯是关于意义的一门学科，而是以意义的产生和对潜在意义的理解作为研究对象，从而揭示交际中人们是如何进行磋商、产生意义的，也即语用学研究是相互应对中的意义为对象的双向动态研究) 冉永平，1998。Professor Ran put emphasis on dynamic studies, which develops from the idea of British scholar Thomas, the founder of dynamic pragmatics, who argued that the studies of pragmatics should aim at interactive sense. Language is alive not dead, and it is for using, so only the dynamic studies are significant.

(2) History of Pragmatics / Origin of Pragmatics