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1 Introduction: What is Pragmatics?

Yan Huang is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland. He has previously taught linguistics at the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and University of Reading, where he was Professor of Theoretical Linguistics. His main research interests are in pragmatics, semantics and syntax, especially the pragmatics–semantics interface and the pragmatics–syntax interface. His published work includes The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora (Cambridge University Press, 1994, re-issued 2007), Anaphora: A Cross-Linguistic Study (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Pragmatics (Oxford University Press, 2007). He has also published a number of articles and reviews in leading international journals of linguistics.

Published: 07 April 2016
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Pragmatics is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. It is a particularly complex subject with all kinds of disciplinary influences and few, if any, clear boundaries. This chapter provides an authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date overview of the contemporary landscape of pragmatics. It starts with the question of what is pragmatics. It then surveys the two main schools of thought in pragmatics: the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. This is followed by a review of macro-pragmatics, which covers cognitively oriented macro-pragmatics, such as experimental, computational, and clinical pragmatics; socially and/or culturally oriented macro-pragmatics, such as politeness and impoliteness studies, cultural, cross- and intercultural, and interpersonal pragmatics; and those branches of macro-pragmatics that are not easily and/or neatly placed in the first two categories, such as historical, corpus, and literary pragmatics. The final section addresses the organization and content of this handbook.

1.1 What Is Pragmatics?

Pragmatics is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. In recent years, it has also become increasingly a central topic in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, informatics, neuroscience, language pathology, anthropology, and sociology. But what is pragmatics? Pragmatics may initially be broadly defined as in (1).

However, though perhaps sufficient for the current purposes, such a definition may be too general and too vague to be of much use. This is because pragmatics is a particularly complex subject with all kinds of disciplinary influences, and few, if any, clear boundaries (see e.g. Levinson 1983 : 5–35 and Ariel 2010 for attempts at defining pragmatics). 1 In section 1.2 , I shall provide two different definitions of pragmatics from two different theoretical points of view.

1.2 Two Main Schools of Thought in Pragmatics

Currently, two schools of thought in pragmatics can be identified: the Anglo-American and the European Continental traditions.

1.2.1 The Anglo-American component view

Within the Anglo-American conception of linguistics and the philosophy of language, pragmatics may be defined as in (2).

This is known as the component view of pragmatics. On this conception, a linguistic theory consists of a number of core components: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Each of the core components has a relatively properly demarcated domain of inquiry. Pragmatics, then, is just another core component placed in the same contrast set within a linguistic theory. By contrast, other ‘hyphenated’ branches of linguistics, such as anthropological, educational, and sociolinguistics, lie outside this set of core components. The component view of pragmatics is to some extent a reflection of the modular conception of the human mind, namely, the claim that the mental architecture of homo sapiens is divided roughly into a central processor and a number of distinctive, specialized mental systems known as modules (e.g. Fodor 1983 ). 2 Two prominent competing theories in the Anglo-American component camp are classical and neo-Gricean pragmatic theory (see e.g. Huang , this volume) and relevance theory (see e.g. Wilson , this volume). 3

1.2.2 The European Continental perspective view

Within the European Continental conception of linguistics, pragmatics is taken to present a functional perspective on all core components and ‘hyphenated’ areas of linguistics and beyond.

This represents the perspective view of pragmatics, namely, the view that pragmatics should be taken as presenting a functional perspective on every aspect of linguistic behaviour. More or less the same can be said of the definition of pragmatics provided within the former Soviet and Eastern European tradition, under which pragmatics (called pragmalinguistics) is in general conceived of as a theory of linguistic communication, including how to influence people through verbal messages, i.e. political propaganda ( Prucha 1983 ). Consequently, within the wider Continental tradition, the empirical orbit of pragmatics has been considerably widened, encompassing not only much that goes under the rubric of non-core branches of linguistics, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis, but also some areas that fall in the province of neighbouring social sciences (see e.g. Huang: 2014 : 5–7 for a critique of this school of thought, but see Verschueren , this volume, for a dissenting view).

However, there has recently been some convergence between the Anglo-American and Continental traditions. On the one hand, important work has been done on micro-pragmatic topics such as implicature, speech acts, and presupposition from a Continental perspective. On the other hand, research within the Anglo-American conception has been extended not only to some core topics in formal syntax such as anaphora and the lexicon in lexical pragmatics but also to certain ‘hyphenated’ domains of linguistics, such as computational, historical, and clinical linguistics, giving rise to computational, historical, and clinical pragmatics (see section 1.3 ). Furthermore, each side of the Anglo-American–Continental divide complements and has much to learn from the other. Whereas the strength of the Anglo-American school lies mainly in theory and philosophical, cognitive, and formal pragmatics, the Continental camp has much to offer in empirical work (empirical pragmatics) and socio-, cross-, and intercultural and part of interlanguage pragmatics.

1.3 Macro-Pragmatics

I move next to what is called macro-pragmatics—the study of the use of language in all aspects. Current topics of inquiry in macro-pragmatics can roughly be divided into three groups: (i) cognitively oriented, (ii) socially and/or culturally oriented, and (iii) those that are not easily or neatly placed in the first two groups.

1.3.1 Group I: Cognitively oriented macro-pragmatics

This category includes cognitive pragmatics, psycho- or psycholinguistic pragmatics (including both developmental and experimental pragmatics), computational pragmatics, clinical pragmatics, neuropragmatics, and part of interlanguage pragmatics.

Cognitive pragmatics has its roots in the emergence of modern cognitive science—an interdisciplinary amalgam of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience—in the 1970s. A typical example of cognitive pragmatics is relevance theory (e.g. Wilson , this volume). Another significant cognitive approach to pragmatics is cognitive pragmatics theory developed by Bruno Bara. Cognitive pragmatics theory offers an explanation of the cognitive processes that are involved in intentional verbal and non-verbal communication. The practitioners of the theory maintain that a ‘partner’ (addressee) in communication establishes the communicative intention of an ‘actor’ (speaker) by identifying the behaviour game that the actor intends him or her to play. Pragmatic phenomena are accounted for in terms of the complexity of the inferential steps that are needed to refer an utterance to a particular behaviour game and the complexity of the underlying mental representations. Cognitive pragmatics theory has been applied to studies of developmental pragmatics in children, the comprehension of pragmatic phenomena in head-injured subjects, and pragmatic decay in subjects with Alzheimer’s disease (e.g. Bara 2010 , this volume ). In these cases, it overlaps with clinical, neuro-, and developmental pragmatics.

Psychopragmatics or psycholinguistic pragmatics is the psycholinguistic study of aspects of language in use and mind. It is primarily concerned with the issue of how human beings acquire, store, produce, and understand the use of language from the vantage point of psychology. Within psychopragmatics, developmental or acquisitional pragmatics studies the empirical development of pragmatic competence in children, utilizing both observation and experiments (e.g. Rollins , this volume). Experimental pragmatics, another subfield of psychopragmatics, which deploys both psycho- and neurolinguistic methods, investigates, through carefully controlled experiments, such important pragmatic issues and theories as scalar implicature, felicity conditions on speech acts, reference, metaphor, neo-Gricean pragmatic theory, and relevance theory. The term ‘experimental pragmatics’ has two senses. In its broad sense, it refers to any investigation by experiment of any phenomenon or issue that is considered to be pragmatic. By contrast, in its narrow sense, the term makes reference to a recent (late 1990s and early 2000s) development in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and the psychology of reasoning that experimentally investigates a particular set of issues at the interface between pragmatics and semantics. These issues, phenomena, and theories include scalar implicatures, default versus contextual versus structural inference theories, the felicity conditions on speech acts, reference, neo-Gricean pragmatic theory, relevance theory, and children’s pragmatic competence. Methodologies typically adopted in psychology and neuroscience, such as reaction times, eye movements, and event-related potentials, are used in experimental pragmatics (e.g. Noveck and Sperber 2004 ; Sauerland and Yatsushiro 2009 ; Meibauer and Steinbach 2011 ; see also Gibbs Jr , this volume). More recently, the scope of work in experimental pragmatics has been considerably widened. One case in point is concerned with the experimental testing of so-called ‘embedded implicature’ (e.g. Huang 2014 : 68–73). The importance of psychopragmatics is that it has a crucial role to play not only in the formulation and development of pragmatic theories but also in the testing and revision of these theories. 4

Computational pragmatics is the systematic study of the relation between utterances and context from an explicitly computational point of view, utilizing computational resources such as annotation standards, algorithms for language generation and interpretation, context models, inference tools, and machine learning methods. This includes the relation between utterances and action, between utterances and discourse, and between utterances and their uttering time, place, and environment. Two sides to the question of how to compute the relation between linguistic and contextual aspects can be identified. On the one hand, given a linguistic expression, one needs to work out how to compute the relevant properties of context. On the other hand, in the case of language generation, the task is to construct a linguistic expression that encodes the contextual information a speaker intends to convey. Given the relevant properties of the context, one needs to work out how to compute the relevant properties of the linguistic expression. This study of the relation between linguistic and contextual aspects requires the building-up of explicit computational representations at either side of the relation. A particularly important topic of inquiry in computational pragmatics is inference. Abduction, the resolution of reference, the generation and interpretation of speech acts, and the production and comprehension of discourse structure, and coherence relations have figured prominently in computational pragmatics ( Bunt and Black 2000 ; Hobbs 2004 ; Jurafsky 2004 ; see also Bunt , this volume). 5

Clinical pragmatics involves the application of pragmatic concepts, theories, and findings to the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of pragmatic aspects of language disorders. It studies such pragmatic concepts and phenomena as Grice’s (1989a) cooperative principle and its attendant maxims, implicature, speech acts, inferences, context, non-literal meaning, deixis, and conversation and discourse from a clinical perspective. Pragmatic deficits have been examined in a variety of clinical groups, including children and/or adults with developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorder, learning disability, left- or right-hemisphere damage of the brain, Alzheimer’s disease, and schizophrenia ( Perkins 2007 , Cummings 2009 , this volume ). In so far as most of these clinical groups are defined by an underlying neurological condition, and a large amount of research involves children, clinical pragmatics overlaps to some degree with developmental and neuropragmatics.

Neuropragmatics is a recently developed branch of pragmatics that examines the neuro-anatomical basis of language in use. It is concerned with the relationship between the human brain/mind and pragmatics. It investigates how the human brain/mind uses language, that is, how it produces and comprehends pragmatic phenomena in healthy as well as neurologically impaired language users. The majority of neuropragmatic research has focused on aspects of pragmatics in adults with identifiable clinical disorders and brain pathology. The brain-damaged populations include patients with left- and right-hemisphere damage, traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease and dementia, and schizophrenia (e.g. Stemmer , this volume). This field of inquiry overlaps in particular with clinical and experimental pragmatics.

Finally, I come to interlanguage pragmatics. What, then, is an interlanguage? Simply put, an interlanguage is a stage on a continuum within a rule-governed language system that is developed by second or foreign language learners on their path to acquiring the target language. This language system is intermediate between a learner’s native language and his or her target language. It gives rise to the phenomenon of what Slobin (1996 : 89) called ‘first language thinking in second language speaking’. Interlanguage pragmatics lies at the interface between pragmatics and second language acquisition. It studies how non-native speakers of a language acquire and develop their ability to understand and produce pragmatic features in a second language, i.e. an interlanguage. Central research topics include pragmatic awareness, pragmatic transfer, the development of pragmatic competence, speech act production and comprehension, and the relationship between second language grammar and pragmatics (e.g. Kasper 2010 ). The sub-branch of interlangauge pragmatics that investigates the empirical acquisition and development of pragmatic competence in children is called developmental interlanguage pragmatics. The best-studied interlanguage is that developed by speakers of English as a second language. Other interlanguages that have been investigated include Chinese, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Spanish (e.g. Huang 2013c , 2014 ).

1.3.2 Group II: Socially and/or culturally oriented macro-pragmatics

In the preceding section, I surveyed a number of branches of cognitively oriented macro-pragmatics; in this section, I turn to the second group of branches of macro-pragmatics. This group includes mainly sociopragmatics, cultural, cross-, and intercultural pragmatics, and part of interlanguage pragmatics. Institutional, interpersonal, postcolonial, and variational pragmatics, and conversation analysis also belong to this category.

Sitting at the interface between sociolinguistics and pragmatics, sociopragmatics studies the use of language in relation to society. One topic that has long been the focus of sociopragmatic research is politeness. Politeness, broadly defined so as to encompass both polite friendliness and polite formality, is concerned with any behaviour including verbal behaviour of an interlocutor to constitute and maintain his or her own face and that of the people he or she is interacting with. As pointed out by Brown (this volume), different aspects of this behaviour are captured by terms such as ‘manners’, ‘courtesy’, ‘tact’, ‘deference’, ‘sensibility’, ‘poise’, ‘rapport’, ‘urbanity’, ‘civility’, and ‘graciousness’. More recently, a distinction has been introduced by Watts, Ide, and Ehlich (2005) between first- and second-order politeness. By first-order politeness or politeness 1 is meant the common-sense notion of normative politeness, that is, a judgement about whether a particular behaviour is polite or not in keeping with the norms of a sociocultural or speech community, made by lay members of that community. In contrast, second-order politeness or politeness 2 refers to a scientific concept of politeness, that is, an abstract, theoretical construct defined within a theory of politeness and impoliteness. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that there is a dynamic trade-off between the two notions of politeness. For example, second-order politeness, which is informed by first-order politeness, is a concept that is more inclusive than first-order politeness. Consequently, first- and second-order politeness should be studied hand in hand rather than in isolation. Finally, this dualistic distinction between an everyday and a technical sense of a notion can be applied to other concepts like face and impoliteness in the study of politeness and impoliteness (see also e.g. Terkourafi 2012 ; Huang 2013c , 2014 ).

Currently, there are a variety of theoretical accounts of politeness. These include (i) the ‘social norm’ model, (ii) the ‘conversational maxim’ model, (iii) the ‘face-saving’ model, (iv) the ‘conversational contract’ model, (v) the ‘social practice’ model, and (vi) the ‘discursive’ or ‘postmodern’ model. Of these frameworks, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) classic ‘face-saving’ model—generally considered to have inaugurated the field of modern politeness and impoliteness study—remains the most influential one (see e.g. Huang 2014 : 144–149 for a detailed overview of the model).

On the other hand, interest in impoliteness has only surged recently, with 1998 being dubbed ‘the Year of Impoliteness’. By impoliteness is meant any face-aggravating behaviour relevant to a particular context. For some scholars, impoliteness has to be intentional (on the part of the speaker) and has to be perceived or constructed as intentional (on the part of the addressee). For others, intentions play no part in impoliteness. If intentions and recognition of intentions are involved, then rudeness rather than impoliteness occurs (e.g. Bousfield 2008 ; Terkourafi 2012 ). In Culpeper’s (2011) work, impoliteness has been classified into three types: (i) affective, (ii) coercive, and (iii) entertaining.

Regarding the study of impoliteness, one of the major criticisms levelled against Brown and Levinson’s classic face-saving model of politeness is that it marginalizes impoliteness for the reason that impoliteness is seen as a phenomenon and/or concept that is related not to face itself but to the absence of it. Eelen (2001) , for example, concluded that traditional theories of politeness have three main problems. First, they are conceptually biased towards the politeness end of the politeness–impoliteness distinction. Secondly, they conceptualize politeness and impoliteness as opposites. And thirdly, their conceptualizations of impoliteness are speaker-based, focusing largely on utterance production (see also Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010d ). Consequently, in recent years, there has been an explosion of work in politeness and impoliteness research that seeks to theorize impoliteness in its own right rather than treating it merely as the reverse of politeness. On Garcés-Conejos Blitvich’s (2010d) view, current theoretical approaches to impoliteness, which are broadly social constructionist in nature, can be divided into three categories: (i) the impoliteness 1 or the discursive/postmodern model, (ii) the impoliteness 2 or the universalist/context-sensitive model, and (iii) the blended genre model. Notice further that within the second category there are a number of analyses, such as (i) the frame-based view, (ii) the face-constituting theory, and (iii) work by Bousfield (2008) and Culpeper (2011) .

Whereas much progress has been made, research on impoliteness is still in its infancy. There are still many questions that need an answer. These include: (i) what is the best theoretical and methodological framework for the study of impoliteness, (ii) what is the relationship between impoliteness and politeness, and (iii) what is the role played by a speaker’s intention in impoliteness.

Other topics that have attracted attention in sociopragmatics include social deixis, social conventions on the performance of speech acts, and social factors which constrain language in use, such as the overriding of conversational implicature by the Malagasy taboo on exact identification (e.g. Huang 2014 : 42–43). From a macro point of view, the hand of societal pragmatics can be detected in any area that pertains in any way to society, dealing with topics as diverse as language in education, pragmatics and social struggle, and what is called critical pragmatics. Critical pragmatics refers to the work done in sociopragmatics that follows the tradition of critical linguistics, in particular critical discourse analysis. As in critical discourse analysis, in critical pragmatics, great emphasis is put on the relationship between language and social power and between language and ideology. 6

Institutional pragmatics refers to an area of research in pragmatics which investigates the use of language in social institutions and institutionalized contexts, such as courtroom interaction, job interviews, and police interrogation.

Cultural pragmatics, sometimes also known as anthropological or ethnographic pragmatics, is the systematic study of language use and its place in the functioning of human communities and institutions from a cultural or anthropological view, especially but not exclusively focusing on non-Western cultures. It overlaps with the ethnography of communication and ethnography of speaking. A particular variety of cultural pragmatics is ethnopragmatics. Ethnopragmatics is an approach to language in use that is semantically grounded in natural semantic metalanguage developed by Anna Wierzbicka and her associatess. Utilizing cultural scripts and semantic or reductive paraphrase explications as analytical tools, practioners of ethnopragmatics aim to find out more about speech practices and language use of particular, local cultures, contextualized and understood in terms of the beliefs, norms, and values of speakers themselves. In other words, the emphasis of ethnopragmatics is on culturally anchored analyses and explanations, thus rejecting what ethnopragmaticists have labelled ‘universal(ist) pragmatics’, namely, any pragmatic theory that views human communication as governed largely by a rich inventory of universal pragmatic principles with variations between cultures being accounted for in terms of local adjustments to and local construals of these universals (e.g. Goddard 2006 ).

Somewhat similar to ethnopragmatics is ethnographic pragmatics defined in its narrow sense. It refers to the ethnographically oriented approach to context-sensitive language use associated particularly with the work of Michael Silverstein and his students. Research conducted in ethnographic pragmatics has concentrated on non-Western cultures, societies, and languages.

A third variety of cultural pragmatics is emancipatory pragmatics. A recently emerged research framework, emancipatory pragmatics attempts to free the study of language in use from the confines of the theoretical and methodological orthodoxies grounded in the dominant thought and practice derived from Anglo-American and European languages and ways of speaking, with the attendant premises of individualism, rationality, and market economy, thus the term ‘emancipatory’. The focus of emancipatory pragmatics is also placed on non-Western languages and ways of speaking and on describing a language and/or culture strictly in its own terms ( Hanks, Ide, and Katagiri 2009 ).

Somewhat overlapping with socio- and cultural pragmatics is interpersonal pragmatics. Interpersonal pragmatics is a research arena that concentrates on the interpersonal and relational aspects of language in use, especially how interlocutors utilize language to establish and maintain social relations, and how interactions between interlocutors both affect and are affected by their own and others’ understanding of culture and society (e.g. Locher and Graham 2010 ).

Whereas cross-cultural pragmatics presents a systematic comparison of different cultures on the basis of studying aspects of language use, intercultural pragmatics is concerned with the interaction between speakers from different cultures, speaking different languages (e.g. Kecskes 2013 , this volume ). Since the 1980s, a principal concern of cross-cultural pragmatics has been the issue of how particular kinds of speech acts, especially such face-threatening acts as requests, apologies, and complaints, are realized across different cultures and languages. One of the most influential investigations is the large-scale Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns Project carried out in the 1980s. In this project, the realization patterns of requesting and apologizing in German, Hebrew, Danish, Canadian French, Argentinean Spanish, and British, American, and Australian English were compared and contrasted (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989 ). Since then, strategies for the performance of a variety of face-threatening acts in a much wider range of languages have been examined. These languages include Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Javanese, Polish, Russian, Thai, Turkish, four varieties of English (British, American, Australian, and New Zealand), two varieties of French (Canadian and French), and eight varieties of Spanish (Argentinean, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Peninsular, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Uruguayan, and Venezuelan). As a result of these studies, it has now been established that there is indeed extensive cross-cultural/linguistic variation in directness/indirectness in the expression of speech acts, especially in face-threatening acts, and that these differences are generally associated with the different means that different languages utilize to realize speech acts. These findings have undoubtedly contributed to our greater understanding of cross-cultural/linguistic similarities and differences in face-redressive strategies for face-threatening acts (e.g. Huang 2014 ). A sub-branch of cross-, intercultural, and/or interlanguage pragmatics is postcolonial pragmatics, which studies the use of the language of the colonizers in a postcolonial society or postcolonial societies. In a postcolonial society, a second (as opposed to a foreign) language is sometimes used in interaction, as in the use of English in contemporary India (e.g. Anchimbe and Janney 2011 ).

Another recently emerged branch of pragmatics that has a close affinity with socio- and cross- and/or intercultural pragmatics is variational pragmatics. It endeavours to study and determine the influence or impact of macro-social factors such as region, social class, ethnicity, gender, and age, and the interplay of these factors on language use, especially pragmatic variation, in interaction. Construed thus, variational pragmatics also represents a research domain at the intersection of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, in particular dialectology (e.g. Barron and Schneider 2009 ).

The exploration of speech acts has been extended to interlanguage pragmatics (e.g. Kasper and Blum-Kulke 1993a ; Kasper 2010 ; Trosborg 2010 ). Of these studies, some have investigated how a particular type of speech act is performed by non-native speakers in a given interlanguage; others have compared and contrasted the similarities and differences in the realization patterns of given speech acts between native and non-native speakers in a particular (inter)language.

Mention should be made of conversation(al) analysis (CA), sometimes also called ‘conversation(al) pragmatics’. Since Levinson (1983) , CA has become a branch of macro-pragmatics. Grown out of a breakaway group of sociologists known as ethnomethodologists within micro-sociology, CA represents an empirical, procedural, and inductive approach to the analysis of (audio and/or video recordings of) naturally occurring, spontaneous conversations or ‘talks in (face-to-face) interaction’. It is concerned with the discovery and description of the methods and procedures that participants employ systematically to display their understanding of the structure of naturally occurring, spontaneous conversations in face-to-face interaction. In conversation, there are rules governing sequential organization, such as the turn-taking system, the formulation of adjacency pairs, and the mechanism for opening or closing a conversation. There are also norms regulating participation in a conversation, such as those for how to hold the ‘floor’, how to interrupt, and how to remain silent. Other interesting structural devices of conversation include the preference organization, the pre-sequence system, and the repair mechanism (e.g. Sacks 1992 ; Sidnell 2011 ; Scheloff , this volume). Given that conversation is the most important spoken manifestation of language, CA has to be closely linked to prosodic pragmatics—a study of how prosody-like intonation can affect the interpretation of a variety of linguistic phenomena in relation to context (e.g. Hirschberg 2004 , this volume ). Furthermore, since rules, norms, and regulations for conversational interaction may vary from culture to culture, society to society, and language to language, CA may overlap with the ethnography of speaking and cross-cultural pragmatics. For some scholars, it is opposed to discourse analysis (DA). CA can further be divided into pure CA and applied CA. By pure CA is meant the type of CA that collects data from naturally occurring conversations. In other words, in pure CA the data is not arranged or provoked by the analyst, as in a psycholinguistic experiment or a sociolinguistic interview. Used in contrast to pure CA, ‘applied CA’ is a term that is employed with reference to the type of CA that studies specific types of conversational situation.

1.3.3 Group III

I turn next to a group of branches and research areas of macro-pragmatics that are not easily and/or neatly placed in the first two categories.

Historical pragmatics is a branch of macro-pragmatics that came to light in the 1990s. It is concerned with the investigation of language change between two given points in time in individual languages and in language generally from a pragmatic perspective. There are two main research trends that correspond roughly to the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ language change. The first, ‘external’ research strand is called ‘pragmaphilology’. Pragmaphilology represents primarily a ‘macro approach’ to the study of the pragmatics of historical texts at a particular point of time. The focus is on the wider changing social and cognitive contexts of the texts in which pragmatic change occurs. It is closely related to ‘historical discourse analysis proper’ in historical discourse analysis. The second, ‘internal’ research trend is diachronic pragmatics in its narrow sense. Diachronic pragmatics in this sense represents a ‘micro approach’ to change in pragmatic phenomena over time, concentrating on the interface between a linguistic structure and its communicative use across different historical stages of the same language. Furthermore, a methodological distinction is made between the ‘form-to-function’ and ‘function-to-form’ modes. The former, called ‘pragmalinguistic diachronic pragmatics’, is semasiological and the emphasis is on how a particular linguistic form has undergone functional changes; the latter, termed ‘sociopragmatic diachronic pragmatics’, is onomasiological and the focus is on how a particular pragmatic function has changed the form it uses. Diachronic pragmatics in the sense being described here is closely related to ‘diachronically oriented discourse analysis’ in historical discourse analysis. Since the boundary between pragmaphilology and diachronic pragmatics is sometimes not clear-cut, an intermediate category, dubbed ‘diachronic pragmaphilology’, has also been proposed. Furthermore, in addition to the two main approaches, there is a third research strand, which is labelled ‘pragma-historical linguistics’. Given that textual data is heavily used in both historical pragmatics and historical discourse analysis, there is a considerable overlap between the two fields. At the early stage of its development, historical pragmatics was called ‘new philology’ or ‘diachronic textlinguistics’ (e.g. Traugott 2004a ; Jucker , this volume; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2010 ).

Next, historical sociopragmatics involves the interaction between historical pragmatics and sociopragmatics. According to some scholars, historical sociopragmatics is more closely related to the pragmaphilology research trend in historical pragmatics. It constitutes a systematic study of interaction between aspects of social context and particular historical language uses that give rise to pragmatic meaning. Historical sociopragmatics can be either synchronic or diachronic. Synchronic historical sociopragmatics studies how language use shapes and is shaped by social context at a certain moment of time in the past. By contrast, diachronic historical sociopragmatics traces how changes in language use shape social context, changes in social context shape language use, and/or changes take place in the relationship between language use and social context (e.g. Culpeper 2009/2011 ).

Directly opposed to historical pragmatics is synchronic pragmatics. Synchronic pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics that studies language use in general or in a particular language as it is, or was, at a particular point in time. In other words, synchronic pragmatics is concerned with the pragmatics of what Ferdinand de Saussure called an ‘ état de langue ’: that is, the pragmatics of the state of language at a particular point in time, regardless of its previous or subsequent history.

The term ‘applied pragmatics’ has two senses. In its broad sense, applied pragmatics makes reference to any application of the concepts and findings of theoretical pragmatics to practical tasks such as the diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of pragmatic disorders, human–computer interaction, and the teaching and learning of a second and/or foreign language. In the last connection, the field is often called ‘second and foreign language (L2) pragmatics’. ‘Second and foreign language pragmatics’ is a term that is interchangeable with applied pragmatics in its narrow sense. It is part of instructional pragmatics, namely, pragmatics that is concerned with how to teach and learn pragmatics in language, especially second and/or foreign language, instruction (e.g. Ishihara and Cohen 2010 ). Applied pragmatics should not be confused with applying pragmatics. The latter is a term that is used within the Continental tradition of pragmatics for any dynamic, user-oriented, problem-solving activity employing pragmatic knowledge in a real-world context, especially in the arena of the social struggle. Described thus, applying pragmatics has an overlap with critical pragmatics in its sociological sense.

A corpus is a systematic collection of naturally occurring spoken or written language or a variety of such a language, which can be searchable online. When it is accessible on a computer, it is called a computer corpus or corpora. By corpus pragmatics is meant the investigation of language use on the basis of the analysis of corpora. Corpus pragmatics forms part of empirical pragmatics. It can be divided into two types: (i) corpus-based and (ii) corpus-driven. In the former, researchers approach the corpora with a set of assumptions and expected findings. By comparison, the latter investigates linguistic forms and pragmatic functions that emerge from the corpora in order to discover things that have not been recognized. Much of the current research in corpus pragmatics is corpus-based rather than corpus-driven. From a methodological point of view, corpus pragmatics can be either form-based (that is, it takes a linguistic structure as its starting point and examines the range of pragmatic functions the form serves in a corpus) or function-based (that is, it takes a particular pragmatic function as a point of departure and studies how such a function is actually realized linguistically). Finally, corpus-based or driven research in pragmatics can be either qualitative (treating corpora primarily as a source of natural data) or quantitative (studying patterns of frequency, distribution, and collocation using statistical techniques) (e.g. Andersen 2011 ; Rühlemann 2011 ).

Literary pragmatics can be best described as covering an area of research rather than a well-defined unified theory. It represents a domain at the intersection of pragmatics, literary theory, and the philosophy of literature. It is the study of the use of linguistic forms in a literary text and the relationship between author, text, and reader in a sociocultural context from a pragmatic perspective, focusing on the question of what and how a literary text communicates. Two complementary aspects of literary pragmatics can be identified. On the one hand, how can the insights of pragmatic theories be employed for the study of literature, and on the other, how can the insights of literary pragmatics contribute to general pragmatic theories? Literary pragmatics can further be divided into two sub-branches: formalist and historical. Formalist literary pragmatics seeks to characterize literariness in terms of the pragmatic properties of literary texts, concentrating on formal analyses which are based on formal systems or pragmatic processes. Key research themes include speech acts in literary communication and free indirect discourse. In contrast with formalist literary pragmatics is historical literary pragmatics. Interdisciplinary in nature, historical literary pragmatics places an emphasis on the interconnections between literary studies, history studies, sociocultural studies, and pragmatic studies. For example, it uses the insights of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) face-saving model of politeness to characterize the relationship between language users, i.e. writers and readers, in a literary context (e.g. Pilkington 2010 ). Next, somewhat related to literary pragmatics is pragmatic stylistics or pragmastylistics. Pragmatic stylistics refers to the application of the findings and methodologies of theoretical pragmatics to the study of the concept of style in language, that is, systematic variations in usage in written or spoken language including those in literary texts among individual writers, genres, and periods (e.g. Black 2006 ).

Originating in part from the work of J. L. Austin, legal pragmatics is concerned mainly with the study of legal documents and spoken legal discourse in the courtroom from a pragmatic point of view. Pragmatic features in written legal texts and spoken legal discourses that have been analysed include speech acts such as legal performatives, presuppositions, turn-taking, question–answer adjacency pairs, and silence. The sociopragmatic concepts of power and politeness and impoliteness have also been used in these studies (e.g. Kurzon 2010 ).

Finally, feminist pragmatics represents an approach to the study of gender and language in use, incorporating insights from both feminism and pragmatics. Within this approach, it is assumed that on the one hand, if pragmatics is to provide a theoretical framework for the investigation of gender and use of language, it has to be informed by the findings of feminist scholarship. On the other hand, pragmatics can inform feminist research on gender and language in a wide range of contexts (e.g. Christie 2000 ).

1.4 Organization and Content of the Handbook

The remainder of this handbook is divided into five parts. Part I is concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories. In Chapter 2 , Anne Bezuidenhout provides an overview of the recent progress in the debate between contextualism and semantic minimalism from three perspectives: (i) cognitive architecture, (ii) formal semantics, and (iii) conceptual analysis. Chapter 3 by Yan Huang gives a state-of-the-art survey of classical and especially neo-Gricean pragmatics, focusing on the bipartite model put forward by Laurence Horn and trinitarian model advanced by Stephen Levinson. The contribution assesses the role neo-Gricean pragmatics plays in effecting a radical simplification of the lexicon, semantics, and syntax in linguistic theory. Relevance theory is the topic of Chapter 4 , in which Deirdre Wilson—one of its co-founders—provides an authoritative assessment of the current state of play of the theory and points out some new directions for research. Chapter 5 deals with formal pragmatics. In this chapter, Reinhard Blutner discusses three formal pragmatic frameworks: (i) optimality-theoretic, (ii) game-theoretic, and (iii) decision-theoretical pragmatics. Next comes Jef Verschueren’s contribution (Chapter 6 ) on the Continental European perspective view of pragmatics. While questioning the accuracy of the contrast between an Anglo-American component view and a Continental European perspective view, the author considers the contrast between Western-based conceptualizations of language use and views that are rooted in non-Western cultures and societies to be more important. Finally, Chapter 7 by Jacob Mey discusses the social foundation of pragmatics in a slightly personal way, outlining an emancipatory pragmatics.

Part II deals with some central topics in pragmatics. Chapter 8 by Yan Huang examines implicature. The concept of implicature (both conversational and conventional) has its origin in the work of H. P. Grice (1989a) . Since its inception, the notion of conversational implicature has become one of the single most important pragmatic ideas in linguistics and the philosophy of language. It has spurred numerous new concepts such as explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986 , 1995 ; Carston 2002 ), the ‘pragmatically enriched said’ (Recanati 2004a , 2010 ), and impliciture (Bach 2004 , 2012 ) in various neo- and post-Gricean enterprises (but see Levinson 2000 and Huang 2007 , 2014 for a dissenting view). Presupposition and givenness is the theme of Chapter 9 . Presupposition is a proposition whose truth is taken for granted in the utterance of a sentence. The main function of presupposition is to act as a precondition of some sort for the appropriate use of the sentence. This background assumption remains equally valid when the sentence that contains it is negated. In this chapter, Bart Geurts provides a survey of two theories of the givenness of presupposition. Chapter 10 by Stephen Levinson takes up speech acts. This notion, introduced by J. L. Austin (1962a) , refers to the uttering of a linguistic expression, the function of which is not just to say things but actively to do things or to perform actions as well. Speech act theory was established by Austin and after his death, refined, systematized, and advanced by John Searle. It has since remained another foundation stone of pragmatics. Levinson’s contribution reviews some core issues in speech act theory, focusing on the role played by conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and the centrality of deep recursive structures in speech act sequences in conversation. Chapter 11 by Jack Sidnell and N. J. Enfield is devoted to deixis. Deixis, or indexicality in the philosophy of language, is the phenomenon whereby features of context of utterance or speech event are encoded by lexical and/or grammatical means in a language. Based on an analysis of deixis in both its most basic and elaborated forms, Sidnell and Enfield stress that the interactional foundation of all references including deixis involves directing the attention of others. Next, in Chapter 12 , Barbara Abbott discusses reference. Reference is a three-place relation that involves speakers, linguistic expressions, and the entities the linguistic expressions stand for in the external world or in some mental representation. In other words, referring is an act of a speaker picking out a particular entity, denoted by the linguistic expression, in the outside world. It is performed through the speaker’s utterance of that linguistic expression on some particular occasion of use. Looked at this way, reference is largely a context-dependent aspect of utterance meaning and it therefore falls largely within the domain of pragmatics (e.g. Huang 2014 ). In this chapter, Abbott examines the way in which we use referring expressions to refer, what it is that a speaker is referring to, a speaker’s choice of referring expressions, and what are the factors that play a role in the addressee’s interpreting intended referents (see also Abbott 2010 ). Finally, Chapter 13 by Anita Fetzer on context ends this part. Context is one of the notions that is widely used in the pragmatics literature, but to which it is very difficult to give a precise definition. This chapter comments on some fundamental rethinking of this important notion in linguistics and its related subjects.

In this handbook, I have divided macro-pragmatics into two groups: cognitively oriented and socially and/or culturally oriented. Cognitively oriented macro-pragmatics is the topic of Part III . In this part, six branches are covered: Chapter 14 on cognitive pragmatics by Bruno Bara, Chapter 15 on developmental pragmatics by Pamela Rollins, Chapter 16 on experimental pragmatics by Raymond Gibbs Jr, Chapter 17 on computational pragmatics by Harry Bunt, Chapter 18 on clinical pragmatics by Louise Cummings, and finally, Chapter 19 on neuropragmatics by Brigitte Stemmer.

Part IV proceeds to look at socially and/or culturally oriented macro-pragmatics. Politeness and impoliteness is the topic of Chapter 20 by Penelope Brown—one of the co-founders of the face-saving model of politeness; cross- and intercultural pragmatics the topic of Chapter 21 by Istvan Kecskes; interlanguage pragmatics the topic of Chapter 22 by César Félix-Brasdefer; and finally, conversation analysis (CA) the topic of Chapter 23 by Emanuel Schegloff—one of the pioneers of this branch of macro-pragmatics.

The final part of this handbook, Part V , is concerned with pragmatics and its interfaces. The part begins with Robyn Carston’s discussion of the relationship between pragmatics and semantics in Chapter 24 . Semantics and pragmatics are the two major branches of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning in language. This much is largely agreed upon. However, what constitutes the domain of semantics and that of pragmatics? Can semantics and pragmatics be distinguished in a principled way? Are they autonomous or do they overlap with each other? How and to what extent do they interact with each other? These are some of the questions that have puzzled, and are still puzzling, linguists and philosophers of language. In this chapter, the author offers a cognitive-scientific or relevance-theoretic approach to communicators’ pragmatic interpretative ability, and argues for the logical and temporal priority of pragmatics from three viewpoints: communicative, developmental, and evolutionary. The division of labour between pragmatics and grammar is the topic of Chapter 25 by Mira Ariel, who is of the view that the pragmatics–grammar divide should be drawn along a code versus inference distinction. In Chapter 26 , Wolfgang Dressler and Lavinia Merlini-Barbaresi are concerned with morphopragmatics. They provide an account of the relationship between pragmatics and morphology on the basis of two major theoretical premises. First, pragmatics is not a secondary meaning derived from semantics. On the contrary, there is a priority of pragmatics over semantics. Second, morphology is capable of a direct interface with pragmatics, but not mediated through its semantics. Thus, certain morphological patterns may yield autonomous pragmatic meanings, independently of their denotative power. Next, Laurence Horn’s contribution in Chapter 27 outlines a neo-Gricean lexical pragmatic theory. It motivates a (Q-principle-based) constraint on lexicalization, reviews the role played by his R-principle ( Horn 2004 ) in giving rise to the division of pragmatic labour, syntagmatic reduction, narrowing of meaning, euphemism, and negative strengthening, and presents pragmatic motivation for the lexical clone, un -noun, and un -verb constructions, and for the complementary avoid synonymy and avoid homonymy principles (see also Huang 2009 , 2015a , b ). In Chapter 28 , Julia Hirschberg considers the relationship between pragmatics and prosody. She reviews a substantial amount of research on prosodic variation and pragmatic meaning in linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics, focusing on the pragmatic influence of prosody on the interpretation of syntactic, semantic, and discourse phenomena. Next comes Chapter 29 , in which Andreas Jucker takes a look at language change from a pragmatic point of view. He provides an analysis of the process of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, and presents two case studies of the development of specific pragmatic entities. Finally, we come to Chapter 30 on pragmatics and information structure by Gregory Ward, Betty Birner, and Elsi Kaiser. In this chapter, utilizing a wide array of both corpus and experimental data, the contributors provide an insightful overview of the current research on information structure.

Acknowledgements

Part of the material contained in this chapter is drawn from Huang ( 2013c and 2016 ). I am grateful to Piotr Cap and Keith Allan for their comments on related material.

Ariel (2010) coined the metaphor ‘big-tent pragmatics’ to refer to the heterogeneous nature of pragmatics. Under big-tent pragmatics, there are two groups of pragmaticists: what she called ‘problem-solvers’ and ‘border-seekers’. Her own way of classifying pragmatics is to treat it as containing a set of inferences, as opposed to grammar as comprising a set of conventional codes. But such a classification is questionable, to say the least.

A particular version of Jerry Fodor’s modularity of mind thesis is the massive modularity of mind thesis. The term ‘massive modularity’ was introduced by Dan Sperber. According to this view, the human mind is largely, if not entirely, composed of modules. Two forms of the massive modularity of mind thesis can then be identified: strong and weak. On the authority of the strong massive modularity of mind thesis, the human mind does not contain any overarching general-purpose mechanism. In other words, every central process is modular. By contrast, the weak massive modularity of mind thesis maintains that while central processes are largely modular, there are also non-modular, general-purpose processes. The massive modularity of mind thesis is not, however, espoused by Fodor himself (e.g. Meini 2010 ). Furthermore, in the opinion of Gabriel Segal, modularity can be divided into diachronic and synchronic modularity. The former is a cognitive module that follows a genetically and developmentally determined pattern of growth. By comparison, synchronic modularity refers to a module that is static. Finally, there are competence and performance modules. A competence module, also referred to as a ‘Chomskyan’ or ‘information module’, is one that constitutes a system of mental representations. It is said to contain linguistic, biological, psychological, physical, and mathematical knowledge. It runs in contrast with a performance module, also termed a ‘computational module’. A performance module is one that functions as a computational mechanism. In other words, it is a device that processes mental representations (e.g. Carston 2010a ).

In recent years, as a philosophical background to Anglo-American component pragmatics, there has also been an ongoing heated debate between contextualism and semantic minimalism in the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy of language and semantics and pragmatics. This debate can be traced back at least to the differences between philosophers in the tradition of ideal language philosophy, such as Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap, and philosophers in the camp of ordinary or natural-language philosophy, like J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice, Peter Strawson, the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Searle. For an overview of contextualism and semantic minimalism and various in-between positions such as (hidden) indexicalism, non-indexical contextualism or semantic relativism, situationism, and (strong) moderate relativism, see e.g. Huang ( 2013c , 2014 : 307–11, 2016 ) and Bezuidenhout (this volume). See also e.g. Recanati (2005) and Preyer and Peter ( 2005 , 2007 ).

Notice the so-called ‘experimental paradox’—a well-known dilemma in experimental psycholinguistics including experimental pragmatics. The dilemma is that the more perfect an experiment, the less like the real speech situation it is, and the more likely that subjects of the experiment will produce unnatural responses. On the other hand, the more like the real speech situation the experiment is, the less easy it is for the experimenters to control the external factors that may interfere with the experiment. The consequence of this paradox is that it is almost impossible to design a perfect experiment (e.g. Aitchison 2003 ). Somewhat related is what a recent editorial in Nature (2015) calls the human ‘cognitive bias’, namely, ‘[t]‌he human brain’s habit of finding what it wants to find’, which ‘is a key problem for research’. As pointed out by the editorial, ‘One enemy of robust science is our humanity—our appetite for being right, and our tendency to find patterns in noise, to see supporting evidence for what we already believe is true, and to ignore the facts that do not fit.’ See also the other three relevant papers published in the same issue of Nature (vol. 526, no. 7572).

Computational pragmatics is different from cyberpragmatics. Cyberpragmatics refers to a newly emerged research area in which Internet-mediated interactions are analysed mainly from a cognitive pragmatic point of view. A wide variety of interactions on the Internet are dealt with in cyberpragmatics. These include emails, web pages, chat rooms, social networking sites, blogs, 3D virtual worlds, instant messaging, and videoconferencing (e.g. Yus 2011 ).

Note that the term ‘critical pragmatics’ has a totally different sense in the philosophy of language and formal pragmatics. It is the term employed by John Perry and Kepa Korta to refer to the philosophical position that takes the contents of an utterance as central and critical to both pragmatics and semantics. According to critical pragmatics in its philosophical sense, language is a way of doing things with words. Meanings of linguistic expressions and contents of utterances derive ultimately from intentions. Language combines with other factors to allow human beings to achieve communicative goals (e.g. Korta and Perry 2011 ).

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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Pragmatics always matters: an expanded vision of experimental pragmatics.

$\r\nRaymond W. Gibbs Jr.*$

1 Independent Researcher, Soquel, CA, United States
2 Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

Much of the work in experimental pragmatics is devoted to testing empirical hypotheses that arise within the study of linguistic and philosophical pragmatics. The focus in much of this work is focused on those aspects of communicated meaning that are “inferred” rather than understood through linguistic “coding” processes. Under this view, pragmatic meanings emerge secondarily after purely linguistic meanings are accessed or computed. Our aim in this article is to greatly broaden the scope of experimental pragmatic studies by calling for much greater emphasis on the complete pragmatics of language use. Pragmatics is continuously present and constrains people’s real-time production and processing of language in context. Experimental pragmatics should attend more to the particularities of pragmatic experience through closer examination of the people we study, the specific tasks used to assess understanding, as well as the actual complex meanings people interpret in diverse contexts. The many specifics of human pragmatics demand the study and theoretical inclusion of many bodily, linguistic, and situational factors that make up each instance of meaning making.

Introduction

Experimental pragmatics has had a complex history in its 40 or so years of existence. The field emerged back in the 1970s as various psychologists, both those studying developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, as well as linguistics, began to explore people’s understandings of pragmatic meaning, which was quite a departure from the traditional emphasis in psycholinguistics on lexical, syntactic, and semantic processing of individual sentence meaning. Certain critics within linguistics and psychology were skeptical about the possibility of scientifically examining pragmatic language production and interpretation. One often repeated refrain from the 1970s and 1980s was that “pragmatics is the wastebasket of linguistics,” a claim that suggests the impossibility of making proper scientific order out of a human endeavor which is so messy and intractable. Still, psycholinguists found much inspiration, and even testable hypotheses, in the writings of linguists and philosophers interested in pragmatics ( Clark, 1996 ; Noveck and Sperber, 2004 ; Bara, 2010 ; Noveck, 2018 ; Gibbs, 2019 ). The field of experimental pragmatics has continued to survive, and make its mark, within the larger interdisciplinary world of cognitive science.

Many practitioners of experimental pragmatics see their work as explicitly devoted to testing the claims of those studying linguistic and philosophical pragmatics. A tremendous body of experimental work has spoken positively and negatively about different facets of various linguistic pragmatic theories ( Noveck, 2018 ; Huang, 2019 ). One lingering assumption in much experimental pragmatics research is the idea that “pragmatics” refers, somewhat narrowly, to those aspects of linguistic processing that are inferential, and not due to temporarily earlier linguistic coding/decoding processes. Under this view, people begin understanding what speakers mean by first engaging in many fast-acting linguistic processes in which sounds are recognized and then syntactic and semantic analyses are completed. Pragmatic meaning is created later on via special pragmatic inferential processes that may be generally applied to all utterances or are optionally applied given specific forms of linguistic input (e.g., different processes are needed to determine metaphor as opposed to ironic speaker meaning) (e.g., the standard pragmatic model, see Gibbs, 1994 ). Noveck (2018) argues that part of this view is motivated by ideas about modularity within cognitive science, more generally.

A related emphasis in experimental pragmatics is on the role that “theory of mind” or “mind-reading” plays in pragmatic language interpretation ( Noveck, 2018 ). The focus here has been to explore the ways that understanding what people say or write depends on creating a theory of that person’s mind, or specific thoughts in some communicative situation ( Nichols and Stich, 2003 ). Experimental studies on theory of mind in pragmatic interpretation have examined a number of ways that people’s cognitive abilities, and sometimes inabilities, to infer speakers’ possible mental states are a critical facet of interpersonal communication ( Kissine, 2016 ; Bosco et al., 2018 ). Some pragmatic theories go so far as to suggest that there is a “relevance theoretic comprehension procedure” module that is embedded within a larger “theory of mind” module ( Sperber and Wilson, 2002 ).

Our argument in this article is that these traditional views on pragmatic meaning, despite their contributions to experimental pragmatics, under-estimate the true, and complex reality of pragmatic meaning making. We maintain that experimental pragmatics should be more than the testing of ideas from linguistic pragmatic theory. Experimental investigations must pay much greater attention to the larger ways that pragmatics always shapes our use and understanding of both linguistic and non-linguistic meanings, as seen in research on multimodal communication ( Shockley et al., 2009 ; Hollers and Levinson, 2019 ). Pragmatics is much greater than the study of particular inferential processing stages, because people are always doing pragmatics within each moment of their lives. This includes people’s pragmatic participation in experimental studies. We suggest the need for an expanded vision of experimental pragmatics, one that extends more deeply into the different ways that our doing pragmatics shape experimental participants’ performances. Pragmatics is not merely a specific type of inferential processing, and it is not just a type of knowledge that differs from that accessed during various parts of language production and processing (e.g., lexicon, grammar, and semantics). Pragmatics is more fundamentally the entirety of people’s adaptive performances in varying circumstances and contexts.

This article discusses several research practices within the field of experimental pragmatics over the last few decades. Our aim is not to criticize particular people. Both of us have engaged in some of the practices we take issue with in what follows. Some readers may also suggest that the situation we outline is not as bad as we make it out to be. Our aim, though, is to encourage discussion and debate in order to move experimental pragmatics studies forward to more adequately addressing “pragmatics” in a broader, psychologically real, fashion than it has been in the past.

The Problem

Experimental pragmatics studies typically explore what kinds of pragmatic processing emerges at what points during people’s use and interpretation of language. Early theories in the field often assumed that pragmatic knowledge and inferential processes were recruited relatively late in the understanding process, especially when compared to the access of other sources of linguistic information (e.g., lexical, syntactic, and semantic) (see Gibbs, 1994 ; Gibbs and Colston, 2012 ). But the strong trend in experimental findings over the last several decades shows that pragmatic knowledge and pragmatic inferences comes into play very early during the online interpretation of language in context ( Gibbs, 1994 , 2019 ; Noveck and Sperber, 2004 ). People do not perform purely linguistic analyses first on a word string and only later recruit pragmatics to infer what speakers/writers aim to communicate. Instead, pragmatics has its influence through the immediate, automatic construction of what people imply by the words they speak and write ( Gibbs, 1994 ; Gibbs and Colston, 2012 ). Pragmatics does not come into play only at certain temporal points in language use, and is not turned on and off in people’s linguistic and non-linguistic experiences. Theoretical models in psycholinguistics now mostly embrace the idea that pragmatics, often through access to prior pragmatic background knowledge and more proximate contextual information, constrains all facets of the understanding process ( Campbell and Katz, 2012 ; McRae and Matsuki, 2013 ; McClelland et al., 2014 ).

Our concern, however, is with two unacknowledged assumptions in the traditional study of experimental pragmatics. First, there is surprisingly little discussion of what it really means to say that some pragmatic message (e.g., “This soup needs salt” implies “Pass me the salt”) has been “understood.” Pragmatic understanding is assumed to be a general goal that all people in all contexts aim to achieve. But people differ in their cognitive and personal make-up, as well as their understanding motivations, in various circumstances. These individual variations, both between and within people, are critical to take into account in any theoretical characterization of how people interpret pragmatic messages.

Second, experimental pragmatics examines people’s language understanding abilities by asking participants to perform a wide range of experimental tasks. These task demands constitute a big part of the inherent pragmatics within any experimental study (e.g., developmental studies have long struggled with how implicit and explicit task demands affect behavioral outcomes in cognitive and linguistic studies). Yet this aspect of pragmatic experience is not sufficiently acknowledged in scholars’ theoretical interpretations of experimental results within psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. As is often the case in experimental studies of human perception and cognition, we too often strip away the task demands in creating theories of pragmatics as if this critical feature of experimental studies is irrelevant to characterizing the role that pragmatics has in people’s use and understanding of language in context.

In addition to these difficulties, there is also the problem that experimental pragmatics focuses mostly on the “processes” by which language is acquired, produced, and understood, but is far less dedicated to explaining meaning “products” that people really convey or interpret in real-world language situations. The relative neglect of pragmatic “products” in experimental pragmatics comes with a great cost. We too often assume that people experience a definitive “click of comprehension” when pragmatic messages are singularly encountered and understood. Yet this mistakenly assumes that experimental pragmatics should focus on the use and understanding of different types of pragmatic meanings (e.g., scalar implicatures, presuppositions, politeness, negation, and metaphor), but not the very specific tokens of meaning that people may often infer in discourse. This difficulty also alerts us to the need to significantly broaden our vision of pragmatics by looking more closely at what participants are fully engaged in during different experimental situations.

Individual Differences

Most theories within linguistic pragmatics offer detailed proposals on the ways ordinary people use and understand pragmatic meanings ( Huang, 2019 ). These theoretical proposals typically assume some idealized speaker/hearer who is an adult possessing relatively intact neural, cognitive and linguistic abilities. Of course, there is an extensive body of research looking at variations in pragmatic language talents, such as children who are still acquiring pragmatic language skills, and atypical children and adults who may be limited because of brain injury, disease (e.g., Alzheimer’s) or developmental disorders (e.g., autism) ( Cummings, 2019 ). The classic assumption, nonetheless, is that differences in pragmatic language performances are mostly evidence of pragmatic deficits in which the typical, normative module of pragmatic competence is not functioning as expected.

But there exists a range of evidence showing important individual differences that shape pragmatic performances in experimental pragmatic studies. For example, there is an emerging body of research showing many variations within, and between, experimental participants. Consider some of the individual differences that have been empirically shown to influence figurative language use and understanding, including language experience, gender, occupation, social status and culture, political background/beliefs, cognitive differences (e.g., IQ, working memory capacity), bodily action, geographic origin, personality, social relationship, and common ground ( Gibbs and Colston, 2012 ). These factors have their assorted influences on both the processing of figurative language, such as metaphor and irony, and the exact meaning products people infer when they encounter different tropes in various experimental situations.

Many scholars in experimental pragmatics may argue that it should be possible to control for, or factor away, individual variations in order to create normative theories of pragmatic language abilities without regard to complex arrays of individual differences. Our reply is that trying to control for, and then eliminate the need to account for, individual differences turns a blind eye to the real complexities of pragmatic experiences. Individual differences are not mere representations of “noise” around some normative mechanism of pragmatic meaning understanding. The fact of the matter is that individual differences always have a critical role in the psychology of pragmatic behaviors.

There are also within-individual variations that affect pragmatic performances in experimental situations. For example, a typical study in experimental pragmatics will present individual participants a set of stimuli, representing different independent variables, which they will respond to in some instructed manner. We often compute averages of people’s behavioral performances across the many stimuli in each experimental condition. The aim here is to capture something about the central tendencies in people’s reactions to different experimental conditions and looking at means is widely viewed as the most appropriate descriptive statistic by which to achieve this goal.

But means or averages hide the fuller complexity of people’s pragmatic behaviors in experimental studies. There is a good deal of work within experimental psychology that demonstrates how individual people’s in-experimental performances vary in systematic ways ( Raczaszek-Leonardi and Kelso, 2007 ; Gibbs and Van Orden, 2010 ). Looking at the distributions of responses, such as reading times, can offer more insightful explanations for people’s experimental performances, including the idea that people are behaving as self-organizing dynamical systems within the experiment ( Gibbs and Van Orden, 2010 ; Gibbs, 2017 ). For this reason, we must be careful not to assume, as is too often done, that the independent variable must only be caused by a specific, isolated mechanism in mind (e.g., pragmatic competence). Many independent variables may only have partial, probabilistic influence on people’s behaviors in experimental pragmatic tasks ( Gibbs and Santa Cruz, 2012 ).

Our point is that the data obtained in experimental pragmatic studies do not simply reflect people’s responses to different experimental conditions and the independent variables these are meant to tap into. Instead, people’s individual pragmatic behaviors in any experimental situation are subtly shaped by their specific bodies, cultural expectations, personalities, and histories ( Paxton and Dale, 2017 ; Abney et al., 2018 ). Pragmatics is, in this way, always a part of experiments we conduct and the data obtained from these investigations.

Experimental Tasks

It is challenging to characterize the diversity of tasks employed in experimental pragmatics ( Jucker et al., 2018 ). Nonetheless, a typical study in experimental pragmatics will present participants with a set of stimuli to which they are to respond in one of many possible ways. Among the most widely used experimental techniques are full-sentence reading times, word-by-word reading times (including both moving-window and eye-movement measures), self-paced listening, paraphrase judgment response times, priming methods, mouse-tracking, eye-tracking in visual world environments, free recall, cued recall, mental imagery studies, summarization and paraphrase of meaning tasks, question answering, cooperative conversation tasks, bodily enactment tasks, and various brain scanning measures such as evoked-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods.

Each of these experimental techniques presumably taps into how people “understand” pragmatic meaning. But these measures reflect different facets of pragmatic understanding. For example, full phrase or sentence reading time studies offer evidence on the total cognitive effort required to interpret a particular kind of pragmatic meaning at the phrasal or sentence level, such as a figurative utterance (e.g., metaphor, idiom, and irony) or other kinds of conversational implicature (e.g., scalar implicature). Methods examining the time it takes people to read individual words in linguistic expressions conveying different kinds of pragmatic meaning, via moving-window or eye-movement techniques, are useful for exploring local processing of specific word meanings in context. These online techniques, along with brain scanning measures such as ERPs, provide insights into the interaction of linguistic, social/pragmatic and cognitive knowledge during real-time pragmatic language understanding. Asking people to paraphrase the meanings of different pragmatic messages, rapidly judge suggested paraphrases of utterance meaning, or engage in specific task-related conversations provide evidence that enables scholars to characterize the meaning products understood when people process pragmatic meanings. Similarly, imagery tasks provide another method for exploring the contents of what people have understood having just quickly read or heard a specific kind of pragmatic message. Bodily engagement tasks, where people are asked to perform specific gestures or adopt different postures, are critical for investigating the role of embodied experience and action in creating pragmatic understandings of words, phrases, and longer stretches of discourse.

In general, no single method is capable of examining all facets of pragmatic understanding. Each technique may reveal different aspects of what happens during people’s inferring of pragmatic meanings. In some cases, these insights into pragmatic language processing are specific to particular temporal dimensions of the online construction of pragmatic meaning. For instance, word-based processing measures aim to assess more local pragmatic processing as experimental participants read or listen to linguistic messages word-by-word. Full-time reading and priming tasks are better able to assess more global aspects of pragmatic meaning understanding, such as when an overall message is understood (e.g., does this phrase, sentence, in context convey metaphorical meaning or a specific scalar implicature?).

Our concern here is that there is still an overwhelming tendency in the literature for scholars to make generalizations from their task-specific studies to larger, comprehensive theories of pragmatics. A vast number of studies on figurative language use employs an extensive range of experimental methods in which participants are instructed to engage in different tasks, such as fast, word-by-word reading, full phrase or sentence reading, making quick judgments on whether a particular figurative utterance makes sense, or fits into the previously read story context, or determine if an utterance conveys literal or some kind of figurative meaning (e.g., metaphorical and ironic), and whether a figurative utterance is apt or creative ( Gibbs and Colston, 2012 ; Colston, 2015 ). Each of these dependent measures may affect participants’ “understanding” performances in experimental situations given the different forms of attention they must pay to the stimulus materials. The results of these varying studies, and the theoretical interpretations scholars offer for explaining these findings, will differ depending on the explicit task required of the participants in a study. Yet these task influences are rarely acknowledged in linguistic pragmatic theories.

One possible response to this concern is to place most credibility in those experimental findings that converge across different experimental tasks (i.e., converging operations) ( Gibbs, 2019 ). But it may still be difficult, if not impossible, to find experimental results that are truly universal across various people, languages, cultures, and task demands ( Kecskes, 2014 ). A related response would be to argue that those that have the greatest convergence across people and tasks should be given the most weight in theoretical debates. However, arguments based on the “weight” of empirical evidence may be far less satisfactory to scientists who demand reliability and consistency in experimental findings.

Another response to the task demand problem in experimental pragmatics is when individual scholars argue for the superiority of some task environments (e.g., measures of eye-movements) over others (e.g., full phrasal or sentence reading times). The arguments along this line typically suggest that some specific task measures are better indicators of “real-world” pragmatic language use than others. Experiments that employ those privileged methods should, under this view, be afforded the most weight in debates over the content of pragmatic theories. It is fair to observe, however, that this type of response to the task demand issue typically ends in complete empirical stalemates as different scholars merely embrace results from preferred methods while ignoring or dismissing findings obtained from less preferred experimental paradigms.

The alternative position that is part of our broader vision of experimental pragmatics suggests that pragmatic language use is always task-specific both in and outside of experimental studies. Pragmatic language processing is not a uniform activity that operates in a task-free manner. Speakers and listeners always approach any language interaction or situation with explicit or implicit goals in mind. For instance, a listener can hear a political speech and wonder, even if implicitly, as to whether or not the message conveyed was persuasive, or whether or not he/she appreciated what a speaker has stated or an author wrote. People listen to language hoping to remember what was stated, in some circumstances, and may, therefore, pay close attention to the individual words and their meanings differently than when engaged in a very casual conversation. People’s criteria for understanding speakers’ messages will greatly vary depending on the circumstances.

More generally, the time is ripe for scholars to incorporate task demands as an enduring part of any experimental pragmatic situation. Theories of pragmatics may need to be specifically tailored to the various tasks people perform in different experiments. It may be impossible to create comprehensive theories that supervene over experimental task demands. In this manner, the pragmatic constraints inherent in any experimental task offer another reason for claiming that pragmatics always matters in people’s experiences of language use.

The Superficiality and Richness of Pragmatic Experience

Another challenge in conducting experimental pragmatic studies is that there are more complicated relations between task-dependent performances and pragmatic theories than are typically acknowledged. Consider a typical reading-time study that explores the cognitive effort required to understand pragmatic meaning, such as drawing a scalar implicature, inferring an ironic message, or quickly comprehending a novel metaphor. The reading time data are typically analyzed to test different hypotheses on the process by which people understand these different forms of pragmatic meaning.

However, we question whether people only infer a specific kind of meaning (e.g., literal vs. figurative, non-metaphorical vs. metaphorical, familiar metaphorical meaning vs. novel metaphorical meaning) when they read or hear language in discourse. Our motivations as readers, for example, are not simply centered on the recovery of a specific “meaning,” but involve a vast assortment of human phenomenological experiences, such as drawing more context-specific pragmatic inferences, experiencing different emotional reactions or esthetic pleasures, or imagining what you, even as an isolated participant in an experiment, may say in response to what some other person has stated. Each of these impressions, reactions, and esthetic responses may be part of the total time it takes someone to read and understand, for example, a simple metaphorical phrase as having “metaphorical” and not “literal” meaning in context.

We often fail to appreciate people’s pragmatic experiences of language in our quest to test specific hypotheses from linguistic pragmatics. To take one example, studies show that people take different times to interpret a metaphorical statement, such as “Lawyers are also sharks,” depending on whether that expression is intended to simply affirm a pre-existing belief in some discourse, add new information, or contradict a previously asserted belief ( Gibbs et al., 2011 ). People do not simply understand a metaphor as only expressing a metaphorical meaning, but interpret it more precisely in terms of its specific pragmatic messages in context (e.g., that a speaker wishes to strengthen an existing assumption, add new information, or contradict a previously stated belief about some topic).

A different example illustrates how the amount of effort devoted to processing a speaker’s message depends on what meanings become most optimally relevant ( Sperber and Wilson, 1995 ). For instance, reading the metaphorical phrase “My marriage is an icebox” takes longer to do in a context in which a speaker describes the state of his marriage than in a situation in which a speaker makes this reply to the question “Are you happy in your marriage? ( Gibbs, 2010 ). The expectation set up by the prior question makes it unnecessary for readers to infer the many possible metaphorical meanings of “My marriage is an icebox” (e.g., my marriage is confining, emotionally cold, and not moving forward), precisely because the utterance quickly communicates a “no” answer to the prior “Are you happy in your marriage?” question.

Pragmatic “understanding” is not simply a matter recovering a particular type of meaning, as it also involves understanding what a speaker pragmatically, socially and esthetically intends to achieve by the use of some discourse. More attention to the exact pragmatic meanings people really infer, including their esthetic and emotional responses, in context will be an important part of broadening the vision of experimental pragmatics. We need to create experimental situations that systematically investigate when and how specific pragmatic messages are conveyed and inferred, as well as when vague, or less specific, meanings and attitudes are interpreted.

A Case Study Example

The experimental literature on pragmatic language use is enormously complex. As noted earlier, many studies offer conflicting findings in regard to how people pragmatically produce and interpret various aspects of communicative meaning. These profound variations in experimental outcomes relate to a broader concern within psychology and elsewhere, dubbed as the “replication crisis.” Failures to replicate are now being published more than ever with some scholars claiming that any variation from some empirical standard should be interpreted as casting doubt on the validity of some earlier obtained experimental result (both for exact and conceptual replications) ( Shrout and Rodgers, 2019 ).

We view the replication “crisis” in the behavioral sciences in a more positive light because it affords a perfect opportunity to explore all of the pragmatic nuances that shape human performances in different experimental studies. These replication problems are not problems at all, but concrete indications of how individual differences and task demands, for instance, are critical to explaining the experimental findings obtained, and why these factors are important to acknowledge in larger theories of human performance.

Consider the case of experimental research on irony understanding ( Gibbs and Colston, 2007 , 2012 ). There are many studies showing relatively fast understanding of ironic utterances in discourse, which suggests how pragmatic knowledge, of various sorts, quickly plays a role in people’s online understanding of ironic meaning (e.g., Gibbs, 1986a , b ; Ivanko and Pexman, 2003 ). At the same time, there is data suggesting that pragmatics comes in only later on during linguistic processing when irony is encountered (e.g., Giora, 2003 ; Filik and Moxey, 2010 ). There is also considerable research on the importance of cognitive abilities related to mind-reading and executive functioning during both the learning and understanding of ironic speech and writing (e.g., Filippova and Astington, 2008 ).

How can we discriminate between those findings that are valid and worthy of theoretical consideration and those that are irrelevant? Replications efforts are important. Our point, though, is that replication attempts are not the solution to the diversity of experimental findings on irony comprehension, or any other pragmatic phenomena. It is far better to see the numerous experimental findings as pointing to many of the pragmatic nuances that really shape people’s complex ironic language use. For instance, many studies show that the speed with which ironic utterances are understood may vary depending on whether the experiments assessed self-paced, full statement reading time, eye-movements in which regressions back to earlier text is allowed, word-by-word moving-window measures in which regressions are not possible, paraphrase judgment times, lexical decisions to words reflecting literal or ironic meanings, judgments over whether some phrase expressed irony or not, and so on. The stimuli used in these studies included variations in the length and syntactic complexity of ironic phrases, familiar vs. novel ironic statements, different forms of irony (e.g., blame by praise vs. praise by blame), different contextual circumstances (e.g., did the context set up an ironic situation, did the context provide an explicit echo to the irony mentioned), whether the ironic statements were addressed to participants or were participants overhearers of ironic exchanges, the accent in which an ironic utterance was spoken, cases where people had to make verbal responses to ironic phrases after quickly reading them, and so on. There are also individual differences between the experimental participants in these studies which include people with different ages, language backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, occupations, personality types, organic brain disorders and injuries, different cognitive abilities (e.g., working memory capacity, mind-reading abilities), and so on. These variations in the tasks and people studied in experiments on timed irony understanding have their individual effects, but also interact in many complex ways to reveal different emergent combinations of factors that may contribute to whether verbal irony is seen as easy or more difficult to interpret.

All of these varying empirical results are subject to exact and conceptual replication attempts (and some have been replicated in one form or another). But it seems unlikely that replication efforts will somehow clean up this catalog of experimental findings to reveal a simple, comprehensive set of data which clearly points to one theoretical model of irony understanding that can be applied to all people in all situations of verbal irony use. Nonetheless, the various, sometimes complex patterns of experimental results may highlight different systems of constraint that flexibly operate to produce relevant irony interpretations in different task-specific and people-specific contexts (e.g., constraint-satisfaction models, see Campbell and Katz, 2012 ; Caffarra et al., 2019 ).

Any instance of linguistic communication fundamentally constitutes a different task for the participants given their idiosyncratic histories, dispositions, and situations. No single task captures the complex underlying psychological reality when people encounter particular combinations of word strings or utterances. Each different configuration of task demands as task constraints requires a differently self-organized mind and body. The flexible capacity to self-organize to suit task constraints exists because mind and body compose a complex system. Specifically, the embodiment of task demands constrains the mind and body to anticipate task appropriate utterances in critical states and respond as needed within an experimental setting (e.g., timed comprehension responses).

Finally, virtually all experimental studies on irony comprehension, similar to many other areas of pragmatic meaning, assume that the final product of understanding is an “ironic” message. Yet these messages vary considerably in discourse, depending on a wide range of contextual and interpersonal factors. A person may hear “A fine friend you are!” in some situation and properly infer that the speaker was not making a compliment. But the exact interpretation created is usually much more than “You are not a good friend,” and likely involves more specific meaning products, including that “the speaker had expected me to help him in my capacity as a good friend and was now scolding me with the hope that my future behaviors will be more cooperative.” All of these more nuanced pragmatic effects may be understood as part of any simple behavioral response in an experimental situation (e.g., measuring eye-movements during reading of irony in written discourse). The future challenge is to assess the relations between task-specific experimental situations and the particular, in this case, ironic messages interpreted, along with the possible emotional and affective responses of people when reading, or listening to, ironic statements. Again, the inherent complexities among people and their explicit task requirements, as well as their implicit personal motivations, may all be constitutive of pragmatics when conducting experimental pragmatic studies.

Conclusion: Embracing a Different Theoretical Goal

These numerous challenges for experimental pragmatics may be overcome by adopting a broader vision for experimental pragmatics. There are several immediate steps toward a better understanding of the complexities of pragmatic language use.

First, researchers need to fully acknowledge the particular people they study and the implicit or explicit tasks presented to participants in experimental studies. There is no neutral point of view, no context-free, task-free environment from which utterance interpretation begins and eventually unfolds to produce pragmatic meanings. All language use is pragmatically situated from the early stages of linguistic processing, and theories of linguistic pragmatics must embrace this omnipresent reality. An experimental effect (i.e., the influence of an independent variable on a dependent variable) may be caused by a confluence of factors, most of which are not necessarily being manipulated within the context of a single study (e.g., individual differences, task demands, and the overall dynamical system that is created as a person performs in a specific task environment) ( Raczaszek-Leonardi and Kelso, 2007 ; Gibbs and Van Orden, 2010 ). Experimental psycholinguistics has obtained many important empirical findings demonstrating how various pragmatic knowledge (e.g., background knowledge, contextual information, and various cognitive abilities) shape ordinary language use ( Clark, 1996 ; Gibbs, 2019 ). There is still a greater need to show how the pragmatic conditions within which experimental participants operate have their influence in different facets of linguistic communication.

Second, scholars need to more fully explore the meaning products that people create when they interpret pragmatic messages in different contexts given their different understanding of goals or tasks. People do not always understand utterances in the same way, as expressing the same meanings, a fact that is true both between and within people (e.g., a single person may infer different messages from the same utterance in the same context at different times) (e.g., “good enough language comprehension,” see Ferreira and Patson, 2007 ). Our ultimate goal is to create a theory of pragmatics that is capable of generating the diverse meanings that people actually understand, not merely the idealized, and too often more socially and esthetically decontextualized, meanings that pragmatic theories typically discuss.

Pragmatic performances are not an isolated part of human behavior, divorced from other psychological processes and systems. People use utterances for various communicative purposes that are deeply connected with other bodily behaviors such as those responsible for tone of voice, eye-movement or gaze, laughter, bodily postures, hand and arm gestures, and so on. These bodily actions are all “coupled” in both time and space, as much cognitive science research indicates ( Clark, 1996 ; Gibbs, 2006 ), to enable people to better coordinate and collaborate in order to achieve various personal and social goals ( Gibbs, 2006 ; Shockley et al., 2009 ; Colston, 2019 ). Too much research in experimental pragmatics ignores these complex pragmatic realities when they analyze their data and go on to draw larger theoretical conclusions on the basis of the specific results they have obtained.

A general theory of pragmatics may also be characterized as part of a human dynamical system, not as its own isolated system ( Gibbs, 2017 ). How people interpret utterances may, therefore, share many properties and processes that are related to many kinds of intentional human actions. The task that people explicitly or implicitly adopt when they produce and understand pragmatic messages, or the particular complex make-up of the participants in our studies, and the ways we analyze the full range of information that is obtained from participants are all part of the inherent pragmatic nature of human communication processes. We cannot, and should not, assume that there are ways of scrapping away the complexities in our experimental studies so that we can create a normative theory of pragmatics apart from the messy descriptive realities of real human performance.

Pragmatics is not just a temporally isolated inferential process that arises only at later points during real-life language use. Instead, pragmatics reflects the entire bodily system in action as people engage in different task-specific performances under the multiple influences of broader interpersonal, social, and cultural landscapes. Pragmatics is best understood as systems of varying constraints that have interactive influences on people’s adaptive behaviors. This broader vision embraces the view that pragmatics always matters, to varying degrees, and must be acknowledged, and systematically investigated, within experimental pragmatic studies.

Our call for an expanded vision of experimental pragmatics is ultimately aimed at broadening what is considered to be “pragmatics” in contemporary theories of linguistic pragmatics. Linguists and philosophers, for example, may not see questions of individual differences and task demands as being relevant to their own respective writings on pragmatic theory. However, pragmatic theories should not be divorced from the pragmatic realities of human performances. Shouldn’t these considerations of real people doing pragmatic actions be at the forefront of research and theory in linguistic pragmatics?

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords : pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, individual differences, task demands, psycholinguistics

Citation: Gibbs RW Jr and Colston HL (2020) Pragmatics Always Matters: An Expanded Vision of Experimental Pragmatics. Front. Psychol. 11:1619. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01619

Received: 18 March 2020; Accepted: 16 June 2020; Published: 24 July 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Gibbs and Colston. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Foundations of Pragmatics

Edited by: Wolfram Bublitz and Neal R. Norrick
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Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: Scholars and students in the areas of pragmatics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, communication studies and related fields.
Front matter: 13
Main content: 710
Illustrations: 5
Keywords: Applied Linguistics ; Communication ; Pragmatics
Published: June 30, 2011
ISBN: 9783110214260
Published: June 16, 2011
ISBN: 9783110214253

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