Pragmatics - Areas of Interest

Areas of Interest

  • The study of the speaker's meaning, not focusing on the phonetic or grammatical form of an utterance, but instead on what the speaker's intentions and beliefs are.
  • The study of the meaning in context, and the influence that a given context can have on the message. It requires knowledge of the speaker's identities, and the place and time of the utterance.
  • The study of implicatures, i.e. the things that are communicated even though they are not explicitly expressed.
  • The study of relative distance, both social and physical, between speakers in order to understand what determines the choice of what is said and what is not said.
  • The study of what is not meant, as opposed to the intended meaning, i.e. that which is unsaid and unintended, or unintentional.
  • Information Structure, the study of how utterances are marked in order to efficiently manage the common ground of referred entities between speaker and hearer
  • Formal Pragmatics, the study of those aspects of meaning and use, for which context of use is an important factor, by using the methods and goals of formal semantics.

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