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Definition 1



Charles Morris (1903 – 1979) was concerned with the study of the science of signs, which he called semiotic;distinguished 3 branches of semiotics: syntactic (or syntax), which studies the formal relation among different signs; semantics, the study of the relation between the signs and the objects they denote; and pragmatics, the study of the relation of signs to their interpreters, i.e. people.



Definition 2
Pragmatics is the study of relations between language and context.( George Yule)

Example:

**She is 65 years old. But she went a bit funny after her husband died.

Funny:
• causing amusement, laughter;
• difficult to explain or understand; strange;
• slightly unwell;
• slightly insane, eccentric.



Advantage of Definition 2: it is not as wide as Morris’s definition, it delimits the field and excludes from the area of pragmatics such disciplines as sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics.

Disadvantage: all the communicative (or conversational) characteristics are excluded.



Definition 3 (by cognitive pragmatics)
Pragmatics is the study of how receivers of messages interpret utterances.



Definition 4 (socio-psychological pragmatics)
Pragmatics is the study of the speaker’s meaning: what does the producer of the message mean, why does he choose to express his idea in a certain way.


Understanding an utterance:
Understanding the sense + the context + assigning reference to the utterance:

Example
**He sat on the wall, he had a great fall...

**Assigning more than one reference or sense to one and the same utterance can create a humorous effect:

Example
**In a clothing store: "Wonderful bargains for men with 16 and 17 necks."

utterance + the structure of the utterance

Example
**The boy was playing with the dog eating a smelly hamburger.


Four possible ways of understanding utterance meaning and
force:

1) You can understand both the meaning of the utterance and its force. This is the most common state of affairs; otherwise our communication with other people would be impossible.