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Chapter 7 Pragmatics 1. What is Pragmatics?? Relevant Language Use Observations and Questions to Ponder over Read the following story. What does the boy still need to learn about using language? A little boy comes in the front door. Mother: Wipe your feet, please. He removes his muddy shoes and socks and carefully wipes his clean feet on the doorma.t Summaries to Make and Linguistic Viewpoints to Learn Sometimes what we mean by what we say is not the same with what others understand. The gap between them is sometimes caused by unclear utterance, making the hearer not able to receive the right information; sometimes by ambiguous expressions, leading to multiple possible understanding; sometimes, knowledge of grammar and vocabulary are the barriers to understanding. It seems that the child’s knowledge of vocabulary and grammar is not the problem. When the little boy was asked by his mother to wipe his feet, that is exactly what he did. The problem is that the boy seems to have understood the literal meaning of the words from his mother but not what she really means. As adults, we usually arrive at the speaker’s meaning so effortlessly that we tend to be unaware of the considerable amount of skill and knowledge that we used to accomplish this. How do we understand what speakers mean by their utterances? What are the factors affecting the agreement between utterance meaning and understood meaning? Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). It has, consequently, more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves. Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning. Definitions to Clarify Pragmatics: Pragmatics studies the meaning of words in context, analyzing the parts of meaning that can be explained by knowledge of the physical and social world, and the socio-psychological