This paper traces the development of pragmatics as a distinct field of linguistic inquiry, from its semiotic origins in Peirce’s concept of the “science of signs” through Morris’s tripartite division of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and Carnap’s application of this framework to natural language. It follows the consolidation of pragmatics as “the study of language usage” (Levinson, 1983) through the major theoretical strands that have shaped the field: Austin’s and Searle’s speech act theory, Grice’s cooperative principle, Goffman’s and Brown and Levinson’s work on face and politeness, and the analytic tradition of conversation analysis. The paper closes by situating these strands within Yule’s (2006) contextual definition of pragmatics as the study of language use in context.
Peirce (1878) introduced the concept of “science of signs” which is the origin of linguistic pragmatics. According to Morris (1938), there are three ways of studying signs with reference to syntactic studies which describe a sign in relation to another sign, or semantic studies which investigate signs in relation to their meaning whereas pragmatic studies examine signs in relation to their interpreters/users.
Carnap (1947) made use of this trichotomy to refer to the ways of studying natural languages while pragmatics is meant to investigate language usage in specific situations. Pragmatics became, therefore, “the study of language usage” according to Levinson (1983, p.5) and five phenomena derived from this definition including speech acts, conversational implicatures, presuppositions, politeness, and deixis.
Austin (1962) made a distinction between constative and performative utterances. For instance, a constative utterance would be “The room is beautiful” referring to a specific state of affairs, whereas a typical performative utterance would be “I name this ship Mary”; thus, performing a specific action (naming a ship). Therefore, Austin approached utterances in terms of performance identifying three types of actions: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. A locutionary act is intended to say, inform or declare something. An illocutionary act asks the listener to take action while the perlocutionary act relies on a specific effect upon the listener.
Moreover, it was Searle (1975) who proposed a typology of five illocutionary acts: assertive acts, the speaker holding something to be true; commissive acts, the speaker committing to act in order to fulfil a promise; directive acts, the speaker getting someone else to perform something, for example, commanding; expressive acts, the speaker expressing the sincerity condition of the illocutionary act; declarations, requiring an institutional authority possessed by the speaker to perform an action, changing the world by the words uttered. In addition, Searle proposed a theory exploiting the indirect speech acts – illocutionary acts by which one could infer something beyond the literal meaning of a mere utterance.
Nevertheless, the cooperative principle was introduced by Grice (1975) stating that a conversational contribution should be as informative as required (quantity maxim), should adhere to the truth (quality maxim), should be relevant (relation maxim) and should be perspicuous (maxim of manner). When communicating, these maxims could be breached, which implies that utterances are interpreted beyond the literal meaning or surface.
Goffman (1955) introduced the concept of face later exploited by Grice and his theory on the cooperative principle. Brown and Levinson (1987) referred to the concept of facework; therefore, the interactants are endowed with two specific needs: to be unimpeded (negative face) and to be approved of (positive face). Speech acts can be referred to as face-threatening-acts (FTA); for instance, asking or advising, interactants develop politeness strategies, “facework”, in order to minimize the effect of the utterances upon the interlocutor.
In pragmatics, the conversational analysis concept refers to the analysis of natural conversation in order to reveal the linguistic characteristics of conversation and how conversation functions in everyday life. Conversational analysis studies three aspects: turn-taking rules, conversational maxims as well as conversation functions such as communicating politeness and assigning roles. Conversation is viewed as a mutual activity in which two or several participants make use of linguistic forms and non-linguistic signals in order to communicate interactively (Brennan 2010).
Goffman (1967) introduced the concept of interaction as a ritual ceremony. This new conception has its roots in the theory that the social patterns guiding human interaction are governed by conversational rituals rather than human will. Conversational rituals are exemplified by greetings, compliments, excuses as well as thanks, being treated as rituals because this type of speech acts form a representation of the individual’s effort made in order to complete his performance within a social setting.
Social interactions can be approached as ritual ceremonies meaning that conversations based on both social and verbal interactions bear the same characteristics. A social interaction takes place in the ordinary daily atmosphere in which individuals live and observe rules and codes of behaviour governing each conversation. Conversational rules are, thus, imposed by social as well as cultural norms of society.
Nowadays, pragmatics indicates that language functions in a context which is socially defined, taking place within space and time limits and assigning possible roles to the interlocutors (Yule 2006). Pragmatics is, therefore, the study of how language is used in context taking into account the factors contributing to language usage.
Conclusion
The theoretical trajectory outlined above shows pragmatics developing along two complementary axes: an axis concerned with the internal logic of utterances, that is, what they do (speech acts) and how their intended meaning is inferentially recovered (implicature, the cooperative principle), and an axis concerned with the social conditions of their production, that is, how face, politeness, and ritual shape the interactional management of speech. From Peirce’s originary semiotic distinction to Searle’s typology of illocutionary acts and Grice’s conversational maxims, the field progressively built an apparatus for explaining meaning that goes beyond literal, sentence-level content, an apparatus that, together with Goffman’s and Brown and Levinson’s work on face and the descriptive tradition of conversation analysis, converges on Yule’s (2006) contextual definition of pragmatics as the situated, context-dependent use of language by its interpreters.
This body of theory has direct implications for language teaching, and for English language teaching in particular. A learner who has mastered grammatical accuracy without a corresponding pragmatic competence may still fail to recognise the illocutionary force of an utterance, misjudge the politeness strategies appropriate to a given social distance, or misread the conversational maxims at work in indirect speech, all of which are common sources of miscommunication in intercultural classroom settings. Integrating the pragmatic dimension into EFL teaching, through explicit attention to speech acts, face-work, and turn-taking norms in authentic or simulated conversational material, would allow learners to move beyond well-formed sentences toward socially appropriate and situationally responsive language use. This suggests a pedagogical priority for curriculum design in education sciences: pragmatic competence deserves treatment as a teachable component of communicative competence, rather than as an incidental by-product of exposure to the target language.
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