3) views pragmatics as the study of meaning.
Kasper (1997) defines pragmatics as “the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context.” For this author pragmatics is "making meaning is a dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer, the context of utterance (physical, social and linguistic) and the meaning potential of an utterance." (p. Thomas (1995) views the study of pragmatics as meaning in interaction. For this author pragmatics "is the study of the mechanisms that support this faith, a faith so strong that many can use the term communicate interchangeably with speak or write, never noticing that the term communication presupposes achievement of the intended effect of verbal action upon the addressee, whereas speaking and writing do not." Green (1989) defines pragmatics as an act of faith. Pragmatics can be taken to be the description of this ability, as it operates both for particular languages and languages in general." (p.
This ability is independent of idiosyncratic beliefs, feelings and usages (although it may refer to regular and relatively abstract principles. In order to participate in ordinary language usage, one must be able to make such calculations, both in production and interpretation. "We can compute out of sequences of utterances, taken together with background assumptions about language usage, highly detailed inferences abut the nature of the assumptions participants are making, and the purposes for which utterances are being used. Levinson (1983) views pragmatics as an inferential process. "Pragmatics is the study of deixis (at least in part), implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and aspects of discourse structure." Stalnaker (1972) defines the scope of pragmatics as follows: This functional perspective is also referred to as ‘empirical pragmatics.’ The latter is considered a functional perspective and interfaces with disciplines such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatic variation, and other social sciences. It is mainly concerned with central topics such as implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, and reference. The first is referred to as the ‘component view,’ and it examines the ‘systematic study of meaning by virtue of, or dependent on, the use of language’ (p. Pragmatics can be analyzed from two perspectives, the Cognitive-Philosophical view (or Anglo-American pragmatics) and the Sociocultural-Interactional view (or European-Continental pragmatics) (Haugh, 2008 Huang, 2007). In modern linguistics, pragmatics is broadly defined as the study of language use in context. Specifically, Morris defined pragmatics as “the study of the relation of signs to interpreters” (1938, p.
Morris (1901-1979) as one of the three components of semiotics, the science of signs. Pragmatics dates back to philosophical thinking of the early 19th century and was introduced by the American philosopher Charles W.