ABSTRACT
Today, the term ‘pragmatics’ is most directly associated with the study of language use, though it originated in the context of a more general theory of semiosis. For Charles Morris (1938a), syntactics was the study of the relationships of signs to other signs, while semantics investigated the connections between signs and the objects to which the signs are applicable, and pragmatics ought to be devoted to the relationships between signs and their users or interpreters. In other words, pragmatics ‘deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs’ (ibid., p. 30). Or, ‘Any rule when actually in use operates as a type of behavior, and in this sense there is a pragmatical component in all rules’ (ibid., p. 35).
