ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes a brief (authentic) dialogue in order to introduce some important terms and concepts in modern pragmatics and to illustrate briefly the sorts of phenomena that pragmatics needs to account for. Sometimes the process of identifying pragmatic meaning involves interpreting ambiguous and vague linguistic expressions in order to establish which concepts and thoughts they express. The pragmalinguistic perspective focuses on the linguistic strategies that are used to convey a given pragmatic meaning, while the sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the socially-based assessments, beliefs and interactional principles that underlie people’s choice of strategies. A sociopragmatic perspective focuses on the social judgements associated with such a scenario; for example, what the relationship between the participants is, and the social acceptability of reaching for food in such a context. Social pragmaticists tend to focus on the ways in which particular communicative exchanges between individuals are embedded in and constrained by social, cultural and other contextual factors.
