The field of research of pragmatics and its role in modern linguistics

Abstract

This thesis delineates the field of research of pragmatics as the inquiry into how language users convert underdetermined linguistic signals into socially recognizable actions through context-sensitive inference. While semantics specifies conventional meaning, pragmatics investigates the mechanisms by which interlocutors enrich, adjust, and negotiate meaning relative to intentions, common ground, and norms. Drawing on theory, corpus evidence, interactional analysis, and experimental findings, the paper shows that speech acts, implicature, presupposition management, indexical anchoring, politeness, and sequential organization constitute the core terrain of pragmatics. The discussion argues that pragmatics operates as an interface discipline linking grammar to cognition and social order, and that its analytical tools are indispensable for modern subfields such as interactional linguistics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational language technology. The conclusion formulates a compact characterization: pragmatics studies the context-dependent processes and normative conditions through which utterances become public actions that update beliefs, relations, and commitments.