ipl-logo

Difference Between Pragmatics And Semantics

740 Words3 Pages
In linguistic world, “Pragmatics and semantics can be viewed as different parts, or different aspects, of the same general study.” (Charles W, 1998) Actually, pragmatics and Semantics are also study with meaning, but semantics mainly concern the ability of speaker’s in produce or understand meaning of sentence, and pragmatics mainly concerned about the ability of speaker’s in produce or understand meaning of utterances in a specific speech situation or background. Therefore, there is a big difference between study of semantics and pragmatics - “Context”, which means the specific speech situation and background.

In definition, context could be classified as three types: linguistics context, situational context and other contextual factors. Linguistic context also known as “co-text”, it mainly related to the background or life experience of the speakers. For example, there may have multiple meanings of a phrase in native language of speaker, then it always happen misunderstand of the speakers think the meaning is widely conscious and explicit, but it is a large extent unconscious and implicit to most hearer in actually. And situational context is mainly related to the specific speech situation, for example factors of time, place and person. Exclude linguistics context and situational context, other contextual factors are also related to specific speech situation or other rules in the real life. There are two important parts in study of pragmatics, deixis and
Open Document