(Re)visiting pragmatics through the lenses of communication skills

Abstract

The studies conducted on pragmatics suggest that defining the borderline of pragmatics has always been a challenging task for scholars. Demarcating the definition of the term itself only to ‘the study of the relation of signs’ to interpreters has proved ineffective in interpreting the term from a wide variety of perspectives. On the other hand, removing the boundaries leads to varying interpretations on pragmatics. As a subfield of linguistics and somewhat semiotics, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the speech, the pre-existing knowledge and the values of receiver and sender as well as the implicit or explicit intent of the speaker among many other factors. Accordingly, this paper firstly attempts to identify and demarcate the borderlines of pragmatics. Secondly, it attempts to uncover the semantic pace of discourse that is a closely knitted term with pragmatics. Thirdly, it analyses pragmatics in terms of aforementioned communication skills through a wide range of examples by considering the principles of George Yule (1986), which are narrated and exemplified in his notable work entitled Pragmatics, particularly in interpreting the ‘use of language’ concerning speech acts and events; the ‘change of language’ concerning cooperation and implicature, and ‘following rules in language’ concerning politeness and interaction.