Pragmatics: The Study Of Language Usage

Levinson (1983) describes pragmatics as “the study of language usage”. He also says that pragmatics is “the study of language from a functional aspect, that is, that it aims to explain facets of linguistic structure by reference to non-linguistic pressures and causes”. He adds that “pragmatics should be concerned only with principles of language usage, and have nothing to do with the description of linguistic structure”. However, this definition does not always work, considering that things that are not explained by semantic theories go to the scope of pragmatics (Aquino, 2011). According to Yule (1996), pragmatics is the study of meaning communicated by the speaker rather than by the utterance. It explains what is said based on the influence

It entails whether or not an utterance is acceptable and appropriate to other users of the language in conveying the speaker’s intended meaning (Kasper, 1997). It can be further divided into pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic components. According to Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983), pragmalinguistics deals with the linguistic resources needed for communicative acts (e.g., strategies and routines) therefore, pragmalinguistic failure, refers to simply using inappropriate linguistic forms.

Sociopragmatics, on the other hand, consists of the sociological realm of pragmatics andrefers to proper social behavior in the target language where learners must become aware of the outcome of their pragmatic choices. Sociopragmatic failure is then regarded as more challenging to overcome than pragmalinguistic failure because of the need for

Its inner circle is discourse competence, the three points of the pyramid are sociocultural, linguistic and actional competences, and the outer circle is strategic competence, an ever present, potentially usable inventory of skills which allows a strategically competent speaker to negotiate messages and resolve problems or to compensate for deficiencies in any of the other underlying competencies. Discourse competence relates to the ability of selecting and arranging lexical items and syntactic structures to achieve well-formed spoken or written texts. In order to become competent in terms of discourse, an L2 learner must be able to master such important aspects of language as cohesion, coherence, genre structure and conversational structure. Linguistic competence concerns the very foundations of communication, basically the phonological, lexical and morpho-syntactic elements of a language and how they are reflected in writing. In order to become linguistically competent, an L2 learner must know the sound inventory of the L2, its spelling rules, the meaning of its lexical items and routines, how to order them so as to form phrases and sentences, the elements that can or cannot collocate with others,