Essay On Pragmatic Competence

935 Words4 Pages

Thomas (1995) said that “the most common definitions of pragmatics were meaning in use or meaning in context”. Thomas (1995) also said that “more up-to-date textbooks tend to fall into one of two camps that are those who equate pragmatics with speaker meaning and those who equate it with utterance interpretation”. In addition, pragmatics can be applied in our everyday life to interpret the meaning or messages that the people want to share with us. Sometimes, we might misunderstand what people said to us due to not having the proper knowledge, proper background same with the speaker or we do not have the pragmatic competency same as the speaker. According to Kaltenbo¨ck, Mihatsch, & Schneider (2010), pragmatic competence is the ability to communicate your intended message with all its nuances in any socio-cultural context and to interpret the message of your speaker as it was intended. Due to this, we need to develop our pragmatic competence skill well so that we can be a better listener that can interpret the speaker’s messages, assumptions, …show more content…

According to Yule (1996), pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a hearer (or reader). It can be said that pragmatics is more to the analysis of what people mean with their utterances than what the choice of words, phrases or the structures of the utterances might mean by themselves. For example, if a teacher said that the classroom is too cold, what she might really meant is for someone to close down the one of the air conditioner or for someone to increase the temperature of the air conditioner in the classroom. If her students can understand the real meaning of what she said, they will take immediate action by turning the air conditioner down or by increasing the temperature of the air

More about Essay On Pragmatic Competence

Open Document