Towards an interdisciplinary definition of pragmatics

Abstract

The definition of pragmatics has long oscillated between two views: as a component of linguistics and as a perspective on language use ( Haberland and Mey 1977 ; Verschueren and Östman 2009 ). The perspective view, now dominant ( Rajagopalan 2009 ), commits the field to interdisciplinary inquiry but leaves its conceptual core unsettled. Within Caffi’s ( 2006 , 2010 ) metapragmatic framework, this study analyzes 365 single-sentence definitions of pragmatics (1938–2025) from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and communication studies. Semantic-field coding and frequency analysis identify five shared core components: contextual relationality, meaningful usage, cognitive communication, functional action, and social system. These inform a unified definition: pragmatics is the study of how language users negotiate context-dependent, socially situated meaning through intentional, inferential, and rule-mediated communication. Countering Gazdar’s (1979) reductionism and Bar-Hillel’s (1971) “wastebasket” critique, this framing positions pragmatics as an interdisciplinary nexus of cognition, interaction, and culture.