The History of Pragmatics

3 stages of developmentThere are three stages in the development of

pragmatics.The 1st stage occurred in 1930s. The term

“Pragmatics” was used at a the 1st time. It was the branch of Semiology/semiotics= the study of signs.

Pragmatics

In 1938, Carnap said that pragmatics should focus on relationship between users, words and reference relationship.

In 1940, Charles Morris divided semiology into 3 parts: syntactics/syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

Then, the 2nd stage: From 1950 to 1960: 3 philosophers: Austin, Searle and Paul Grice established their theory of Speech act and implicature theory.

The 3rd Stage: in 1977, Jacob L. Mey published the 1st Journal of Pragmatics in Holland.

In 1983, Levinson wrote his book “Pragmatics” whereas Geoffrey Leech wrote his “Principle of pragmatics”.

In 1988,the set up of International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). This was a year which noted as a year when pragmatics turned into an independent discipline.

Schools of PragmaticsThere are two schools of pragmatics: Br. And

Am.school and European School.British and American school had a focus on

sentence structure and grammar: deictic expression, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech and conversational structure. It was called : Micro-pragmatics.

The European school had a wider focus. It focused on macro-pragmatics scope like conversational analysis, cultural anthropology, social linguistics and psycholinguistics in the process of communication.