Pragmatics in the context of Topic-comment

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning). Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions.

Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilize the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy.

Semiotics is the study of signs. It is an interdisciplinary field that examines what signs are, how they form sign systems, and how individuals use them to communicate meaning. Its main branches are syntactics, which addresses formal relations between signs, semantics, which addresses the relation between signs and their meanings, and pragmatics, which addresses the relation between signs and their users. Semiotics is related to linguistics but has a broader scope that includes nonlinguistic signs, such as maps and clothing.

Signs are entities that stand for something else, like the word cat, which stands for a carnivorous mammal. They can take many forms, such as sounds, images, written marks, and gestures. Iconic signs operate through similarity. For them, the sign vehicle resembles the referent, such as a portrait of a person. Indexical signs are based on a direct physical link, such as smoke as a sign of fire. For symbolic signs, the relation between sign vehicle and referent is conventional or arbitrary, which applies to most linguistic signs. Models of signs analyze the basic components of signs. Ferdinand de Saussure's dyadic model identifies a perceptible image and a concept as the core elements, whereas Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic model distinguishes a sign vehicle, a referent, and an effect in the interpreter's mind.

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use language in communication. Semantics, together with syntactics and pragmatics, is a part of semiotics.

Lexical semantics is the branch of semantics that studies word meaning. It examines whether words have one or several meanings and in what lexical relations they stand to one another. Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences by exploring the phenomenon of compositionality or how new meanings can be created by arranging words. Formal semantics relies on logic and mathematics to provide precise frameworks of the relation between language and meaning. Cognitive semantics examines meaning from a psychological perspective and assumes a close relation between language ability and the conceptual structures used to understand the world. Other branches of semantics include conceptual semantics, computational semantics, and cultural semantics.

In philosophy and linguistics, the denotation of a word or expression is its strictly literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning, in particular connotation. For instance, the word "warm" may evoke calmness, coziness, or kindness (as in the warmth of someone's personality) but these associations are not part of the word's denotation. Similarly, an expression's denotation is separate from pragmatic inferences it may trigger. For instance, describing something as "warm" often implicates that it is not hot, but this is once again not part of the word's denotation.

Denotation plays a major role in several fields. Within semantics and philosophy of language, denotation is studied as an important aspect of meaning. In mathematics and computer science, assignments of denotations are assigned to expressions are a crucial step in defining interpreted formal languages. The main task of formal semantics is to reverse engineer the computational system which assigns denotations to expressions of natural languages.

In linguistics, grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.

Fluency in a particular language variety involves a speaker internalizing these rules, many or most of which are acquired by observing other speakers, as opposed to intentional study or instruction. Much of this internalization occurs during early childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves more direct instruction. The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. At smaller scales, it may refer to rules shared by smaller groups of speakers.

In the study of the biological sciences, biocommunication is any specific type of communication within (intraspecific) or between (interspecific) species of plants, animals, fungi, protozoa and microorganisms. Communication means sign-mediated interactions following three levels of rules (syntactic, pragmatic and semantic). Signs in most cases are chemical molecules (semiochemicals), but also tactile, or as in animals also visual and auditive. Biocommunication of animals may include vocalizations (as between competing bird species), or pheromone production (as between various species of insects), chemical signals between plants and animals (as in tannin production used by vascular plants to warn away insects), and chemically mediated communication between plants and within plants.

Biocommunication of fungi demonstrates that mycelia communication integrates interspecific sign-mediated interactions between fungal organisms, soil bacteria and plant root cells without which plant nutrition could not be organized. Biocommunication of Ciliates identifies the various levels and motifs of communication in these unicellular eukaryotes. Biocommunication of Archaea represents key levels of sign-mediated interactions in the evolutionarily oldest akaryotes. Biocommunication of phages demonstrates that the most abundant living agents on this planet coordinate and organize by sign-mediated interactions. Biocommunication is the essential tool to coordinate behavior of various cell types of immune systems.

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the use of the English language "as a global means of inter-community communication" and can be understood as "any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice and often the only option". ELF is "defined functionally by its use in intercultural communication rather than formally by its reference to native-speaker norms" whereas English as a second or foreign language aims at meeting native speaker norms and gives prominence to native-speaker cultural aspects.

English became the established global lingua franca in academia after the 1940s (until which French and German were of equal importance) and, by the end of the 20th century, partly by the cultural influence of the United States, had become the dominant lingua franca in all communication. While lingua francas have been used for centuries, what makes ELF a novel phenomenon is the extent to which it is used in spoken, written and computer-mediated communication. ELF research focuses on the pragmatics of variation which is manifest in the variable use of the resources of English for a wide range of globalized purposes, in important formal encounters such as business transactions, international diplomacy and conflict resolution, as well as in informal exchanges between international friends.

Etymology (/ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ ET-ih-MOL-ə-jee) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. Most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, it additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to attempt a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings and changes that a word (and its related parts) carries throughout its history. The origin of any particular word is also known as its etymology.

For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, particularly texts about the language itself, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about forms that are too old for any direct information to be available. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots in many European languages, for example, can be traced back to the origin of the Indo-European language family.

In linguistics and the philosophy of language, a locutionary act is the performance of an utterance, and is one of the types of force, in addition to illocutionary act and perlocutionary act, typically cited in Speech Act Theory. Speech Act Theory is a subfield of pragmatics that explores how words and sentences are not only used to present information, but also to perform actions. As an utterance, a locutionary act is considered a performative, in which both the audience and the speaker must trust certain conditions about the speech act. These conditions are called felicity conditions and are divided into three different categories: the essential condition, the sincerity condition, and the preparatory condition.

The term equally refers to the surface meaning of an utterance because, according to J. L. Austin's posthumous How To Do Things With Words, a speech act should be analysed as a locutionary act (i.e. the actual utterance and its ostensible meaning, comprising phonetic, phatic, and rhetic acts corresponding to the verbal, syntactic, and semantic aspects of any meaningful utterance), as well as an illocutionary act (the semantic 'illocutionary force' of the utterance, thus its real, intended meaning), and in certain cases a further perlocutionary act (i.e. its actual effect, whether intended or not).

In linguistic pragmatics, the term metalocutionary act is sometimes used for a speech act that refers to the forms and functions of the discourse itself rather than continuing the substantive development of the discourse.

The term metalocutionary act originated as metalocution (Gibbon 1976, 1983) in functional descriptions of intonation in English and German, by analogy with locution (locutionary act), illocution (illocutionary act) and perlocution (perlocutionary act) in speech act theory. The term metalocutionary act has developed a more general meaning and may include, for example, quotation acts and comments on preceding speech acts.

In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. The philosopher H. P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversation, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as but or therefore. Take for example the following exchange:

Here, B does not say, but conversationally implicates, that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context. Conversational implicatures are classically seen as contrasting with entailments: they are not necessary or logical consequences of what is said, but are defeasible (cancellable). So, B could continue without contradiction:

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language varies between distinct social groups and under the influence of assorted cultural norms, expectations, and contexts, including how that variation plays a role in language change. Sociolinguistics combines the older field of dialectology with the social sciences in order to identify regional dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, and other sub-varieties and styles within a language.

A major branch of linguistics since the second half of the 20th century, sociolinguistics is closely related to and can partly overlap with pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and sociology of language, the latter focusing on the effect of language back on society. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and some sociolinguists study these sociolects.

In linguistics, a grammatical construction is any syntactic string of words ranging from sentences over phrasal structures to certain complex lexemes, such as phrasal verbs.

Grammatical constructions form the primary unit of study in construction grammar theories. In construction grammar, cognitive grammar, and cognitive linguistics, a grammatical construction is a syntactic template that is paired with conventionalized semantic and pragmatic content. In generative frameworks, constructions are generally treated as epiphenomenal, being derived by the general syntactic rules of the language in question.

In linguistics, semantic analysis is the process of relating syntactic structures, from the levels of words, phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs to the level of the writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings. It also involves removing features specific to particular linguistic and cultural contexts, to the extent that such a project is possible. The elements of idiom and figurative speech, being cultural, are often also converted into relatively invariant meanings in semantic analysis. Semantics, although related to pragmatics, is distinct in that the former deals with word or sentence choice in any given context, while pragmatics considers the unique or particular meaning derived from context or tone. To reiterate in different terms, semantics is about universally coded meaning, and pragmatics, the meaning encoded in words that is then interpreted by an audience.

Semantic analysis can begin with the relationship between individual words. This requires an understanding of lexical hierarchy, including hyponymy and hypernymy, meronomy, polysemy, synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. It also relates to concepts like connotation (semiotics) and collocation, which is the particular combination of words that can be or frequently are surrounding a single word. This can include idioms, metaphor, and simile, like, "white as a ghost."