Pragmatics in discourse

Abstract

In this chapter, we have briefly discussed how pragmatics and discourse inform each other as two closely intersecting concepts. This is also the underlying assumption for our chapter on pragmatics in discourse as they entail several common aspects regarding the analysis of language use in social interaction. We discussed the role of context and social factors and presented the distinction between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. Additionally, we have provided a broad overview of five different approaches to pragmatics in discourse as these have been predominantly embraced by recent research studies. These are namely conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, genre analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Finally, from a sociolinguistic perspective, we have utilized the concept of domain in speech communities and exemplified it with two discourse domains and these are classroom discourse and institutional discourse.