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insights that pragmatics perspectives bring to the understanding of human verbal communication.
A. Pragmatics
1. Definition of Pragmatics
There are some definitions of pragmatics by some linguists. Yule 1996
said, “Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a
speaker or writer and interpreted by a listener reader”. This type of study necessarily involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular context
and how the context influences what is said. It requires a consideration of how speakers organize what they want to say in accordance with who they are talking
to, where, when, and under what circumstances. When we read or hear pieces of language, we normally try to understand not only what the words mean, but also
what the writer or the speaker of those words intend to convey.
Crystal 1990 gives his definition, “Pragmatics studies the factors which
govern someone’s choice of language, when they speak or write. If we choose to say something, there are all kinds of factors which constrain what we will say, and
how we will say”. It means that when someone wants to talk to someone else, he will consider the situational context and all factors combined with it such as with
who he is talking to, when, where and in what situation the conversation takes place. Hence, he will produce the proper utterances.
Leech 1983 gives his definition, “Pragmatics can be usefully defined as
the study of how utterances have meanings in situations”. From his definition, it can be seen that pragmatics is a study which understands the meanings of
utterances by looking at the situation when the utterances happen. In addition, Levinson 1985 defines that “Pragmatics is the study to an account of language
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understanding”. Here, it is clear that pragmatics is a linguistic study emphasizing on the relation between language and context.
From the definitions above, it can be concluded that pragmatics is the science of language seen in relation to it users. It is not the science of language in
its own right, or the science of language as seen and studied by the linguists, or
the science of language as the expression of our desire to play in schools, but the
science of language as it is used by real, live people, for their own purposes and within their limitations.
2. Context
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