Abstract
Contemporary Pragmatics has the semiotic features from the respects of disciplinary naming, the means of development, and theoretical source to research object and method. It is not only an independent linguistics and language science, but also an interdisciplinary field and paradigm. This paper is to explore the semiotic features and dimensions of Pragmatics for tracing back the origin and the theoretical resources from semiotic perspective, and to define its research scope and clarify the connotation of its conception. As Semiotics has a triad dimension of semiosis, one of which is the “pragmatic dimension”. Therefore, contemporary pragmatics includes at least three semiotic dimensions: scientific semiotics, linguistic semiotics and social semiotics. The semiotic analysis of Pragmatics could be conducive to clarify and fix the semiotic and philosophical origin, definition, disciplinary connotation and meaning of Pragmatics, which is also theoretically helpful for clarifying the concepts for the study of philosophical pragmatism, pragmaticism, semiotics, semantics and syntax.
 
 Key Words: Semiotic, Pragmatics, Pragmaticism
Highlights
The Problems in the Process of Development of Pragmatics Pragmatics is a “rapidly developing field”, “branch discipline” and “independent discipline” in Contemporary Linguistics (Huang 2007:1-3); It is the study on “science of language use” (Haberland & Mey 1977:1) and the “new perspective” of Linguistics, as well as the new “paradigm” of Linguistics (Mey 2001:4)
Levinson (1983) pointed out that pragmatics is an inevitable part of semantic theory; If pragmatics takes precedence over semantics logically, a general linguistic theory must take pragmatics as its component or a dimension so as to be called a complete integration theory, “just as, traditionally, syntax is taken to be the study of the combinatorial properties of words and their parts, and semantics to be the study of meaning, so pragmatics is the study of language usage, but it will hardly suffice to indicate what the practitioners of pragmatics do”
In the process of developing from “pragmatism” to “pragmatics”, there are the linguistic turn of philosophy, the foundation of ordinary language philosophy and generative semantics, the research paradigm turn of linguistics and the pragmatic turn of many other disciplines
Summary
The Problems in the Process of Development of Pragmatics Pragmatics is a “rapidly developing field”, “branch discipline” and “independent discipline” in Contemporary Linguistics (Huang 2007:1-3); It is the study on “science of language use” (Haberland & Mey 1977:1) and the “new perspective” of Linguistics (ibid.: 5), as well as the new “paradigm” of Linguistics (Mey 2001:4). Pragmatics is generally recognized as being derived from “pragmatics” put forward by American pragmatist philosopher and semiotician Morris (1938:6), which is a branch of semiotics for studying the “pragmatical dimension of semiosis”. The philosophical basis of pragmatics is Peirce’ s pragmatism, or pragmaticism, which studies the relationship between meaning and context, i.e., the illocutionary meaning being excluded in the scope of Semantics.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
