The Pragmatic

Félix-Brasdefer (2015) takes a pragmatic-discursive perspective to examine meaning in social interaction, with particular attention to the negotiation of meaning in service encounters. This author views pragmatics from an interactional perspective. Pragmatics is the study of "language use in context, with actions that are accomplished and negotiated during the course of social interaction. My understanding of pragmatics includes both a social component which embraces sociopragmatics and cultural expectations, and a cognitive component for the interpretation of social actions, be they intentional or not. This cognitive context might include utterances and non-verbal information such as prosodic information, gesture, and laughter. My understanding of discourse is concerned with the analysis of social action and interaction, with participants (e.g. friends, professor-student, or customer-server) interacting through the negotiation of joint actions in authentic social situations. […] I use a revised version of the term discursive pragmatics to refer to the analysis of social action through joint actions that are co-constructed and negotiated according to the sociocultural norms dictated by the members of specific communities of practice." (p. 3)