THE RESEARCH OBJECT OF PRAGMATICS

Abstract

This thesis delineates the research object of pragmatics as the study of how language users accomplish action and construct meaning through context-sensitive inference under normative social conditions. Unlike semantics, which characterizes conventional meaning, pragmatics targets the mechanisms by which interlocutors enrich, adjust, or recalibrate utterance content relative to intentions, common ground, and activity type. The paper clarifies core components of this object—illocutionary force, implicature, presupposition accommodation, indexicality, politeness, sequential organization, and multimodal cues—and shows how they are investigated across corpora, experiments, and interactional analyses. The results highlight pragmatics as an interface field linking grammar to cognition and social order, in which communicative success depends on coordinated expectations about relevance, cooperation, and accountability. The conclusion proposes a compact formulation: the research object of pragmatics is the set of context-dependent processes and norms through which utterances become publicly recognized actions with consequences for belief, alignment, and commitment.