Over the past 30 years or so, pragmatics has grown into a well-established, ‘secure’,
discipline in institutional terms. There are a number of specialist journals (Journal
of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, Multilingua as well as
others), there is at least one major professional organization (The International
Pragmatics Association) whose membership goes into thousands, and regular
international conferences are held the world over. Yet despite these achievements,
pragmatics remains a good example of an insecure science in terms of Hacking's
(1995) definition. None of the many pragmatic theories and frameworks comes close to
being a generally accepted paradigm, and in fact, there is no consensus as to the domain
of pragmatics. Nevertheless, most people working in the field would probably not
disagree with some interpretation or other of the definition, given by Charles Morris
(1938: 30), that pragmatics is ‘the science of the relation of signs to their
interpreters’. In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the interrelationship
between signs (in the case of linguistic communication, the signs are utterances),
messages (i.e. what is conveyed by the signs) and language users (i.e. people who
send and receive messages by means of using signs. Linguistic pragmatics, which is
concerned with communication by means of language, explores questions such as the
following: