The origin and development of pragmatics as a study of meaning: semiotic perspective

Abstract Pragmatics has grown into a flourishing independent academic discipline. Undefined and unsolved are, nevertheless, such confusing and controversial concerns in its evolution as research boundaries and uncertain definition. Some academics view Austin᾽s Speech Act Theory to be the birth of pragmatics, which certainly confines pragmatics to the field of linguistics and hence limits its study scope. This assertion is incongruous with Morris’ primary objective of proposing the word pragmatics from the standpoint of semiotics, inspired by Peirce. This research intends to investigate pragmatics from the perspective of linguistic philosophy and semiotics and argues that pragmatics derives and develops from Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics and Morris’ behavioral semiotics. Pragmatics is the exertion of the “interpretant” in Pierce’s Semiotics. Clearly, it is one of the three branches of Morris’s semiotics that investigates the relationship between signs and sign users. The meaning of signs is derived from the interpretation of sign users. Pierce’s pragmatism or pragmaticism is the intellectual foundation of pragmatics. As its research objective, it focuses on the relationship between meaning and context, i.e., the illocutionary meaning not covered by the study of semantics. Its primary methodology is based on logical reasoning.