In the last 20 years, it has become clearer and clearer that

language and how people use language cannot be studied

separately. This new method is based on the idea that grammar
(which includes phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, and
semantics) and pragmatics work together. The "interface view,"
which looks at how each part of grammar and pragmatics
connects to the others, can also be used to study hard-pragmatics
and soft-pragmatics. Hard-pragmatics looks at how people use
language from a philosophical, linguistic, and logical point of
view. Soft-pragmatics, on the other hand, looks at how people
use language from a social and sociocultural point of view.
Since pragmatics has become its own field, the terms "hard" and
"soft" pragmatics have become a bit out of date. As a result,
these two trends have merged in some ways. Also, many
important attempts were made by pragmaticians to combine
these ideas. Still, there is a line between these two areas: hard-
pragmaticians rarely study socio-pragmatic issues, and soft-
pragmatic studies rarely use the formal tools of hard-pragmatics.
Pragmatic Interfaces fills an important gap in the field of
pragmatics by being the first major publication project to study
the interfaces between grammar and pragmatics and the
blending of soft and hard pragmatics. Through this merging,
many practical things could be looked at again. The Pragmatic
Interfaces series takes an interdisciplinary approach, which lets
grammar and pragmatics scholars from different fields work
together. People who want to write or edit a book should get in
touch with the series editors first to talk about new ideas.

1. Pragmatic and semantics

Pragmatics is the study of how people communicate overtly and

inferentially. This means that it looks at how people can make
and understand overt acts of communication, such as words but
also pointing, miming, and other overt body gestures. What
makes this kind of communicative behaviour different from
other kinds of intentional behaviour is the kind of intention it
shows: a complex, higher-level intention to make clear to an
addressee the intention to make some thought(s) clear to him.
Haung calls this the "communicative intention" all the time.
People often say that pragmatics is about "speaker meaning,"
but we can also talk about "communicator's meaning," which
includes non-verbal and multimodal communication.

Taking this view of pragmatics into account, the term

"semantics" refers to two very different areas: (1) the meaning
introduced by the words and phrases someone uses when
speaking; and (2) the content of the thoughts being
communicated.  Thoughts (or propositions) are the main carriers
of truth-conditional content (that is, they are truth-evaluable
representations of the world); what communicators mean to
communicate by their overt acts (e.g., utterances) are thoughts,
and when they use language, the meaning of the linguistic
expressions they use gives rich evidence of the thoughts they
mean to communicate but never fully encodes those thoughts
(fully truth- conditional contents). This gap between the
linguistically encoded meaning (in the first sense of the word
"semantics") and the thoughts communicated occurs not only for
content that is communicated indirectly (implicatures) but also
for content that is communicated directly (explicatures), as in
the following example: She’s had enough. We can easily
imagine a range of different discourses and extralinguistic
contexts in which this sentence might be uttered by a speaker
intending to communicate not only any number of very different
implicatures (e.g., that she needn't eat any more; that she's
leaving her husband; that she should rest, etc.), but also any
number of very different explicatures, that is, explicitly
communicated thoughts that are built out of the linguistically
encoded words.

the focus here is that pragmatics as a human cognitive

capacity and the study of pragmatics as falling within the
cognitive sciences, so pragmatic theories should be responsive
to relevant empirical research on human cognition: its
architecture and evolution, the nature and time course of the
processes responsible for understanding ostensive
communication, and the development of the relevant cognitive
capacities in youth. Thus, pragmatic and linguistic semantic
interface at three points:
1. the cognitive systems responsible for utterance
interpretation: From the point of view of human
cognitive architecture, the pragmatics–semantics interface
is where the meaning or content of our linguistic
knowledge interacts with our ability to draw conclusions
about the meaning of ostensibly communicative acts.
There are different ways that the two systems at this
interface could work together: they could be rigidly
separate and work in a certain order; they could be
different systems in the sense that they use different
procedures but still work together; or they could not be
different in any interesting way and instead be a single
general interpretive system that uses information from any
source (perception, language, memory) as it becomes
available.
2. the evolutionary emergence of pragmatics and
language (hence linguistic semantics) in human
cognition: this issue addresses the question of how overt
communication "pragmatics" and "semantics" came to be
in the human species. There seem to be three possibilities:
(a) language first, then communication/pragmatics, with
the first making the second possible; (b)
communication/pragmatics first, then language, with the
first making a space for the second; and (c) the two
systems developing separately, possibly at the same time,
 with one being recruited by the other and the two systems
coevolving. Most people agree with the first point of view.
but Sperber (2000) argues in favour of the second— that
is, that our capacity for metarepresentation emerged first
and enabled a rudimentary kind of (non- verbal) ostensive-
inferential communication.
3. the development of communicative competence
(pragmatic and semantic) in the child: Pragmatics is the
study of ostensive communication, which, as far as we
know, is something only humans can do. 13 Even before
they say their first words, children show this kind of ability
to communicate. For example, from the age of 12 months,
babies use the obvious gesture of pointing for a variety of
reasons. They do this not only when they want someone to
give them something (proto-imperative pointing), but also
when they want to share an experience with their caregiver
(for example, so they can both take care of a dog in the
park), or just to be helpful to someone else (e.g. to direct
her attention to the keys she has dropped). Around the
same age, they start to respond to pointing by turning their
own attention to where the pointing seems to be going.
The evidence for the last two types of pointing, which
involve sharing attention and experience and informing
others in a helpful way, is a strong sign of the development
of what Michael Tomasello and his colleagues call "shared
 intentionality" (Liszkowski 2006; Tomasello 2008), which
is the basis for a full theory of mind and the pragmatic
capacity.

Thus, the pragmatics–semantics interface is where two

cognitive systems meet: the pragmatics system, or ostensive
stimulus processor (which is modular in Sperber's sense of
being an evolved special-purpose mechanism tuned to the
regularities of a particular input domain), and the language
processor (which is modular in both Fodor's and Sperber's
senses). The "semantic representations" that come out of the
language module give the pragmatics system important
information about what the speaker meant to say. This
information puts strong limits on the interpretation
hypotheses that the pragmatics system infers. As argued in
section 24.3, it is very unlikely that these representations are
fully propositional, and there is no reason to think they
should be, since it is the job of the pragmatics system, not the
language system, to recover the (propositional) thoughts the
speaker is trying to communicate.

2. Pragmatics and Grammar

Huang views that the relation between pragmatics and grammar
appears complex and requires much more efforts to identify.
Grammar is defined as a set of codes, and pragmatics as a set of
non-logical inferences derived on the basis of these codes.
Accordingly, it is possible to list the points or situations in
which pragmatic and grammar can meet:

1. Grammar is the initial step towards a logical inference and

then it leads to arrive at the exact interpretation. the role of
grammar in this process might be minimized or maximized
the opportunity to logical inference by offering the
required cues that interact effectively with the current
context. It also has the ability to adjust which kind of
pragmatic inference best accounts for any given pragmatic
interpretation. Some inferences are part of the information
that is given directly because, along with the coded
meanings, they help show that the statement being made is
true. If so, once we've decided that a possible
interpretation should be looked at as a pragmatic inference,
we also need to decide whether the inference is best seen
as a conversational implicature or as part of the statement
being made. There are both cognitive and social effects of
the classification.
2. The truth is that our current grammar is often just our old
pragmatics turned into grammar. Standard analyses
suggest that grammar and pragmatics are completely
different from each other. If this is true, then how can we
explain grammaticalization and semanticization? There
must be a way for pragmatic meanings and patterns of
 distribution to get through the divide between grammar
and pragmatics and become part of grammar.
3. Our investigation of the grammar/pragmatics interface
concludes with a look at the various synchronic levels at
which it functions. In addition to the level of conveyed
meaning, which is a representation of the linguistic
meaning plus all pragmatic inferences, researchers have
found a basic-level meaning that is not as strong as the
conveyed meaning but not as weak as the linguistic
meaning. This is the way we look at representation, and
once again, we ask how little or much there should be. As
we'll see, both minimalist and maximalist basic-level
representations play a role in explaining how language
works for communication. At the end, we say that the
diachronic grammaticalization and semanticization may be
caused by the same basic-level synchronic interpretation.

Pragmatics and Morphology: Morphopragmatics

The present authors laid the groundwork for the field of

morphopragmatics in a series of articles published between 1986
and 1989 (Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1986, 1987, 1989) and
developed it into a full-fledged model in 1994 that precisely
addresses the overlap between morphology and pragmatics. The
study of how grammatical rules (morphological) interact with
pragmatic conditions (pragmatic) is known as
morphopragmatics. In particular, it characterises morphological
operations in grammar that can bring about regular pragmatic
changes from the input to the output of a morphological
operation, whether that operation is derivational or inflectional.
It can be compared to well-established fields such as
morphosemantics, lexical semantics of morphology, lexical
pragmatics of morphology, and the pragmatics of syntactic
patterns and textual strategies, but it must be distinguished from
these fields in important ways:

1. Morphosemantics is the study of the meanings of

morphological rules, which are the regular changes to a
word's denotation and connotation that come from its
derivation or inflection. In a morphosemantic
investigation, pragmatic factors related to the context of
speech no longer matter. This is the place to talk about
how a diminutive suffix adds a pure denotative meaning of
smallness, as in "flat-let."
2. Lexical pragmatics is the study of how single, complex
words, like "lexicalized bunny" (which means "rabbit"),
can be used in a child's environment to mean "I love you"
or something similar.
3. Syntactic patterns and textual strategies can have their own
pragmatic meanings that can clash with the meanings that
can be gleaned from individual parts of a text.
Morphopragmatics, on the other hand, is the study of pragmatic
meanings that can be reliably gotten from morphological rules
alone, given a certain set of contextual conditions. The authors
say that the subfield of morphopragmatics is the end result of
pragmatic phenomena becoming more grammatical over time
and at the same time. In particular, they set up a level of
morphologized pragmatics, which is meant to cover the area of
how morphological rules are used in everyday life. One of the
main goals of this theory is to show that they can communicate
pragmatic meaning on their own.

Pragmatics and the Lexicon

Our goal has been to present a comprehensive review of the

topics surrounding the connection between pragmatic
phenomena in language use and the question of what
information is assumed to be stored in the mental lexicon. Thus,
the point of contact between pragmatic and lexicons can be
found in three forms:

1. scalar Implicatures: scalar implicatures embody the

Gricean idea that the conventional content of a lexical
entry can include less that what might seem to be its
overall contribution to meaning at first sight. scalar
implicatures fundamentally involve comparing linguistic
expressions, this may require conventional association
between lexical entries in some cases.
2. presuppositional phenomena, with questions arising as to
whether the presuppositional status of some information
encoded by presupposition triggers must be marked as
such lexically or whether it can be derived pragmatically.
It was also discussed whether projection properties of
connectives like conjunction need to be lexically
represented, as well as the differences between triggers
and the corresponding differentiation in lexical encoding.
Of course, there is a consistent theme throughout, one that
is fundamental to the interface between semantics and
pragmatics and the interface between language and
cognition more generally: In order to determine whether a
particular linguistic expression's interpretive effect is the
result of conventional encoding or whether it can be
explained independently, usually in domain-general (as
opposed to language-specific) terms, we can ask whether
the effect is idiomatic or idiomatically derived.

Pragmatic and Prosody

It is well known in the field of pragmatics, which studies the

meaning of utterances, that prosody (or "tone of voice," in a
more colloquial sense) can contribute significantly to that
meaning. Thus, the pragmatic effects of speech are the result
of both the content and the delivery of the message. Many
pragmatics researchers recognise prosody's significance, but
pinpointing how it produces its effects remains an open
question. This book lays out a number of the pragmatic
functions of prosody. It aspires to provide a sampling of the
wide variety of approaches and topics within the interface
between prosody and pragmatics.

Although Levinson (1983) acknowledged that the lack of

prosody in his account, especially intonation, was a serious
omission, he justified the lack on two grounds: first, that there
was as of yet no agreement on how to analyse intonation, and
second, that the area was understudied. While the American
autosegmental model, as captured in the ToBI transcription
system, has become the gold standard in intonational
phonology (e.g. Ladd, 1996; Gussenhoven, 2004) and for
typological comparison (Jun, 2005), other models, including
variants of the British system ofholistic contours, continue to
have currency (fall, rise, fall-rise etc.). The pragmatic effects
of prosody, which include the effects commonly referred to
as paralinguistic, are not adequately accounted for by any of
the currently available theories.

The second qualification offered by Levinson, that the

region was understudied, is more debatable. In the
intervening decades, there has been a surge in interest in the
role that prosody plays in conveying pragmatic meaning,
albeit from a wide range of theoretical perspectives and with
some overlap. One's understanding of pragmatics will
determine how far these changes go. The Anglo-American
perspective (cf. Hirschberg, 2004) emphasises the function of
prosody in conjunction with other linguistic systems, such as
the identification of speech acts, the resolution of syntactic
ambiguities, and the signalling of information and discourse
structure. On the other hand, the European tradition adopts a
more holistic perspective on pragmatics, one that incorporates
not only the aforementioned phenomena, but also a broader
cognitive, social, and cultural perspective on meaning in
context. This collection features research from a wide variety
of theoretical perspectives on prosody and meaning.
Interaction management, tum sequencing, pragmatism, and
cognitive processes are all explored. Features of intonation,
timing and rhythm, phrasing, and voice quality are analysed
using a variety of auditory and instrumental methods, from
corpus studies to case studies. Each chapter adds something
new to the conversation from a theoretical vantage point, and
taken as a whole, they provide a multifaceted look at
prosody's function in establishing meaning in spoken
discourse.