Stalnaker (1972) defines the scope of pragmatics as follows:
"Pragmatics is the study of deixis (at least in part), implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and aspects of discourse structure."
Levinson (1983) views pragmatics as an inferential process. According to Levinson
"We can compute out of sequences of utterances, taken together with background assumptions about language usage, highly detailed inferences abut the nature of the assumptions participants are making, and the purposes for which utterances are being used. In order to participate in ordinary language usage, one must be able to make such calculations, both in production and interpretation. This ability is independent of idiosyncratic beliefs, feelings and usages (although it may refer to regular and relatively abstract principles. Pragmatics can be taken to be the description of this ability, as it operates both for particular languages and languages in general." (p. 53)
Green (1989) defines pragmatics as an act of faith. For this author pragmatics "is the study of the mechanisms that support this faith, a faith so strong that many can use the term communicate interchangeably with speak or write, never noticing that the term communication presupposes achievement of the intended effect of verbal action upon the addressee, whereas speaking and writing do not."
Thomas (1995) views the study of pragmatics as meaning in interaction. For this author pragmatics is "making meaning is a dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer, the context of utterance (physical, social and linguistic) and the meaning potential of an utterance." (p. 22)
Kasper (1997) defines pragmatics as “the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context.”
Yule (1996, p. 3) views pragmatics as the study of meaning. According to this author, Pragmatics is concerned with four dimensions of meaning:
The study of speaker meaning
The study of contextual meaning
The study of how more gets communicated than is said
The study of the expression of relative distance
Mey (2001) analyzes pragmatic meaning according to how humans use language in communication. For this author, pragmatics
"studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society." (p. 6)
Huang (2007), following Levinson (1983, 2000), adopts the following definition of pragmatics:
"Pragmatics is the systematic study of meaning by virtue of, or dependent on, the use of language. The central topics of inquiry of pragmatics include implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and deixis." (p. 2)
Crystal (1997) takes into account language users and meaning in social interaction. For this author, pragmatics is "the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication." (p. 301)
Kecskes (2013) examines pragmatics from an intercultural pragmatic perspective, and adopts a socio-cognitive approach in intercultural interactions. According to this author, the socio-cognitive approach "emphasizes that language production and comprehension involve both prior experience and knowledge, and emergent, actual situation experience and knowledge co-constructed by interlocutors. It claims that the meaning values of linguistic expressions, encapsulating prior contexts of experience, play as important a role in the meaning construction and comprehension as actual situational context." (p. 7)
Bardovi-Harlig (2013) defines second language (L2) pragmatics as "the study of how-to-say-what-to-whom-when and that L2 pragmatics is the study of how learners come to know how-to-say-what-to-whom-when." (pp. 68-69)
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)
