Introduction

Since its inception as a branch of linguistic enquiry, pragmatics has been the focus of numerous debates about its scope of study. While such debates have brought about necessary refinement of core concepts, they have also resulted in uncertainty about exactly which linguistic phenomena are pragmatic in nature. This uncertainty has come to characterise the related discipline of clinical pragmatics, with many investigators labelling as ‘pragmatic’ behaviours that are not pragmatic on any reasonable interpretation of this term. In this chapter, I examine a number of clinical studies in which behaviours have been incorrectly characterised as pragmatic. These studies will be classified according to several categories of error. The implications of these erroneous characterisations for the assessment and treatment of pragmatic language disorders will be discussed. Finally, a number of criteria are advanced which, it is expected, will constrain the tendency of clinicians and theorists alike to incorrectly identify behaviours as pragmatic.

The domain of pragmatics

In addition to obvious differences in the content of their respective enquiries, pragmatics is unlike other branches of linguistics in one further fundamental respect. While theorists in fields such as syntax and semantics can at least agree on what it is that they should be studying – if not on how they should be studying it – theorists in pragmatics lack even this most basic consensus on what constitutes their domain of study.