The Importance Of Pragmatics In Interpersonal Communication

Communication, the indispensable reality of our life, takes place from birth to death. It exists in every situation. There are several definitions of communication according to different fields; different definitions of communication are available. The most spread communication is oral communication that is performed by language. One of the most important phenomenon of the communication is language and it continues till the beginning of humanity. Language, being developed, added or omitted words into according to the necessities of individuals, groups or society is reflection of the cultural belonging at the same time. Every society has a culture; here the culture phenomenon is the gathering or the reflection of the individuals’ culture. Establishing healthy communication does not mean to create sentences only by composing words together. In this sense, the factors such as the target listener in front of the speaker, culture, identity, understanding capacity of the listener, the place where the speech takes place, the tone of the voice and the cohesion of the speech play very important role. Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and studies the ways in which context contributes to the meaning of the words and sentences. In other words, pragmatics studies and helps to understand the meanings beyond the words. Pragmatics reveals the invisible meaning. Based on this definition, each word or each sentence used may attribute a positive or negative meaning to negotiation. In other saying, the meaning of words and sentences show varieties according to the factors such as context, the parts take place in conversation, the culture, the identity, the place where the speech takes place, the tone of the voice and the cohesion of the speech. One of the keystones to build a healthy communication is the comprehension of pragmatics. As if the intention of the both parts that take place in communication is transmitting their messages to the other side successfully, they have to take into consideration the effects of their choices on the other part. The sincerity between the parties is the determiner for the choice of the words, sentences. The level of the familiarity might be guessed from the words and sentences they use. People from the same culture or different cultures has their own way to explain or describe the events but the most important point is trying to catch the common points at the highest level as possible as with the other side. The factors such as linguistic, religious, racial and ethnic background of the people that take part in communication play crucial role in the selection of the words of the message. While sender transmitting the messages in the mind to the receiver, s/he should consider the receiver’s capacity and encode the messages according to those conditions. On the other hand the receiver after decoding the message will be the sender, and then s/he should be careful about encoding of the feedback. At this point, sharing the same culture decreases the misunderstandings and prohibits unsuccessful communication thus showing effort to understand other side’s culture would be advantageous to reach the aim. This kind of behavior increases the success of transmitting the intended message. On the other side, long sentences and incoherent text may cause trouble as the other side may lose her/his attention and cannot get messages as aimed. Sometimes there is absolutely no correspondence between the response we want to produce and the one we receive (Tubbs Moss, 2003:22). It would be better to use clear and sufficient expressions. The speaker and the listener should be careful about choice of genre, sentence structure, lexical items, pronunciation, and tone of voice if the aim is to transfer the intended meaning to the other side successfully. It would be useful for both parts in communication to realize the importance of pragmatics and to save effort to comprehend pragmatics in the way of successful communication. The aim of this study is to point out the role of pragmatics, one of the subfield of linguistics, in communication and to emphasize healthy communication is not only performed by words or sentences.