Pragmatics deals with utterances, as specific events, subject to speakers’ or signers’ knowledge, awareness, intentions, in particular circumstances according to who is talking or signing and his or her audience. Pragmatics is sometimes, mistakenly it seems to me, counterposed to linguistics.

In the late 1950s John Langshaw Austin was working on what was published in 1962 as ‘How to do things with words‘. The book was only published after Austin’s early death. It established the discipline which soon became known as ‘pragmatics’.

In his non-academic life, Austin was uncommonly concerned with truth and accuracy. As an intelligence officer in the 1939 – 1945 war, he is credited by one of his colleagues who later went on to become another philosopher, with ensuring that the intelligence, on which the 1944 D-day invasion depended for its success, was accurate. The invasion was planned for a day earlier. But a group of meteorologists correctly predicted that the weather that night would be bad. The invasion was duly delayed. Austin had a role in this very significant decision.

As a philosopher, Austin distinguished between three sorts of speech act: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Each with a correspondingly different sort of ‘force’ in utterances.

There is clear pragmatic force in the ‘transformations’ which Noam Chomsky (1957) famously identified, including negation, question formation, ‘passivisation’ as in “The actor was stunned by the criticism” as opposed to “The criticism stunned the actor”. The passivisation diminishes the agency in the unpassivised ‘kernel’, instead highlighting the actor’s experience.

Pragmatics is obviously part of everyday discourse between children, between adults, and between adults and children. By the proposal here, both discourse and pragmatics were part of the evolution of language, especially at the very start of this evolution, but less and less so as this evolution proceeded.

John Searle and Herbert Paul Grice greatly developed pragmatics, but not in any way so as to supplant linguistics.