pragmaticsn.

1693 E. Settle (title) The new Athenian comedy containing the politicks, oeconomicks.., theologicks, poeticks, mathematicks, sophisticks, pragmaticks, dogmaticks, &c. of that most learned society.

1872 A. C. Brackett tr. K. Rosenkranz Pedagogics as Syst. §52. 27 The classification of the special elements of Pedagogics is hence very simple: (1) the Physical, (2) the Intellectual, (3) the Practical. (We sometimes apply to these the words Orthobiotics, Didactics, and Pragmatics.)

1923 Internat. Jrnl. Ethics 33 337 The second part applies Harmonism to the higher systematic knowledge of man in the domains of science, art, pragmatics, ethics, politics and religion.

1986 Jrnl. Pragmatics 10 405 Peirce's theory of signs is often cited by modern students of the pragmatics but..his theory itself is rarely used to inform current research.

1937 Amer. Jrnl. Internat. Law 31 192 This unity is to be sought not so much in the pragmatics of political events as in the natural conflict between the dictates of Western civilization and the Oriental peculiarities of Russian impulses.

1983 Broadcasting 4 Apr. 50/1 The pragmatics of managing broadcasters: getting the most from your employees.

1988 Chicago Tribune 8 Sept. c25/3 We who look beyond the politics of '88 are swayed less by cynicism than by pragmatics.

1993 E. Breitinger in C. C. Barfoot Shades of Empire 160 The Fons and Fais in Cameroon drama seem to be more occupied with the pragmatics of political expediency than with the ethics of political philosophy.

1937 C. Morris Logical Positivism 4 Analysis reveals that linguistic signs sustain three types of relations (to other signs of the language, to objects that are signified, to persons by whom they are used and understood) which define three dimensions of meaning. These dimensions in turn are objects of investigation by syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.

1954 Mind 68 360 The step..from descriptive pragmatics to descriptive semantics.

1964 E. A. Nida Toward Sci. Translating iii. 35 Pragmatics, in contrast to both semantics and syntactics, deals with the relation of symbols to behavior.

1975 Language 51 37 Partee..expresses reservations about the place of the referential/attributive distinction in natural language, and sees the possibility of assigning it to pragmatics.

1990 Mod. Lang. Jrnl. 74 539 The reader is introduced to various phenomena belonging to the domain of pragmatics, such as indexicals, including deictic and anaphoric expressions; reference of an expression and its sense; and speech acts (locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary).

2004 Bull. Symbolic Logic 10 565 The ordinary-language school conflated meaning with use, semantics with pragmatics, truth with assertability, until a dissident, H. P. Grice, developed his famous theory of implicature.