Q: What is
Pragmatics Wastebasket?
Q: Significance of Yehoshua Bar-Hillel’s note on the field of
pragmatics?
Ans: Pragmatics
wastebasket means when you consider things that are just pragmatics, but not real
linguistics. Some linguists say that pragmatics studies only those things which
are not worthy of scientific study. In other words, they consider pragmatics as
meaningless stuff. In modern terms, the meaning of pragmatics wastebasket is
taken differently. For example, if someone says, ‘I am tossing that question in
pragmatics wastebasket’, the meaning it seems to carry is that ‘that question
is just pragmatics and therefore not worthy of scientific study. But what it
really means is that ‘that question is worthy of scientific study but too hard
to deal with right now, or it would take us too far afield’. The term
‘Pragmatics Wastebasket’ was used for the first time in 1970 by Yehoshua
Bar-Hillel. He argued that someone needed to ‘clean the basket’. He comes up
with a serious study of pragmatics. His study resulted in a book known as
Pragmatics of Natural Languages.
