Discourse and Pragmatics
Summary
Discourse and pragmatics explore how language functions beyond sentence-level grammar and literal meaning, focusing on how utterances are shaped by context, social norms and speaker intentions. Discourse analysis examines the structure and function of spoken and written texts, revealing how cohesion, coherence and rhetorical organisation convey and construct meaning. Pragmatics investigates how interlocutors use language to achieve goals, employing devices such as implicature, politeness strategies and deictic expressions to manage turn-taking, signal attitudes and negotiate social relationships. Together, these fields illuminate the dynamic interplay between speaker, listener and context, underpinning applications from conversation analysis to digital communication and informing areas as diverse as sociolinguistics, cognitive science and human–computer interaction.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Recent work on metaphor in crisis communication has shown that people drew extensively on spatial frames to conceptualise the unfolding pandemic. By analysing a large multilingual corpus, researchers characterised the variety of spatial metaphors used in early COVID-19 discourse and traced their role in shaping public understanding and policy responses through computational mapping of metaphorical patterns across media sources. An international educational project has further highlighted how collaborative online workshops can harness intercultural pragmatics to foster novel conceptualisations of global challenges. Participants negotiated differing rhetorical conventions to co-create shared frameworks for discussing the pandemic, demonstrating the power of joint methodology in bridging cultural divides. Another study has revealed that incidental tactile sensations, such as handling hard or soft objects, influence abstract judgments through embodied mappings; participants primed with hard textures recommended harsher punishments, linking sensory experience with evaluative discourse and implicating sensorimotor brain regions in communicative acts.
Discourse and Pragmatics publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in discourse and pragmatics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Coherence: The logical and semantic connections between units of discourse that allow a text or conversation to form a unified message.
Implicature: Additional conveyed meaning inferred by the listener or reader beyond the literal content of an utterance, based on context and shared norms.
Deixis: Use of expressions (such as “I”, “here”, “now”) whose interpretation relies on contextual information about the speaker’s identity, location or time of speaking.
Metaphor framing: The cognitive process by which abstract concepts are understood via mappings from concrete source domains, as reflected in linguistic choices.
Multimodal discourse analysis: The study of how different communicative modes (verbal, visual, material) combine to produce meaning in social contexts.
References
- Reasoning COVID-19: the use of spatial metaphor in times of a crisis. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022).
- Intercultural discussion of conceptual universals in discourse: joint online methodology to bring about social change through novel conceptualizations of Covid-19. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022).
- Incidental haptic sensations influence judgment of crimes. Scientific Reports (2018).
- Dishing up Distinction: Language Materiality and Multimodal Coherence in Elite Foodways. Frontiers in Communication (2022).
- A Polish adaptation of the usage-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis in caregiver interactions with children. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics (2024).
- “We are at war”: The military rhetoric of COVID-19 in cross-cultural perspective of discourses. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2023).
About these summaries
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