1. Introduction

This article introduces the development of pragmatics since the 1980s, from early topics to current branches such as cognitive pragmatics and social pragmatics. The research focus has shifted from language use to communicative issues such as cognition, relationships, and identity, emphasizing pragmatic issues under social change and technological development. The theme of the International Congress of Pragmatics reflects the development trends of research, such as the real world and marginalization issues. The article summarizes the trend characteristics of contemporary pragmatics research by analyzing authoritative journals and works, providing reference for the development of pragmatics in China.

2. Multi perspective and Fusion Trends in Pragmatic Research

Explored the multi perspective and fusion trends in pragmatics research. Early pragmatics mainly focused on language issues, but with development, it gradually broke through the research topics and theoretical perspectives within linguistics and became an interdisciplinary field. In recent years, pragmatics has utilized multimodal communication resources and diversity theory perspectives to explore pragmatic expressions in discourse use, reflecting the trend of interdisciplinary resource utilization, perspective mutual learning, and integration. The series of books launched by international journals and publishing houses also reflect the interdisciplinary and integrated development of pragmatics. New generation scholars emphasize the interdisciplinary and collaborative perspective of pragmatics research, such as combining pragmatics with psychology, education, sociology, etc., to form a research model of multi perspective and theoretical mutual learning. The multi perspective and interdisciplinary characteristics of pragmatics research are also reflected in the study of practical issues such as multilingual cultural communication, online communication, public discourse communication, clinical/doctor-patient/health discourse communication, and business discourse communication, focusing on the linguistic expressions and social pragmatic constraints of special contexts, special groups, and special industries.

3. The trend of "social turn" in pragmatic research

This paper explores the trend of "social turn" in the development of international pragmatics, emphasizing the integration of pragmatics research with social norms, social expectations, social management, and other issues, highlighting the social characteristics of pragmatics. Pragmatics, from a functionalist perspective, explores the production and understanding of pragmatic information in communicative discourse, forming the distinction between pragmatics and sociopragmatics. The Anglo American School and the European Continental School respectively focus on the pragmatic information of language forms and socio-cultural pragmatic information. Under the influence of scholars such as Austin and Searle, pragmatics began to study the agent and post speech effects of speech acts, emphasizing the revelation of interpersonal pragmatic motivations for speech acts or discourse choices, such as politeness principles and face management. Meanwhile, pragmatics also emphasizes research from a cognitive perspective, focusing on the cognitive efforts and effects of information understanding and deduction, which has promoted the development of cognitive pragmatics.

4. Online communication brings about new changes in pragmatics

Explored the new changes and challenges brought by online communication to the development of pragmatics. Online communication has changed traditional ways of communication, giving rise to "online discourse" characterized by spatial-temporal, interactive, and word order composition. These discourses combine multimodal resources such as emoticons, images, videos, and sounds to form visual discourse, which has become a new object of pragmatics research. Cyberpragmatics/internet pragmatics has emerged, focusing on the exploration of lifestyle, behavior, and cognitive styles in the context of the internet. Relevant research results have been published in international journals.

5. Conclusion

Summarized the main trend characteristics of contemporary pragmatics research, including diversity and integration of perspectives, social shift and reality, and challenges and new changes brought by online communication. Pragmatics, as a multidisciplinary field, attaches great importance to social reality and communicative practice. Like other humanities and social sciences, it integrates interdisciplinary methods and perspectives. The development of pragmatics is closely integrated with social progress and communication methods, such as internationalization and globalization giving rise to multilingual and multicultural interactive discourse practices, and the emergence of research in intercultural pragmatics. Due to space limitations, further exploration is needed for more changes and trend characteristics.