Clinical Pragmatics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Integrative Approaches

Clinical pragmatics is an emerging sub-discipline of clinical linguistics, providing basic description, mechanism explanation and applied diagnosis and treatment, and therefore explicitly exhibiting its distinctive interdisciplinary features. To complete the three major disciplinary missions, clinical pragmatics combines a multi-layered perspective within linguistics to characterize the patterns of pragmatic disorders; it intersects with other external disciplines, such as cognitive pragmatics and neuro-pragmatics, to elucidate the mechanisms underlying pragmatic disorders; it also integrates with social pragmatics, psychometrics, cognitive psychology to assess and intervene in pragmatic disorders. In its new developmental stage, the scope of clinical pragmatics has expanded, and its knowledge system has been constructed through neurophysiological experiments, computer and communication technology, and statistical methods from social sciences. Establishing interdisciplinary research perspectives and integrative research methods not only deepens the disciplinary connotation of clinical pragmatics, but also improves the quality of linguistic services in clinical practices, with both theoretical significance and practical values.