Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that studies how context influences meaning. It analyzes how speakers convey information beyond the literal content of words and how listeners infer intended messages in real communication.

Key topics include deixis, reference and anaphora, presupposition, and implicature. Deixis covers time, place, and participant references such as I, you, here, now. Implicature concerns conveyed meaning not explicitly stated, often guided by conversational maxims. Speech acts examine how utterances perform actions—promising, ordering, apologizing—depending on felicity conditions. Politeness, facework, and sociocultural norms show how social context alters interpretation and choice of wording.

Pragmatics contrasts with semantics, which studies encoded linguistic meaning, by focusing on how context shapes interpretation. The field is associated with theories such as Grice's cooperative principle and maxims, Relevance theory, and Austin and Searle's speech-act theory. Other strands include discourse pragmatics and sociopragmatics, which look at language use across cultures and social settings, and cognitive pragmatics, which explores mental processes behind inference.

Research methods combine experimental studies, corpus analysis, and discourse-analytic approaches. Applications span natural language processing and human–computer interaction, language teaching and translation, and clinical domains such as aphasia and autism research, where pragmatic language use is affected. Pragmatics informs intercultural communication, cross-linguistic data interpretation, and the design of conversational interfaces.