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Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and philosophy of language that investigates how context contributes to meaning. It studies how speakers convey and listeners interpret intended meaning beyond what is literally encoded in words or grammar. While semantics covers sentence meaning, pragmatics concerns how context shapes interpretation in actual use, including speech acts and conversational routines.

Core notions include the context of situation, deixis (here, there, now, you), reference and inference, and the role of speakers’ and listeners’ knowledge. Deixis and anaphora govern how words point to entities in discourse. Implicature refers to what is suggested in addition to or instead of what is explicitly said; Grice’s cooperative principle and maxims (quality, quantity, relation, manner) are foundational.

Speech acts classify utterances by their performative function (promising, ordering, apologizing). Indirect speech acts show how an utterance can have one illocutionary force while appearing to have another. Politeness and face-work (Brown & Levinson) examine strategies to mitigate threats in communication.

Theories and approaches include Gricean pragmatics, Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson), and various cross-cultural perspectives. Pragmatics overlaps with discourse and sociolinguistics and informs areas such as conversational analysis and discourse analysis.

Methods and applications include analysis of naturally occurring discourse, experimental pragmatics, corpus studies, and computational linguistics; implications for natural language processing, dialogue systems, and human-computer interaction.

History and scope: the field developed from philosophical work by Austin and Searle and was refined through twentieth-century linguistics, with ongoing research addressing language variation, cultural context, and multimodal communication. Pragmatics thus provides a framework for understanding how meaning emerges in real-world language use.