Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics concerned with how people use language in context and how listeners or readers interpret particular utterances. It examines the relationship between linguistic expressions, speakers’ intentions, shared assumptions, and communicative actions. Whereas semantics investigates meaning encoded in linguistic expressions, pragmatics addresses how their use contributes to what is communicated in a particular situation. Its subject matter includes context-dependent reference, implied meanings, presuppositions, and actions such as requesting, promising, and apologizing. (plato.stanford.edu)
Scope and historical development
Pragmatics has roots in philosophy of language and the study of signs. In his 1938 account of semiotics, Charles Morris distinguished syntactics, concerning relations among signs; semantics, concerning signs and what they designate; and pragmatics, concerning signs and their interpreters. Linguistic pragmatics subsequently developed a more specific focus on communication and utterance interpretation. (plato.stanford.edu)
Twentieth-century foundations include J. L. Austin’s analysis of speaking as action and Paul Grice’s account of speaker meaning and conversational inference. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, published in 1962, helped establish speech-act theory. Grice’s work distinguished what an expression conventionally means from what a speaker intends to communicate by using it. These approaches made intentions and interaction central objects of inquiry. (plato.stanford.edu)
The distinction between pragmatics and semantics is not absolute. Syntax concerns the organization of linguistic expressions, but grammatical form alone does not settle their interpretation. Some expressions encode instructions for consulting context, while contextual inference may contribute to the proposition expressed rather than merely add an implication. Different theories therefore draw the semantics–pragmatics boundary differently. (plato.stanford.edu)
Context, reference, and shared assumptions
Deixis concerns expressions whose interpretation depends on the circumstances of use. “I” identifies the speaker, “here” depends on a relevant location, and “tomorrow” depends on the time of utterance. Demonstratives such as “that” may require a gesture or an understood focus of attention. Their linguistic meanings constrain interpretation without independently identifying a referent. (plato.stanford.edu)
Context also includes preceding discourse, participants’ goals, and assumptions about what others know. Common ground is information treated as shared for the purposes of communication. It is not simply everything that participants individually believe: what matters is what they regard as mutually available. Common-ground models explain why speakers can leave information unstated and how conversation changes the assumptions available for subsequent interpretation. (web.stanford.edu)
A presupposition is information presented as already taken for granted rather than as the main assertion. For example, “Maya has stopped cycling” normally presupposes that Maya previously cycled. “Maya has not stopped cycling” generally retains that assumption. Such persistence under negation is an important diagnostic, although presuppositions interact with embedding and context in complex ways. Through accommodation, an audience may accept previously unmentioned background information instead of challenging it. (web.stanford.edu)
Implicature and conversational inference
An implicature is meaning conveyed without being part of what is explicitly said. If someone asks whether a colleague will attend dinner and receives “She is working late,” the response may convey that the colleague will not attend. That interpretation depends on the question and background assumptions rather than on the sentence alone. (plato.stanford.edu)
Grice explained conversational implicature through the cooperative principle and maxims concerning informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and clarity. These are interpretive expectations, not rules requiring every conversation to be harmonious. A conspicuous departure from an expectation may itself communicate something: an obviously inaccurate positive description can signal irony rather than an attempt to deceive. (plato.stanford.edu)
Scalar implicature involves alternatives ordered by informational strength. “Some students passed” often suggests that not all passed. The suggestion is ordinarily cancellable: “Some students passed—in fact, all did” need not be contradictory. This contrasts with entailment, where the truth of one proposition guarantees another under the relevant interpretation. Cancellability helps distinguish conversational implications from encoded meaning, though it is not an infallible diagnostic. (plato.stanford.edu)
Speech acts and inferential theories
Speech-act theory investigates what people accomplish through utterances. Austin distinguished the locutionary act of saying something meaningful, the illocutionary act performed in saying it, and perlocutionary effects such as persuading or alarming an audience. A warning can be successfully issued without successfully frightening its recipient; the communicative act and its consequences are distinct. (plato.stanford.edu)
An indirect speech act occurs when one act is performed through another. “Can you close the window?” has interrogative form but commonly functions as a request. Felicity conditions concern circumstances required for an act to succeed: institutional authority, appropriate procedures, or relevant intentions may matter for acts such as declarations and promises. (plato.stanford.edu)
Relevance theory, developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, treats utterance understanding as an inferential process guided by expectations of relevance. In this framework, relevance depends on cognitive effects and processing effort. Hearers use decoded linguistic information as evidence for an intended interpretation rather than as a complete message. The approach addresses explicit meaning as well as implications, metaphor, and irony. (phon.ucl.ac.uk)
Social variation and applications
Pragmatics overlaps with sociolinguistics in investigating how communicative expectations vary across settings and communities. Politeness research examines how speakers manage relationships through language, including requests, refusals, and apologies. Cross-cultural pragmatics compares such practices systematically; differences in interpretation need not reflect grammatical mistakes, because participants may bring different expectations about appropriate communication. (cambridge.org)
Applications include language teaching and translation, where conveying an utterance’s communicative function may require attention to context beyond lexical correspondence. In natural language processing, pragmatic research examines how computational systems use conversational history, shared goals, and visual or embodied environments to interpret language. Grounded communication tasks make these dependencies explicit by connecting utterances to objects, actions, and participants’ goals. (cambridge.org)