Pragmatics is the study of the way that context contributes to meaning. It is a subfield of linguistics and also has connections with philosophy, psychology and sociology. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians.

The word ‘pragmatics’ comes from the Greek root prae, which means ‘practical’ or ‘necessary’. It is thus the study of the ways that a language can be used for practical purposes, such as communicating, giving directions, or describing a situation.

Unlike syntax and semantics, which focus on the formal structure of sentences, and propositions, respectively, pragmatics focuses on what speakers actually say and how they say it. It is the study of the “implicit” meanings that arise from a given situation, or what a speaker assumes that their audience will already know.

This study can be very difficult to do because it requires knowing a great deal about the social and cultural context of an utterance, as well as the speaker’s intentions and beliefs. As a result, it is often considered to be one of the more difficult areas of linguistics.

Some of the most important aspects of pragmatics are politeness, inference, conversational implicature, and the use of non-verbal cues such as gestures, facial expressions and body posture. This field of study is very useful for understanding the different communication styles of people from different cultures, and how they may change depending on a number of different factors.

Pragmatics is often considered to be part of the broader field of pragmatism, which was developed in the 1930s by philosopher Charles Morris. According to the online pragmatism encyclopedia Pragmatic Cybrary, pragmatism is defined as the theory that human beings can only achieve a true and complete knowledge of the world by interacting with it. Morris based his theory on a combination of influences, including anthropology (the study of human societies and culture), sociology, and philosophy.

Morris contrasted pragmatics with semantics, explaining that semantics deals with the relation of signs to objects which they may or may not denote, and that pragmatics deals with the ‘biotic’ aspect of semiosis, the process by which human beings interact with their environment and each other.

Current philosophical approaches to pragmatics can be classified as either literalist or contextualist. Literalists are those who believe that a sentence’s conventional meaning is independent of its context, while contextualists follow the basic outlines of Relevance Theory and argue that pragmatics is very important at every level. There are also some who argue that the two theories are incompatible, and therefore prefer to view pragmatics as a subfield of semantics. A more technical approach to pragmatics is computational linguistics, which attempts to build systems that can better approximate natural human language processing by incorporating contextual information. This includes tasks such as reference resolution, which is how computers determine what a particular word in a sentence refers to. This field of study has been particularly helpful in the development of artificial intelligence, such as speech recognition.