Pragmatic is a subfield of linguistics that studies the context-sensitive meaning of language. We rely on pragmatic knowledge when we politely hedge a request, intelligently read between the lines or navigate the turn-taking norms of conversation. It’s what allows us to negotiate ambiguity in context and make sense of the many ways that people can say the same thing with different meanings (e.g., “A stolen painting was found by a tree”).

In contrast to semantics, which focuses on the meaning of individual words and sentences, pragmatics takes into account the larger context of an utterance. This is the reason that it’s possible to have a different meaning for the same word in two very different contexts: the first refers to an event that is happening now, while the second refers to an event that will happen sometime in the future.

The concept of pragmatics is based on the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, which emphasizes considering real world conditions and circumstances when making decisions. This is in contrast to being idealistic, which prioritizes high principles or goals that may not be feasible to achieve.

For example, a business owner who decides to settle a lawsuit rather than fight it in court is being pragmatic by considering how the decision will impact her bottom line. This is in contrast to someone who is being idealistic and fighting for a cause that they believe in, even if it means that they will not win.

There are many different branches of pragmatics, ranging from computational and theoretical to intercultural and clinical. There’s also semantic and metapragmatics, game-theoretical pragmatics, neuropragmatics and more. Each branch of pragmatics focuses on a different aspect of the field.

Pragmatics is also related to other fields, such as philosophy and psychology. It is often discussed in conjunction with the theory of meaning, which is the study of how concepts and ideas are represented in language. The theory of meaning is closely linked to the theory of speech act, a broad theory that examines the way in which human languages are used to convey information.

The difference between syntax and semantics is that syntax studies the structure of language, while semantics focuses on the meaning of individual words and phrases. For this reason, linguists distinguish between syntax-side and semantics-side pragmatics. Linguists who are on the syntax-side of pragmatics tend to focus on the ways that grammatical rules can be used to convey a specific meaning, while those on the semantics-side of pragmatics focus on how a specific meaning is determined by the context in which it is expressed. The distinction between the two is not necessarily clear-cut, as some scholars have argued that syntax and semantics share certain characteristics. For example, the theory of speech act pioneered by J. L. Austin and John Searle, as well as the more recent theory of relevance by Sperber and Wilson, both describe the process in which a meaningful utterance is understood.