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In linguistics and semiotics, pragmatics is concerned with bridging the explanatory gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. The study of how context influences the interpretation is then crucial. In this setting, context refers to any factor — linguistic, objective, or subjective — that affects the actual interpretation of signs and expressions.
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Pragmatics is interested predominantly in utterances, made up of sentences, and usually in the context of conversations.
A distinction is made in pragmatics between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of the sentence, while the speaker meaning is the concept that the speaker is trying to convey.
The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
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Related fields
According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between signs and interpretations, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas that a word refers to, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines the relationship between signs.
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Significant works
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Topics in pragmatics
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Bibliography
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford University Press.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. (1978) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
Carston, Robyn (2002) Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cole, Peter, ed.. (1978) Pragmatics. (Syntax and Semantics, 9). New York: Academic Press.
Dijk, Teun A. van. (1977) Text and Context. Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse. London: Longman.
Grice, H. Paul. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Leech, Geoffrey N. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT Press.
Mey, Jacob L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).
Potts, Christopher. (2005) The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomas, Jenny (1995) Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Longman.
Verschueren, Jef. (1999) Understanding Pragmatics. London, New York: Arnold Publishers.
Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert, eds. (1995) Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. New York: Norton.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1991) Cross-cultural Pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Yule, George (1996) Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study). Oxford University Press.
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See also
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