Meaning a speaker implies beyond the literal content of an utterance, inferred via Grice's cooperative principle (e.g., 'It's cold here' implying 'close the window').

Pragmatics

Pragmatics studies how context contributes to meaning — how speakers convey and hearers infer more than is literally said.

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Scope

It covers speech acts, implicature and the cooperative principle, deixis, presupposition, and the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Core questions

How does context shape meaning?
How do we mean more than we say?
How do utterances perform actions?
How do hearers infer speaker intent?

Key concepts

Speech acts
Implicature
Cooperative principle
Deixis
Presupposition
Relevance

Key theories

Speech act theory: Austin showed that utterances perform actions (promising, warning), not just describe.
Implicature: Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims explain how implied meaning is inferred.
Pragmatics as a field: Levinson synthesized deixis, implicature, presupposition, and speech acts into a coherent field.

History

Pragmatics grew from ordinary-language philosophy (Austin, Searle) and Grice's theory of implicature into a core linguistic field, later including relevance theory and experimental pragmatics.

Debates

Where is the semantics-pragmatics boundary?: How much of meaning is encoded (semantics) versus inferred from context (pragmatics).

Key figures

J. L. Austin
H. P. Grice
Stephen Levinson

Seminal works

austin-1962
grice-1975
levinson-1983

Frequently asked questions

What is implicature?: Meaning a speaker implies beyond the literal content of an utterance, inferred via Grice's cooperative principle (e.g., 'It's cold here' implying 'close the window').