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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pragmatics
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A central question that remains, though, is whether the study of deixis belongs to semantics or to pragmatics.
▪ As regards metaphor, the cognitive approach appears to share something of both semantics and pragmatics.
▪ So the notion that pragmatics might be the study of aspects of meaning not covered in semantics certainly has some cogency.
▪ The distinction between sentence and utterance is of fundamental importance to both semantics and pragmatics.
▪ This involves information about syntax, semantics, discourse structure, pragmatics and knowledge of the world.
▪ To this day, most of the important concepts in pragmatics are drawn directly from philosophy of language.
▪ Unlike many other topics in pragmatics, implicature does not have an extended history.
▪ Yet pragmatics tends only to examine how meaning develops at a given point.
Wiktionary
pragmatics

n. (context linguistics English) The study of the use of language in a social context.

WordNet
pragmatics

n. the study of language use

Wikipedia
Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. In this respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an utterance.

The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.

Usage examples of "pragmatics".

The phlegmatic, has-to-be-shown scientist may be good at pragmatics but it is the sensitive—even poetic—scientist who is really able to reach out and explore the unexplorable.

The phlegmatic, has-to-be-shown scientist may be good at pragmatics but it is the sensitiveeven poeticscientist who is really able to reach out and explore the unexplorable.

As it was, it treed me for three days, which did my figure good and gave me time to think over the philosophy, ethics, and pragmatics of self-preservation.

As it was, it treed me for three days, which did my figure good and gave me time to think over the philosophy, ethics, and pragmatics of selfpreservation.